Body Scan - an insight into the True experience of our Body!

Let's close our eyes and sit comfortably.

One of the byproducts of a constantly thinking job or tendency to think more is that we lose touch with our bodies.

That's why you'll see a lot of fitness trainers,

Self-help gurus talk about coming back to our own bodies.

Get out of your head and get into your body.

That is a very prescribed way.

We would like to do something today similar but more in a gentle,

Subscribe way where you are invited to embody and quietly withdraw from this extensive thinking process.

And the reason this exercise is important is because no matter how much we love thinking,

How much we think,

Our deep-rooted connection with nature,

With life is this body.

And it becomes evident when we are in a little discomfort or in a little bit of pain or in a lot of pain.

If there was a way to think our way out of physical pain,

Everyone would be doing it.

But no matter how sophisticated we have gotten in our approaches,

In our thinking,

Breaking things down,

Putting them back together,

We have not figured out how to outthink physical pain.

Some people might have trained to get that accomplished but ordinary people like you and I,

We get disturbed.

It's constantly playing on our minds when something is off in our bodies.

Some of us go quiet,

Some of us want to cry,

Some of us switch off.

Either way,

This experience of this embodying our bodies can be a fruitful exercise for all of us.

The least it can give us deep relaxation,

The most it can help loosen up some tensions and stresses that we have stored in our bodies.

We can start at what I even mean by body and what does this word body relate to in our own experience when our eyes are closed.

If our eyes were open and I asked you to become aware of your body,

What we would do instantaneously as a reaction would be to start looking at our feet,

Our torso,

Our hands,

Our arms and re-acclimate ourselves to our quote-unquote body.

Or we would walk ourselves to a mirror and see our body's reflection in a mirror.

But what does this word body mean when our eyes are closed and not meaning in terms of definition in words but meaning in terms of experience,

The experiential meaning of the word body.

Knee-jerk reaction would be to superimpose the reflection that we are used to seeing of our body in the mirror or in a photograph and thinking,

Oh,

This is my left arm,

This is my right arm or this is what my face looks like because guess what,

We have seen how our hands and arms and torso and legs look like but we have no idea how our face looks.

We have seen a reflection of what our face looks like but the reflection is not the original.

So there is a tendency to superimpose what we have seen in terms of the rest of our bodies or in terms of reflections in the mirror or in a photograph.

That is what we would first do when given such an instruction to become aware of your body.

One of the corollaries of this tendency would be to approach our body piecewise,

Piece by piece.

Our attention will flow through our knees,

Left knee,

Right knee,

Maybe shoulders,

Chest,

Stomach,

Back,

Nose,

Hair,

Mouth and as our attention is moving around,

We will tend to superimpose the image that we have of that particular body part and kind of bolt them together if you may and think that okay,

This is how my experience of the body is.

So check it out right now if I say become aware of your left foot.

Are you becoming aware of your left foot using your closed eyes and trying to see and because you can't see with closed eyes,

Are you superimposing an image and satisfying this tendency of seeing to believing and with our eyes closed,

What does it even mean to look down towards our left foot?

Up,

Down,

Left,

Right,

Forward,

Backward is all in the context of eyes open.

Some of us might find it hard to believe this,

So if that's happening to you,

Just forget about what I just said in terms of eyes open versus eyes closed,

But if it is your experience that you are trying to look down through your eyes,

Knowing very well that your eyes are closed,

Catch yourself.

Do you need eyes to become aware of your own body?

Guess what,

Your eyes are also a part of your body.

So coming back to your left foot,

Do you see a contour?

If you are seeing a contour,

Is that an experience,

Pure experience or is there some kind of superimposition of an image of your left foot?

Somehow you know there are five toes,

You know the big toe is on the right.

If we are trying to overlay and superimpose images on top of our true experience,

We are still playing with the thinking faculty of our minds.

Thinking,

Imagination all gets encompassed into one faculty of the mind.

It's like when you're seeing through your window and you see a net that is on the outer side of your window to avoid mosquitoes from coming inside,

You have to see through that mesh to look at the tree outside.

If you focus on the mesh,

You see the mesh.

But if you're trying to see the tree,

Somehow the mesh becomes transparent.

What if we use the same perception ability and try to find what is our experience of our left foot despite this tendency of wanting to superimpose an image on top of it?

We may find that there is some kind of a density to this experience,

Some kind of a vibration,

Coldness maybe,

Prickly feeling.

And not the density and prickly static feeling but a more fluid.

