The bodyscan meditation experiment

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soles_of_a_Males_Feet.jpg

The London sky is empty of cloud and the warmth of the sun has dissipated into space, leaving the temperature low enough to give a fringe of chill to my toes. I sit at my desk and prepare to do a bodyscan meditation. 

I have decided, despite knowing that typing and using words will be a great interference to it, to try to describe the experience here on the computer in the moment as I do it. I don't know if it will work at all, but I am giving it a try. Because, well, because that seems like an interesting idea right now. 

This is a mindfulness practice, so the purpose is not to empty my mind, but to exercise the awareness of where my focus is, and to return it to the progress through the body sensations whenever it diverges from that. However many times that happens. I plan to drop my attention onto different parts of my body all the way down from the top of the head to my toes. And to start a new paragraph whenever I notice my mind diverting me from the task. 

The meditation record

I prepare by finding a comfortable sitting position with a straight back and neck, and relaxed shoulders. By putting my attention on the rising and falling of my tummy with the breath. Some days my tummy is toned and stiffer, but today it is loose and light, moving out and in like an overstretched balloon. With more natural breaths like this I feel the way the movement of the air into my body changes the sensations of other parts - my hips' angle on the chair, the spacing of my upper arms, the curvature of my neck change minutely in a sinus wave. I am never still. That would be death. 

Which is a distraction. From the inside, the crown of my head is like a tonsure today - I can only feel the hair around the outside. I'm having one of those days when from the inside I don't feel symmetrical. The right side of my body, starting at the squashed face and down to the shrunken ribcage, are much smaller than the open, soft left side. I move my attention back to my head, to the forehead which is tenser on the right than the left, a little cooler on the left than the right. Interpreting this or trying to change it is not the game. This is an exercise in experiencing and nothing else. In returning my attention when it goes astray. 

Like it is now. From my forehead I move to the sensations on the right side of my upper head. There is heat here, and some tension at the front, and towards the back. There is an awareness of light from the right. The back of my head at this level is freer, except at the very right edge where the heat sits. I feel a pinching underneath it, which I speculate is the muscle tense and causing the heat. 

Speculation is distraction from the task. I move on. The left side of my head above my ear is cool and relaxed and I can't feel the individual hairs, but there is a restfulness about it, and a poised quality, as if it were a dancer relaxed and ready for its moment. 

There I go getting poetic. Bringing my inner attention to focus on my eyes. My left eye sits in its socket, but I can only feel the socket around the eye itself, as an intensity of sensation with no word for it. I thought of saying ache, but it doesn't hurt. The eyebrow is tangible with tension. I bring my attention to the other eye, feel the same intensity around the eyeball and tension graduating to warmth at the right end of the brow, but the eyeball itself is covered in a scum of something. A film of awareness that isn't usually there. My right temple is hot and knotted. My right ear is warm, I can feel the veil of hair insulating it, and not much else. My ear isn't very sensitive to touch. 

My mind wants to explore that. I bring myself back to my survey. The back of my head at ear level is a broad area without sensation with edges of warmth. My left ear is cooler, especially on the outer lobe, and within I feel a tiny tickle like the froth of a wavelet on the beach. 

Should I be going there, with the similes? I bring my mind back. Here I am now at the left temple, and the image of Michaelangelo's David flashes in my mind. I was looking at it yesterday online and perhaps it has particularly sculpted temples? 

I don't know and it's not relevant. My nose is cold at the tip, the tip that's very far away from my face because I have an unusually large nose. 

OK. My nostrils have the subtle sensation of slow air flowing past their inlets. The left is subtler and cooler than the right again. I wonder why.

My nose. Surely wondering why is a good thing?

I breathe again, and my attention is on both the air flowing into my nostrils, and the larger balloon of my belly below. I can have my attention on both at once? Is that possible?

I move my attention to my mouth. There is tension there on either side of it, like a schoolboy trying hard at his maths. I am trying hard to do this right. What does that mean? 

Nothing right now. Here is the left jaw, the tension is in the looser flesh beneath the jaw rather than where I would have expected it in the hinge. 

I'm thinking too much. Here I feel the softness beneath my jaw. The hanging down. And at the back of my skull, the base of it, there's the sensation of holding on tight wtih muscles I had forgotten. On the right side of my jaw, I feel the squeeze of saliva inside and the warmth outside. I bring my attention down to the front of my neck and I am distracted by a squeeze of pain in the top of my head. No it's moved to the right temple. 

I bring my attention down again. At the front of my neck there is a sensation of water, especially on the right side next to the lump in the middle. On the right side of my neck is a surface stroke of soft hair and I become aware of the posture of my upper back making my neck uncomfortable. I straighten and then wonder if I should have left it. 

