by Ed Halliwell
Accepting whatever comes up There’s no right or wrong thing to feel when you practise the body scan, or any other mindfulness practice. Whatever you notice is valid, because that’s what’s happening. Whether you notice thoughts that you’re not doing it properly, or you’re falling asleep, or there’s tension or discomfort, or lots of mind wandering, boredom, irritation or numbness, that’s all good noticing. The task is to know and be present to what’s here rather than judging it, or trying to change it.
Being interested and friendly As best you can, bring curiosity and compassion to your practice. Many of us wish our bodies were different, or that we didn’t feel uncomfortable or restricted in them. As best you can, gently connect to the present moment reality of body experience – even if you don’t feel good – knowing that you’re offering your body care simply by attending to it. For now, let go of trying to change anything.
Not needing to relax The body scan isn’t a relaxation exercise. By setting it up as relaxation we’re creating an expectation for how the experience should be. If relaxation comes, that’s fine, but so is tension or frustration, or agitation or discomfort. Can you offer compassion to all kinds of experience as and when they appear?
Not striving The only thing we’re working to achieve here is awareness of what’s happening right now. If other benefits come, they’ll most likely come in their own time, as a by-product, not as a result of striving for them.
Working with sleepiness People sometimes drift to sleep during a body scan practice. This isn’t wrong – maybe sleep is what your body needs right now, especially if you’re tired. If you consistently fall asleep during the practice, you might like to come back to it when you’ve rested, perhaps practising at a different time of day, or sitting up, or with the eyes open – all of which can help you to ‘fall awake’.
Stress and the human animal
Our human capacity for awareness enables us to work consciously with stress. As well as the more primitive limbic system in the brain, which is strongly implicated in ‘fight or flight’ reactions, humans have larger pre-frontal cortexes than other animals, and these regions seem to be particularly important in working to manage autopilot reactions.
But our greater consciousness also creates some problems. Our bigger frontal lobes enable us to reflect and plan, and when stress occurs we’re often driven to think about it, perhaps reliving stressful situations over and over in our minds as we work out what we could do differently. A certain amount of reflection and planning is helpful, as we consider how best to manage our problems, but if there’s no obvious fix available, we may just ruminate over and over, the problem kept alive in our heads.
As we keep on churning things over in the mind, we’re likely to stay on hyper-alert, as our attempts to solve the problem keep us focused on the sense of threat, and the fact that it hasn’t been resolved. The anxiety becomes self-perpetuating – with unfortunate irony, our attempts to find solutions to stress actually keep the feeling of stress alive.
This issue is made worse because many of the stressors we face in our lives aren’t acute survival threats. In the animal world, a predator attack might last a few minutes, after which the prey either gets eaten or escapes. If it survives the stressor, most animals will settle quickly back into a non-stressed state, the body calming down and returning to balance.
As humans we more often face chronic, lower-level problems – like traffic jams, irritating neighbours, muscle pain, or an overload of emails. Unfortunately, the animal in us doesn’t distinguish between these kinds of stressors and the lion that wants us for breakfast, and so the same unconscious reactions are set off.
Because chronic stress doesn’t resolve easily, and because we’re driven to keep worrying and ruminating, even when there’s no solution at hand, the fight or flight reaction starts to become maladaptive. We feel tense all the time; we get tired from lack of sleep; and we stay on hyper-alert, perhaps over-sensitive to any small problem.
Modern human experience is set up for chronic stress, but we haven’t evolved to cope with it – indeed, with our seemingly unique capacity for thought, we’re wired to get stuck in fight or flight. This is why, to paraphrase the memorable title of Robert Sapolsky’s book, zebras don’t get ulcers and people do.2
Even worse, the more we get stressed, the more we tilt our brains in the direction of reactivity and negativity bias. Neuroplasticity works both ways – everything we practise becomes a habit. The more we react unskillfully to stress, the more prone we are to get stressed, and the less able we are to choose our response. Overload leads us into greater automaticity, to more unconscious reactions and to more suffering.
When we get stressed for prolonged periods, we may become prone to anxiety disorders, depression, chronic fatigue, hypertension, irritable bowel syndrome, heart problems, diabetes, reduced immune response and any number of other mind-body disorders. We might develop addictions to substances, or behaviours that promise short-term relief from our stress but which end up stimulating further craving for the pleasurable ‘hit’. In our brains, bodies and minds, pathways are forged that lead to unhappiness.3
The two arrows
When talking about stress 2,500 years ago, the Buddha used an analogy to describe our predicament. In life, he said, we’re struck by two arrows.4 The first arrow represents all the inevitable pain we experience. This might include unpleasant sensations related to getting older or falling sick, as well as the discomfort that comes with other situations that haven’t worked out the way we’d like – the frustration of a career dead-end, the sadness of a failed relationship, the anxiety that accompanies financial uncertainty.