Even within the foot,

As the attention moves from the toes to the heel,

As the attention is moving,

The experience seems to be evolving,

The sensations in your left foot are making their presence felt.

This is the internal experience of our body.

This is how we feel our body from the inside,

So to speak.

When we are seeing it,

It's the external experience of our body where you can see contours,

Sharpness,

Preciseness.

But the internal experience is a very fuzzy experience that cannot get captured in that precise external experience.

And this is not a new experience.

We have felt our bodies from the inside many times,

Hopefully more often than we do.

But then let your attention move along the leg,

Along the left leg.

And while being aware of this tendency to superimpose images like a straight line from the heel rising up,

Focus more on the fuzzy feeling of the body,

Of that left leg,

Either the calf or the shin.

And as the attention moves higher,

And it rests on the left knee,

And even as it rests on the knee,

It goes back and forth between the ankle,

The heel,

The shin,

The knee,

And there you have that fuzzy,

Prickly feeling.

Constantly moving,

Evolving.

Then we continue moving up from the knee towards the left thigh,

The touch of our left thigh onto the chair or the floor we are on.

And suddenly the density of the sensation changes.

Nothing is to be done,

Just notice and move on.

Maybe we feel the temperature,

Which is just a different permutation and combination of this fuzzy feeling.

Whatever part of the left thigh is in contact with the air,

With the clothes,

The sensations are different versus what is in contact with the chair or the floor.

Slowly come up to our left hip,

Left hip.

And become aware of the entire left leg all the way from the left hip to the tip of your toes.

And resist the temptation of superimposing straight lines,

Contours,

But become familiar with our internal experience of our own left leg.

And if you are tightening up,

Let go.

Relax your left hip,

Relax your knees,

Toes.

Let's move on to our right foot.

The internal experience of the right foot.

Maybe you feel a little cold.

Maybe as the foot is touching the floor,

You feel some sensations different than ones in contact with the air.

This is not a place of judgment.

It's a place of familiarizing ourselves with our own internal experience of the body.

The prickly feeling rises up through the calf,

Through the shin,

Into the knee.

And as we move on from the knee to the hip,

We encounter the left thigh,

Right thigh.

The touch of the thighs on the floor,

On the chair.

The distribution of sensations,

The movement,

The evolution.

Relax your butt cheeks.

And get yourself acclimated what your lower body feels like as an experience from the waist down.

Just a bundle of sensations moving around without any specific contour that you can see.

But you can definitely feel it.

It's there,

Kicking and screaming and playing,

Evolving.

Let's move on up from our hips,

Through our genitals to our abdomen.

The rise and fall,

The outside inside of the stomach as we breathe.

If our backs are rested against a wall or a chair,

Then as the stomach moves out,

The back tries to move into the chair as well.

It's like a balloon inflating from both sides,

From all the sides.

But all we can sense is this movement,

The sensations.

Different parts of the stomach rising into the chest,

The different parts of the back,

All the way from the lower back to mid back.

Getting punctuated by the breathing out and in.

Maybe the whole distinguishing of the stomach and the back collapses into one fluid motion of just expanding,

Contracting.

As our attention moves through the stomach to our chest,

Different sensations playing around,

Rising,

Falling,

Moving.

As our attention moves from our left palm,

Slowly,

Without finding out anything about the contours we move,

The sensations evolve from the left hand through the elbow to the shoulders.

Same with the right hand,

Moving,

Rising,

Expanding.

Somehow we can feel our breath moving our shoulders,

Our arms,

Our stomachs,

Our backs,

Our knees,

Our foot,

Our feet.

So much so that we can't even make out that we are wearing clothes.

All we feel is sensations.

The clothes have merged.

Take your attention to your throat and neck.

Just as the internal experience,

No contours,

No lines.

Just the raw,

Prickly,

Moving feeling,

Sensations rising through the throat,

Through the jaw.

Resisting everything that is tightening,

Like your tongue,

Your jaw,

Your teeth,

Your eyes,

Your forehead.

Your ears are relaxed,

The back of the head,

The top of the head,

The sides.

It's as if you are just dipped into this soft,

Gentle,

Electrical pulse that is running electricity,

But just enough to make it pleasant,

Make it real,

Make it feel alive.

Familiarly alive,

Not worth getting afraid or unknown.

But just this whole body is dipped in a solution,

Just vibrating,

Pulsing.

I would suggest taking as long as you need to come back from it without any rush.

Being gentle.

Thank you.