Nothing to decide. At the back of my neck the aches, which I thought were up both sides of my spine, are really only at the lower left part of the neck, and the rest of it is warm but loose. I can feel where the right side of my neck abuts the base of my skull and I'm interested. Is that ok? 

Yes, curiosity is ok. I move my attention down to the upper part of my chest between the shoulders. There is a  trembling inside the skin on the left side of this strip of my body. On the right side there is nothing, no sensation at all. My right shoulder, which I visualise in my mind as almost spherical, is giving me an experience of something of a different shape, more curved around the back, less sensation at the front. More of a sickle shape I think as I shift my focus from the sensations to the best word to describe it to you. 

So I've noticed that I lost the quality of attention again. The top of my upper back between the shoulders is stiff and hot, especially on the left side, with a quality of one of those big steel files. My left shoulder is loose and doesn't hold together in a shape, perhaps there's a sensation of something, a quality of density, around the outer back of it. I move my attention to the left side of my chest over the heart. The word heart sends my mind into thinking about emotions and searching for one. 

I bring myself back to my chest. The surface of my skin is warm and the sensations disconnected like hillocks. I can feel the movement of my top in relation to the skin, especially in the more central parts. I move my attention to the right side of my chest and I find a ridge-like area of higher sensation and warmth over the centre of that area when it moves against my top. Under my right arm is moist and soft, and my upper right arm barely there inside the sleeve. A very subtle experience. My upper back is rougher to feel, more neutral. My left armpit is dark. 

I'm thinking of it as dark even though of course I can't see it with my eyes. It is warm and I can't feel the shape of it by attending to the sensations. There's a lot of that - I think of my experience of my body as being in alignment with what I see of other people's bodies, but it really isn't, like the difficulty balancing when your eyes are closed. 

There I go. Here is my attention on my left upper arm. I wonder how long this writing has been going on. Should I do the whole of the bodyscan to my toes or is that enough? 

OK that was the plan, so I'll let go of the question. That's what self-discipline is, right? Letting go of the parts of you that want to re-examine the plan. 

Where was I? Left upper arm. The back of it has more sensation than any other part, as if it's rougher against the fabric. As if the fabric is rougher against the skin. Whichever, I can't tell by feeling. I move my attention to the front of my lower ribcage. There the breathing moves the flesh more than higher up. The bellows. 

Is irrelevant. The sensations in my front lower chest are of constant movement, with some reining in of it. The breath is not entirely free and natural. I wonder whether I will ever let go of controlling it completely. 

Irrelevant. I move my attention to the right side of my body above the waist. The sensations are more alert here, more sensitive. I move my attention to the back of my body at this level and there the back of my clothing is applied more evenly to the skin and moving with it when I breathe. At the left side again there is the experience of greater sensitivity. My tickling spot. 

At the front of my body at the level of the belly button I experience the presence of a pad of softness, the curiosity brings me to the belly button and the full dullness where the cave of it is. I move my attention to the right side at this level, and there are sinuous cold threads through that part. And at the back little on the right and a feling of a cold spike across the back of my hip bone there on the left. At the left side of my body there is a contrasting warmth and I bring my attention back to the front of my body at the level of the lower belly. My minds eye steps in to give me the shape of the bulge over the line of the caeasarian scar.

I refocus on the sensations of that part of my body, and find a hammock of sensation in empty space, and the skin experience of hair below. On the right side of my body at the level of the hips there is an ache, which dissolves as I watch. At the back of my body at that level there are sensations of pressure and some more of those cold threads on the left side. At the left side at this level the cold threads sit unmoving at the back, and ice spikes chill in the middle. I move my attention to the front of my thigh and there is the familiar tension of it along the ight side, like the arm of an old armchair where the stuffing has slipped. 

Bring it back. I feel the breath refilling my chest. In my thigh the sensations are stronger on the outside, and barely there on the inside. I certainly can't tell on the inside where the edge of my skin is. The tension makes it easier to tell. 

Which is not the point. The right side of my right thigh is not, as my inner eye tells me, straight-edged. I feel it only in small patches in empty space. The back of my thigh I feel halfway down where I imagine it to be, as an increase in density of the air. The left side of my right thigh I feel at the top as softness, and otherwise not at all. My left thigh at the front is density towards the top and the touch of my clothes two thirds of the way down, The right side of my left thigh is tension and knotty in parts, cool in parts, changing all the time. The back of that thigh is soft and heavy towards the right side, as I take in the sensations the whole thigh appears to expand softly out to the left. Does that make me crazy?