It also includes the unbidden thoughts that are sparked by these situations, perhaps repeatedly reminding us that things aren’t going the way we want, and telling us that something must be changed to fix the problem. We don’t consciously choose these unpleasant events, sensations and thoughts, and once they’re here, we can’t prevent them happening.
The second arrow, said the Buddha, represents how we react to the first one. When we experience an unpleasant event, most of us try to resist it, and/or run from it. This represents our habitual reactions to ‘fight or flight’ – getting caught up in, or trying to stop, the powerful thoughts and impulses that drive us to deal with the stressor: to ‘sort out the problem’.
If we get sick and there’s no easy cure, we may be stuck with chronic pain. When we’re hurt by unkind words, we may feel an anger that lingers. Perhaps we find ourselves obsessing about what we should do, or why our current strategies aren’t working. We step up our focus on the pain or anger, and how to be rid of it.
Or maybe we tell ourselves there’s nothing we can do, and instead get frustrated with our thoughts and sensations, which don’t seem to listen to reason. We get stressed about getting stressed, turning the fight in on ourselves.
So what can be done? Of course, the best result would be not to experience the misfiring mechanism, but as the actor’s tale shows, the fight or flight reaction can’t be shut off easily. However, we can choose to practise staying present to thoughts and sensations, by noticing how automatic stress reactions arise in our bodies, and how we tend to resist or identify with them.
This might not make them go away, but it significantly alters how we experience them: the meaning we ascribe them, the degree to which they control us, our way of relating to them, and our response. Instead of running round screaming, ‘I’ve got to get rid of this anxiety – now!’, we might bring a friendly interest to sensations of stomach churning, and the thoughts that come along with it. Staying present to thoughts, sensations and automatic reactions, we shift our relationship to stress.
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Stress and the science of mindfulness
Science shows the value of responding to stress in this way. Studies have pointed to changes in patterns of brain activity when people start practising mindfulness. The amygdala (a marker of the fight or flight reaction) becomes less ac
tive and reduces in size, while there’s more activity in regions of the pre-frontal cortex, associated with the ability to regulate thoughts and sensations.1
There’s less going on in the default mode network of the brain, which is associated with rumination,2 and more activity in experiential networks, including areas such as the insula, which is active when we tune in to body sensations.3 There are patterns of greater connectivity between brain areas related to attention and regulation.4
Levels of cortisol5 and inflammation in the body6 are reduced. The immune system is strengthened.7 Telomeres, which protect our chromosomes from damage and are shortened by stress, show greater signs of resilience, potentially offering protection from premature ageing.8 Mindfulness of breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system,9 which helps the body come down from the fight or flight reaction – heart rate and blood pressure drop.
People’s experience changes too. Mindfulness practitioners are less likely to be negatively affected by stressful situations and react in harmful ways, such as by acting on urges to addictive behaviour.10 They’re more able to regulate mind and body consciously in the face of stress.11 They can choose to stay present, rather than being driven by impulsive and automatic reactions. They’re less prone to firing the second arrow.
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To stay present, we need to really get to know the signs of stress, and our habitual ways of reacting to them, as they manifest in our being, again and again. We need to practise staying embodied. Fortunately, there are further means we can employ to cultivate mindfulness of body.
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Practice: Mindfulness of body
This practice offers space to experience body sensations fully, openly and with awareness. We become aware of signs of stress in our bodies, and learn how to work with them skilfully. Practise for between five and 20 minutes, or however long feels appropriate for you right now.
Settle into a dignified sitting posture, and practise mindfulness of breathing for a time.
Open up awareness and notice sensations in the whole body. Be aware of contact – texture and temperature in parts of you touching the floor, chair, clothes, other body regions, the air around – as well as internal sensations, such as tightening, relaxing, pressure, fatigue, heat, cold, aching and so on.
As best you can, bring interest to pleasant and unpleasant sensations, feeling them fully. Be aware of preferences – liking some sensations and not liking others – and notice when and how you’re getting caught up or resisting. Be curious about any changes in location, intensity or quality of sensation.
When you see the mind wander into thinking, bring awareness to this shift, gently letting go of thoughts and coming back to feeling. When you notice the mind wandering elsewhere (e.g. to sounds), acknowledge this also, bringing it back, as best you can, with kindness.
If the mind feels very scattered, or sensations are particularly intense, you could come back to mindfulness of breathing for a time, using the breath as an anchor for attention once more. Open up to the whole body again as you feel ready. Perhaps imagine that you’re breathing into and out from the entire body.
After you’ve practised, experiment with staying present to body sensations as you move into whatever comes next in your day.
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Mindfulness as bodyfulness
There are many good reasons for practising mindfulness of body. We live in a society that exhalts thinking – our education system prioritizes academic learning, and most people are trained when they’re young to identify with thought. Even the English word ‘mindfulness’ makes our subject sound like a quality of thinking. Whereas actually, mindfulness brings us down from our heads and into our whole bodies.
