Week Three: Mindfulness of the Body

Every experience we have, every emotion we feel, every thought we think happens with our body. Our lives truly are embodied.

Our bodies are constantly providing us with information – about pain and pleasure, sickness and health, happiness and sadness. There is a whole wealth of wisdom within the body that we can tap into.

Perhaps this has happened to you: you start having significant pain in your knee, or arm, or shoulder (it could be anywhere), and it begins to impact your ability to complete daily tasks. You end up at the doctor’s office, unsure of when the pain actually started or what may have caused it.

We typically become aware of pain when it has progressed to being intolerable. Had we been paying closer attention to our body, we may have noticed the slight twinge, the dull ache, the general sensation that something was “off.” We could have addressed our symptoms before they became more severe.

When we pay attention to the body, we learn to recognize the signs of an oncoming illness, and then we can listen to the body’s signals that it’s time to rest. We may become more aware of our fatigue. We may begin to take better care of ourselves.

We may also notice more of the things that are right with our body. We spend so much time in our culture emphasizing the things we dislike or want to change about our bodies, as opposed to celebrating pleasant bodily sensations and features.

We will begin this week with a standard mindfulness practice: the body scan. As we have now entered week 3 of the course, I will once again gently encourage you to increase your daily practice time, this time to 15 minutes a day. To begin this week, you can listen to the 15-minute body scan meditation at the end of this lesson.

[And if you don’t practice for 15 minutes each day? That’s okay!!! You are your own best teacher. When you are ready to sit for longer periods, you will. If 10 minutes is working for you, or if 5 minutes is what is working for you, stay with that. You’ll know when you’re ready move on.  ]

In addition to providing us with valuable information from the body, the body scan is often experienced as very relaxing and soothing, so many people choose to do it before bed (if they’re not too sleepy!) In contrast to formal seated meditation, the body scan is typically performed lying down, although you can be in whatever position is comfortable for you. You can lie completely flat, or you can bend your knees and place the bottoms of your feet on the ground (a great position if you have back issues).

In the body scan, we focus on the direct experience and sensations of the body, rather than thinking about the body. If you find your mind wanders during the body scan, just “jump back in” to where we are in the scan (if your mind wanders when we’re at the toes, and you become aware when we’re at the knees, go to your knees!) If at any time focusing on a particular area of the body becomes overwhelming or emotional (for any reason), come back to your anchor breathing.

Finally, the powerful insight of the body scan is recognizing how much things can change. I encourage you to do the body scan each day this week (this can be in place of your seated practice). It will be the same body every day, the same narration every day, but the experiences and sensations may be completely different one day to the next.

Okay, enough words. Let’s practice!

“We can regain our freedom if, as a first step, we simply acknowledge the actuality of our situation, without immediately being hooked into automatic tendencies to judge, fix, or want things to be other than they are. The body scan exercise provides an opportunity to practice simply bringing an interested and friendly awareness to the way things are in the moment, without having to do anything to change things.”

Zindel Segal

As we explored emotions last week, we began to notice how emotions have definitive physical markers – anxiety may be tightness in the chest, anger may be experienced in the stomach. Many of the ways we describe emotions (“a weight on my shoulders,” “a sinking feeling in my stomach”) often refer to their physical manifestations. In this lesson, you can practice a second body awareness meditation that focuses specifically on identifying how emotions and mental states feel in YOUR body.

In the previous lesson, I mentioned how with the body scan, we can become aware of a slight pain before it manifests into something more debilitating. Well, the same is true for our emotions. Have you ever had a day where you just “blew up” at someone (probably during the evening “witching hours” of 4-7pm)? Most likely, you had been triggered by an event earlier in the day, creating some low-level anxiety or frustration that hovered just below your awareness (perhaps as a slight headache, or nausea, or a quickened pulse). By evening, a small annoyance triggered an out-of-proportion response because you hadn’t acknowledged or addressed the earlier frustration.

By tuning in to our bodies throughout the day, recognizing our unique physical manifestations of various feelings, we become more aware of emotion and can begin to prevent those unproductive reactions and outbursts. We can address (and greet!) anger when we feel it, rather than letting it simmer.

You can access the guided meditation here.

After you listen to the guided meditation, you can click here to download the funsheet for reflection and journaling.

(The meditation is about 10 minutes. You may find it helpful to pause the audio between each emotion we explore if you need more time to explore that sensation in the body).

“When we pay close attention, we see that almost all movements are an attempt to alleviate some kind of pain or discomfort. When we’re sitting, we can see this in the slight shifts of position, in order to relieve some tension; or in the larger movements of posture, when we move if the pain becomes unbearable. When we go to eat, we’re relieving the suffering of hunger. When we go to the bathroom, we’re alleviating a discomfort. We lie down to relieve tiredness. But even then, when we think we might finally enjoy some ease, after some time, the body needs to roll over or stretch. And after some number of hours, we need to stand up because the body is getting stiff from just lying down…. It’s worth investigating this to see for ourselves what drives the many movements we make during the day.”

Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening (definitely a recommended read!)

After a few weeks of seated practice, you may have noticed times when you are distracted or bothered by physical sensations or pain during meditation. This lesson will focus on how to work with pain and unpleasant sensations.

