15-Minute Body Scan: Guided Meditation
This week’s podcast episode is a 15-Minute Body Scan meditation. The Body Scan is a classic practice to cultivate mindfulness of the body and develop embodied awareness.
Episode Details:
For many of us, it’s difficult to stay connected with the felt sense of the body. There are a lot of reasons we get pulled away from our embodied awareness – because of busy-ness, speeding through the day, getting lost in our devices, and living in a culture that values our intellectual side over our embodied knowing. Experiences of trauma can also contribute to this sense of mind-body separation, as can experiences of being othered related to attributes of our body, whether that’s based on our size, race, age, sexuality, gender expression, or physical ability.
By practicing Mindfulness of the Body, you can develop a habit of checking in more often, learning to listen to the signals of your body, and gradually re-embodying your full self.
Over time, this work can really shift your relationship to your body. The practice can change how you sense the body, how you talk to it, how you talk about it, how you work with its energies, and how you perceive what it even means to be in a body. Getting to know the body up close by observing its aliveness in the present moment is very different than basing your relationship on all of the accumulated messages you’ve received over the course of your lifetime.
Practicing the 15-Minute Body Scan
The Body Scan meditation is a wonderful practice in service of these discoveries. As we move our attention through the body, the intention is to be receptive to sensations in a non-judgmental way. We learn to be with the full range and variety of sensations – pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral ones, intense sensations and subtle ones, familiar ones, new ones, and mysterious ones.
In Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the standard Body Scan is a longer 45-minute practice. However, this 15-Minute Body Scan may be more accessible, especially if you are newer to meditation, or find body practices challenging.
This meditation also includes a few simple instructions to help you navigate more charged experiences, like physical pain or intense emotion. Sometimes as we do the work of reconnecting with the body, strong feelings or memories come up, so I offer some simple ways to “tap the brakes,” if needed. With these options in mind, the Body Scan can be an excellent vehicle for exploring and deepening embodied presence – on your own terms.
You can do this meditation seated on the ground, or in a chair, or lying down. Any position that’s kind and friendly to your body is good. This meditation also pairs well with movement! You can do a body scan before you do a movement practice, as a way of really establishing connection to what you’re feeling. Or, you can do some movement first, and benefit from waking up sensation in the body, which might make it easier to feel connected as you move your awareness through in the body scan.
Resources & Links from this episode:
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If you want to hear more about Mindfulness of the Body, check out Episode 36 – Deeper Dive: Bodyfulness. That talk goes a bit deeper into the reasons why we benefit from developing a deeper embodiment.
- This “Beginner’s Body Scan Meditation” article on mindful.org humorously describes the author’s journey from struggling with the Body Scan to experiencing its transformative potential.
P.S. Did you know there is a Free Membership Tier of the Moved To Meditate Class Library? Learn more about the Class Library and sign up for your Free Library Card to access the five featured classes from the catalog each month.