Body meditation – bringing attention to and deeply feeling the sensations in the body – is a great place to start a meditation practice, as well as a technique that can provide a lifetime of enlivening and vitality.
One great way to bring mindful awareness to the body is to simply be aware of wherever you most feel sensation and hold awareness there for a couple seconds. While holding attention, we feel the sensation as fully and richly and with as much subtle detail as possible. We then release the hold and let attention stay in the same spot or move to a new one, whatever feels more natural, and then hold ourselves there for a couple seconds again while letting attention saturate the feeling like water flowing into a sponge.
It can often be helpful to, while feeling each sensation, say the name of the part of the body that is being felt. This is usually done silently, inside our mind, but can be done out loud if sleepy or wanting some extra concentration.
Another popular way to meditate on the body is the “body scan” or “body sweep”. With this technique, one systematically moves awareness through the body, from one end to the other, vividly experiencing each part as one does. This can be done in a few seconds, quickly feeling large parts of the body (the whole head and face, a whole arm, etc) at a time, or done over hours, hanging out for a while with one tiny part at a time.
Holding attention in one specific part of the body requires working on our power of concentration, the ability to pay attention on purpose and have attention stay where we intend it to stay. A different form of concentration is required for a third body mindfulness technique, which is to, over time, feel the entire body at once. When we do this, if our attention is drawn into one smaller part of the body, we continually bring it back to being aware of the whole.
In the “Unified Mindfulness” system of meditation that my teacher Shinzen Young has developed, there are other specific ways to meditate on the body, for example the “Feel Rest” technique, where we aim to focus attention to parts of the body that are relatively relaxed and low-intensity, and “Feel Flow”, where we focus on the changing dynamic aspect of body sensations. And if one studies the traditional meditation techniques that humans have developed and practiced over the millennia, one can find an almost infinite specific ways to intentionally bring our attention to parts and attributes of how our bodies feel.
Whatever form of body meditation we do, we are also likely to be distracted by verbal analytical thinking, visual thinking, and sounds we can hear. When that happens, our goal is, as best we can, to keep attention grounded in the body, and to feel the impact that these distractions have in how our body feels. Out thinking mind can sometimes create a fuss and try to convince us that we can’t live without it being active, but it can be useful to spend some time taking a vacation and putting our trust in in the simplicity of how the body feels.
However we do it, mindful awareness of the body can be a great tool to help us to feel more grounded and centered. It can be a refreshing and nourishing counterbalance to all the mental activity of thinking and details that modern life demands of us, which can sometimes leave us arid, brittle, and anxious. Deeply feeling our bodies can help us to notice when and where we feel tense and where and when we feel relaxed, which can help us to better understand what we really want, and to tune us more into our deeper intuition.