Background[]
The body scan is also at Digital_Badges/Mindfulness/Body_Scan
Script: Body Scan from Mindful Eating (book) by Jan Chozen Bays[]
A Basic Body Scan[]
All you need for this exercise is a quiet environment to focus your attention on your body.[]
We are going to use the mind’s awareness like a flashlight. This is sometimes called a body scan. It's fine when you are doing a body scan to close your eyes. It can help you focus your mind on the body part.
Let's begin. Sit or lay down in a comfortable position. We'll start at the feet and move up, but another time, on your own, you could also start at the head and the hair and move down.
I'm going to move, for the purpose of this exercise, fairly quickly. You may want to go through this exercise at home, moving your attention through your body very slowly.
Let's begin with the feet. If your eyes are closed, and you cannot see your feet, how do you know that there are feet?
What are the sensations arising from the feet?
Body scan is a part of the Mindful Eating activity at Summer Dreamers in 2015 at Camp South Hills.
Become aware of all the sensations arising from the feet: Touch, pressure, temperature. Maybe you can feel many sensations of touch on your feet? Hold your awareness in those sensations for awhile, the sensations that let you know there are feet. You can silently say, "thank you feet," for carrying you around every day.
Now move your awareness up to the next body part. Let's pick the ankles. Become aware of the sensations arising from the ankles. Scan the many tiny touches, the many sensations of temperature or pressure. You hold your awareness in these sensations as they arise, and persist, and then fade away.
You can rest your awareness in your sensations coming from the ankles as they arise for as long as you like. Then, when you are ready to move on, move upward through the body at your own pace, gradually opening your awareness to the lower legs, to the knees, and do this with me quickly as I'm moving through the body quickly... the knees, the thighs, the hips, the belly, the lower back, the chest, the lungs and heart, the upper back, the shoulders, the upper arms, lower arms, wrists, hands, moving the awareness back up to the neck, and then the head, moving the awareness into individual parts of the head, into the mouth and jaw, tongue, teeth, the nose, all the sensations coming from the nose, the eyes, eye lashes, ears, forehead, scalp and hair.
I moved through those quite quickly, just to give you an example of each body part. And probably, you'll want to move through all those areas more slowly if you do this on your own at home.
For each body part, become aware of the sensations in that body part, as they arise, and then change, and then fade away. And as you repeat this body scan exercise at home, try adding body parts that we missed, such as the eyebrows, or fingernails, or internal organs, such as the stomach or lungs.
Source:[]
- From the “Mindful Eating (book)” by Jan Chozen Bays