The left side of that thigh has a stringy twitch as I focus on it, which is gone instantly but my thoughts about it continue on.

Now it is warm where the twitch was and there's nothing at all below. I move my attention to the right knee. At the front there is a tender senation on the bottom left, under the edge of the kneecap. On the right side there's the senation of a pulling narrow part. At the back I can feel where the two pieces of skin touch in a comforting way and the emptiness of the other part. I feel the sadness of it. 

Which is not the point. I move my attention to the other knee. Again it doesn't feel the same as my mental image at all, it's jutting more at the left, wtih some coolness on the skin. The right side is warmer, flat, even. At the back there is the skin to skin contact and the coldness on the inside. I move my attention to my right shin. The memory of the vulnerability of this part to poor healing in older people pops into my head. My eyes open themselves wide to the white computer screen. 

I take a breath and lower them again. The front of my right shin is cool and smooth and there's a noticeable difference in termperature and sensitivity across the vertical line of it. On the right side it has even sensation all the way across, tapering to the ankle., At the back, there's some tingling at the top some coolness over the calf, some pressure in the lower inner part. On the left side of the shin I feel little except at the ankle where it's dull. Is that a word that you can use to describe sensations, yes, dull like lead.

On the left side my shin is stiff and inactive. There's no movement there that I can pick up. Can that be true? 

Not important. On the right side there is cool and it feels almost wet. At the back, the upper calf is smooth and the lower part I can't feel at all. On the left there is more movement, more variety of temperature. The top of my right foot is cold especially towards the toes. I feel the front more than the upper part. There are tickles over the right side of the top. The sole of my foot registers the edge of the box I am resting it on as a ridge. I feel nothing in the middle of the foot. A pressure along the outside of the heel. The big toe is cold. 

And I notice that my minds eye bizarrely is showing it to me upside down as if from the floor. My big toe is cold at the tip, with pressure on the left edge of the nail. The second toe is just available to me as a cool line, the third toe indistinguishable from the fourth and without sensation at all. The fifth is a surface subtlety of sensation I can't describe. 

The search for words took me away for a moment. The top of my left foot is warmer and more present to me. The sole is dominated by the pressure in a line from the middle toe to the edge of the heel. 

Again I am seeing it in my minds's eye from beneath. There is pressure sensation on the ball of my left foot. The big toe is more noticeable on the top, with sensation sof cool and awarness of skin. Beneath there is nothing clear, ony a subtle suggestion of something. The second toe is absent mostly, Cool at the base. The third and fourth toes are again indistinguishable and absent. The little toe is only a suggestion in the empty space. I open my eyes.

Reflection

I find that the typing of this record became automatic for most of this period, except when I caught myself wandering from the task of attention and curiosity. I will have to go back and correct the spelling and punctuation, of course. But it worked a lot better than I expected.

My mind is calm and clear now, as it almost always is after doing this practice. Looking back over the record I've made of it, one obvious thing is the relative turbulance of my mind at the beginning, when there are more irrelevant comments sneaking in, and it was taking longer for me to notice when I was diverting myself from the task with thoughts, ideas, speculations and feelings. Towards the end it was plain and simple. Not a problem to notice and return.

Simple and effortless. Not easy to stay focussed as you can see, but easy to notice when I wasn't on task any more and bring myself back without fuss.

To be clear, it wasn't always easy to be kind about it. That's one of the benefits of regular practice over time - that you learn to stop being mean to your mind for doing what it does. Because, well it can't help it, so what's the point in upsetting yourself.

So simplicity, and gentleness. 

But my curiosity learns something else too, from bodyscan practice: the way our minds summarise and expect and delude us into thinking we know what's going to be there. For example, I suspected I would not to be able to do a bodyscan at all when I started, or that it would be like driving in traffic - a frustrating stop/ start affair. But in fact the typing barely interfered at all. 

There are other examples. At the beginning I was experiencing the cold air temperature as a fringe around all my toes, but when I was clear minded enough to actually feel what was there, the chill was only in small parts of two toes on the right, and three on the left. 

And for another, more glaring example, my inner eye giving me a visual of my feet from the bottom is strange and wonderful but not helpful at all if what I'm looking for is the actual truth of my experience. 

It's only when we really exercise our ability to be on receive that we get to know without doubt that we cannot trust this aspect of our minds. That we are not, except in the most approximate and misleading way, what our minds tell us we are. 

Written like this it may seem unimportant knowledge in the real world. But I assure you it's anything but. It changes everything.

And this is not knowledge anyone can teach us by telling. We have to find out for ourselves through experiences like the body scan practice.