Ask someone from Tibet where their mind is and they may point to their chest – the word for mind and heart in Tibetan, and many other Eastern languages, is the same. When we practise mindfulness, we’re recalibrating our centre downwards – as such, the practice might better be described as ‘heartfulness’, or even ‘bodyfulness’.
Whether we recognize it or not, our experience of life is embodied. As the actor’s tale shows, the body’s reactions are governed by a strong animal sense. We can’t just decide not to feel what we’re feeling – body sensations are driven at a level deeper than thought. When we come to terms with this, we can let go of trying to force ourselves into changing how we feel by thinking about it. By bringing attention to sensations in the body, we might learn how to work with them skilfully.
To return to the analogy of the rider and the horse, a good relationship is established not by the rider trying to beat the horse into submission, or ignoring its needs, but by listening to it, feeling it, gently synchronising with it. By tuning in, we can notice how the body feels. Using this information can help us – we can start to live a fully embodied life.
The human body is a staggeringly wonderful thing, and yet we so often take what it does for granted – we move around, carry things, make things, see, hear, speak, feel and taste, often without appreciating how this all happens. When things feel right with the body, we take it for granted. When things feel wrong, we get frustrated. And yet, just by breathing, the body is performing magic every moment. Alive, the body is a miracle. This is true, even when it’s not feeling how we’d like it to feel.
The body is always in the present. When we take our attention to it, we’re naturally drawn to the here and now. Through the body, we can feel the sensational joys of living, beneath the dulling layers of concept that can cloud their vividness. Attending to the body also has a grounding effect. When we bring awareness to the body, we’re getting down to Earth. Unlike thoughts, which have no corporeal existence, the body has form. It offers a good counterweight to the flighty mind that’s continually zooming off into past and future.
The body experiences by feeling, so by becoming familiar with patterns of physical sensation, we can more easily work with them. If our body is in pain and we try to ignore it, resist it or ruminate on it, we’re trying to live outside physicality. This is a recipe for fractured living. The body is our home, even when we don’t like the state of it. We face a better chance of happiness if we can open to the reality of body experience and explore how to be with it, than if we try to control it with thinking, or wish we could find somewhere else to live.
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Practice: The mountain meditation
This practice helps us centre, especially in the midst of life’s shifting swirls. By imagining and then embodying the steadiness of a mountain, we train in being present to the weather of the world, as well as our own internal weather.
Settle into a dignified sitting posture, as for mindfulness of breathing.
Imagine a beautiful mountain. It could be one you’ve climbed or viewed from a distance, or seen in a film or picture, or one you’ve conjured in your mind. Visualize a mountain that for you embodies majesty and magnificence, full of natural wonder.
Notice how its base is grounded in the Earth, and how it rises into the air, unapologetically taking its place in the landscape. Bring awareness to all its mountainous qualities: solidity, stillness, beauty, grandeur. Realize that come day and night, storm and sun, winter and summer, the mountain abides, sitting in its landscape, unwavering, whatever the weather.
Now notice your own mountainous qualities as you practise sitting – feet in contact with the ground, body rising upwards. Like the mountain, you too can embody stillness, solidity, beauty and presence. There may be weather going on – events in life, thoughts and sensations, ebbing and flowing in the internal and external environment. Whatever the weather, practise being a breathing body mountain: naturally wonderful without having to do anything. Let the climate of the world touch you – be rained on, shined on, snowed on – and stay present to whatever comes, neither resisting nor running from it.
When your mind wanders, come back to the sense of being as a mountain, or if you prefer, let your attention rest on the mountain in your mind for a while,
before returning to the felt experience in the body. Let go of the need to feel a particular way – if you don’t feel ‘mountainous’, that’s fine, this practice is inviting you to cultivate a quality rather than force a feeling.
Remain practising for five, 10, 15 minutes or longer, as feels appropriate to you right now. When you get up, allow yourself to stay tuned to your mountainous qualities. Come back to awareness of them when you remember, especially when stressful events arise.
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Practising acceptance
When trying to relax, we’re subtly (or not so subtly) rejecting our reality, attempting to get into a different state of being. In mindfulness practice, the invitation is to let go of trying to be calm and instead respect what’s actually happening, even if that means opening to tension, agitation, pain or fatigue.
Realizing how amazing the body is, and how powerful, we can allow it to have its present moment. With a wholehearted acceptance of the inevitable, tension drops from our bow and the second arrow falls to the floor, unshot.
Relaxation happens not by struggling for it, but by allowing the mind to come into the body. This invokes a peace that doesn’t depend on things being pleasant. The body might still feel tense or uncomfortable, and we might still have unpleasant thoughts racing round the mindstream, but we’re dropping the attachment or resistance to these mental and physical events.
This changes everything – we’re no longer in opposition to what’s happening. Rather than always trying to do something about what’s going on, we’re practising being with it. Some action may be advisable in time, but if our activity comes from impulsively reacting to events, thoughts and sensations, we remain in bondage.