Body Scan Meditation

You can use this body scan meditation to strengthen body mindfulness by sweeping your awareness through your body.

Begin at the top of your head and as you breathe, allow your inhalations to focus your attention in this region. Simply be aware of any sensations or vibrations that you experience here.

Then allow your mindful attention to travel slowly down through your body, breath by breath, and part by part. When your awareness reaches your toes, then gently return your attention to the top of your head and once again let your awareness sweep down through your body, lighting each part up with awareness.

Welcome whatever comes to your attention. If what you encounter is pleasurable or painful, let those feelings flow into and through your awareness of the present, ever-changing moment. Let your mindfulness flow through your body like a warm wave or gentle breeze passing through an icefield, or like a pure light shining through a dark crystal.

As the warm light of your awareness sweeps through your body, allow the blocks of tension to melt, soften, and release. Like a magnet passing over a pile of jumbled iron filings, with each pass through your body, feel subtler dimensions of your body beginning to align and flow more smoothly and harmoniously. Pay particular attention to how these subtle sensations change, how everything inside you is moving, vibrating, changing moment to moment.

With practice of this body scan meditation, you will refine your sensitivity to be able to sense, feel, and actually alter the patterns of subtle sensation and energy through the power of your awareness. As you sweep your tender awareness through your body, allow it to flow particularly through regions of discomfort or disease. Gently direct the mind to sweep back and forth, up and down, moving like a laser beam or a floodlight, sweeping from different directions, front to back, top to bottom, diagonally or in spirals.

Intuitively feel how you can best move your attention into a region of internal space and try different approaches until no obstruction or resistance remains. Though at first the body may seem riddled with discomfort or some regions may be impossible to sense or feel at all, gradually these parts of yourself will come alive with sensations and feelings of a more harmonious resonance. As your mindfulness of your body deepens through practice of body scan meditation, it will reveal a treasury of profound insights to you.

[Adapted from the book "Luminous Mind" by Joel & Michelle Levey]