Body Scan

Your body has been here for every moment of your life. It has held every joy and every grief, and it is always in the present, even when the mind is far away. The body scan is a pilgrimage through your own flesh, an unhurried walk of blessing from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet.

OriginsThe Root of the Practice

The Buddha taught mindfulness of the body in the Satipatthana Sutta and in the discourse on mindfulness immersed in the body, naming it as a path to calm and clear seeing. In 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn brought a form of the body scan into the stress-reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts, and it has since entered hospitals and homes around the world. The Christian tradition has its own word for this reverence: the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.

The WayWhat the Practice Teaches

Attention to the body brings you out of the story and into the sensation. A tight shoulder, a warm hand, the pulse in the wrist: these are real, immediate, and present. You meet each region with interest, the way a gardener meets a new bed of soil. You do not fix anything. You listen. What is heard with kindness tends to soften by itself.

BeginHow to Practice

1. Lie on your back or sit, and allow the eyes to close.
2. Bring attention to the toes of the left foot. Feel whatever is there, or nothing at all.
3. Move slowly up through the foot, ankle, calf, knee, and thigh, then repeat on the right side.
4. Travel through the hips, belly, chest, back, hands, arms, shoulders, neck, and face.
5. Linger where there is tension, and breathe toward it without forcing it to change.
6. End by feeling the whole body at once, breathing as one living field.

HarvestThe Fruit

Tension is released that you did not know you carried. Sleep deepens. You begin to live in your body as a friend and a home, rather than as a vehicle dragged along by the mind.