Let’s discuss body meditation and its impact on our health.
If we want to take charge of our health, it’s crucial we’re in touch with our body and mind and learn to discern their signals. With this knowledge we’re in a much better position to make changes and care for ourselves.
Meditation is one of the main tools we encourage people to use, because it gives you powerful intel into your inner state, both mental and physical, fostering remarkable self-understanding.
When it comes to physical health, body meditation is particularly relevant.
What is Body Meditation?
Body meditation isn’t one technique but really a family of meditation practices. There are many possible practices that can be considered body meditations.
Nevertheless, they all involve the attempt to hold our attention in our body, discern the different qualities of our body experience, and all with a stance of non-resistance or equanimity.
There are many, many practices that meet those criteria, and we’ll look at a few after we’ve discussed the benefits of this kind of meditation.
Why Do It?
Entire books have been written about this subject, but let’s cover the main benefits. Body meditation:
- makes you more aware of what’s happening in your body: emotions, tension, pain, lightness, heaviness, sleepiness, alertness, anxiety, ease;
- helps you realise how your actions affect your body, equipping to take nourishing action, like better diet, slower pace, exercise, yoga, relaxation;
- helps you break psycho-corporal patterns that lead to unhappiness and unease;
- opens up your body, releasing stored tension and holding patterns;
- trains your awareness skills, which you can apply to mind, body and senses for similar benefits.
And the best thing of all is that you learn and implement the skills yourself. So often we rely on doctors and the medical establishment to cure our health issues for us. Their approach is usually to see your maladies as problems that happen to you, and so give you medicine to address them, totally bypassing the one person who can truly take ownership of your health: you.
Meditation and other related practices take the opposite view. Only you can do the work. You can receive guidance from experienced practitioners, but they can’t develop the skills for you. Only you can have direct first-person insight into your inner state and how you perpetuate your troubles. And once you have done the work, nobody can take it from you.
In meditation, there are no pills to take. There’s no doctor’s regime to follow. It’s you, your body, and your meditation practice. This is a hugely empowering endeavour that can serve you for the rest of your life.
The Many Forms of Body Meditation
As mentioned, body meditation is a very general category of meditation practices and contains many possibilities. That said, there are a few quintessential practices:
- Body Scan: one of the core meditations in the eight-week MBSR meditation programme. You work with each part of the body in turn, from toes to head, for 30 to 60 seconds each.
- Vipassana Body Sweeping: the core innovation of S.N. Goenka’s Vipassana meditation system that features on the famous 10-day silent retreats. This is similar to the Body Scan in that you work systematically, except you keep your attention moving continuously, and scan through the body from bottom to top cross-sectionally.
- Free Float: when you notice a body sensation of any kind, make it the object of your attention, use the label “Feel”, and pour your attention into it, detecting its qualities. Repeat this cycle over and over.
If you’ve never meditated before, I recommend you do twenty minutes a day for four weeks, or for one calendar month. Try out the practices we’ve covered in this article. You’re likely to get at least a glimpse of the benefits, and the more you practice, the more benefits you experience.