In meditation, we become mindful of stillness. And we can also become mindful of sensations of discomfort. When you notice these – whether it’s an itch, a dull ache, or a sharp pain – notice your intention or desire to scratch the itch, change positions, or wince in reaction to pain. In Joseph Goldstein’s Mindfulness (quoted above), he asserts that every movement we make is essentially a way to avoid discomfort. This was eye-opening for me, and I have become much more aware of my intentions to move and shift positions before actually moving. Sometimes I discover that it was really restlessness, and not discomfort; I can watch the desire to move pass without acting on it.

Perhaps you can practice sitting with discomfort (if you are in acute pain, by all means, get more comfortable). As one of my mindfulness teachers told me, “at some point we’re going to get an itch we can’t scratch.” It can be very powerful to learn how to bear discomfort.

If you do choose to move and shift position due to discomfort (which is totally fine!), do so slowly and mindfully. Note what it feels like to change position. If it feels good, enjoy the relief. Note how long the relief lasts, and how soon the urge to move again returns.

I often use the analogy that we practice mindfulness when it’s “easy” – we practice stillness and calm observation of thoughts and emotions when our home is silent and our candle is lit in our meditation space. We train the mind in this way when it’s easy, so that when it’s HARD, when our kids are pushing our buttons or a co-worker angers us, we’ve rehearsed enough to know what to do.

Learning to sit with and observe mild discomfort in meditation trains us in a similar manner. It trains us to not immediately run from something unpleasant, but to observe it, without judgment. We can be curious about the bodily sensations. And just like bringing our awareness to emotions can lessen their intensity, we may notice something similar with physical sensations.

The next time you notice discomfort or mild pain in your practice, remain still and observe it. This is practicing non-getting. What is it like to not immediately move? What is it like to not scratch the itch?

What is this sensation, exactly? How big is the itch? How strong is it? Where is it, exactly?

You can ask the same question of pain. One of the most helpful teachings I’ve received in working with pain was at a retreat two summers ago, when our instructor told us, if we noticed pain, to “find the edges of the pain.”

That was HUGE for me. Think about it. When you are in pain, you probably focus on the MOST INTENSE CENTER OF THE PAIN. But what if you expanded your awareness outward? Can you find the edges of the pain? Can you find the spot where pain fades into irritation, and irritation fades into neutral sensation?

For me, this produced the same awareness we spoke of with emotion – I am larger than my pain! The pain is held in awareness, which is gentle and infinite. The pain is not me. My body can contain the pain. My entire body is NOT in pain.

It’s probably no surprise that mindfulness was first used in medical practices in the West as a pain management technique. Jon Kabat-Zinn writes, “you will probably find that how you relate to the sensations you experience makes a big difference in the degree of pain you actually feel and how much you suffer.” He also reminds us that pain, like a negative emotion, is an important messenger. It’s the body’s way of telling us that something is happening that needs our attention.

“Pain is a natural part of the experience of life. Suffering is one of many possible responses to pain.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn

While I am not an expert on chronic pain conditions, I can share a few suggestions for those of you who may be dealing with chronic pain: (many of these suggestions are explained in great detail in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living)

• remind yourself that YOU are not your pain!
• practice the body scan each day — imagine the in-breath bringing in relaxation and nourishment, and the out-breath releasing tension and resistance
• notice how the pain is not monolithic — it changes in intensity or severity or size
• don’t expect the pain to go away (non-striving)
• welcome the pain the way you learned to welcome emotions last week
• when the pain becomes really intense, see if you can shift your attention to another part of the body that is NOT in pain
• realize that “pain” is just a word — it’s not the actual experience
• investigate the sensation you have labeled as “pain” — what is it?
• bring your awareness to the distinction between the sensation of pain, and your reaction to it

(Though it seems like the opposite of mindfulness, distraction can be a powerful pain-management technique. One thing I will do with my kids when they get hurt and they’re upset is I will rub their back (or a non-injured body part), and ask them, “How does this backrub feel? Does it feel good?” Tears usually stop pretty quickly! Or I’ll ask, “Where is the pain? Is it in your toe? Is it in your tooth? Is it in your hair?” When I’m goofy with it, they learn that their bodies can hold the pain, too.)

If you’re interested, you can access a guided meditation from Ron Siegel on dealing with pain here.

“As we practice being with these unpleasant experiences, our capacity to bear them steadily increases. We also come to see painful sensations are distinct from the suffering that commonly accompanies them.”

Ron Siegel

“Each one of us is sovereign over the territory of our own being and the five elements (skandhas) we are made of. These elements are form (body), feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Our practice is to look deeply into these five elements and discover the true nature of our being — the true nature of our suffering, our happiness, our peace, our fearlessness.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

In this lesson, we’re integrating much of what we’ve learned over the past few weeks, exploring the mind-body-brain connection.

If you remember from our talk about the nervous system last week, our body has many “feedback loops” connecting the brain, the peripheral nervous system, and the visceral organs. Sensations from the body enter the brain through the vagus nerve – they are first perceived in the right hemisphere of the brain, and then labeled by the more linguistically-oriented left hemisphere. (This is why the “name it to tame it” strategy works so well – left-hemisphere activation in the brain is associated with more positive mental states than right-hemisphere activation. The mere act of shifting awareness and processing of the emotion to the labeling part of the brain helps lessen the intensity and power of the emotion!)

As you are developing your mindfulness practice, YOU ARE CHANGING YOUR BRAIN. Meditation increases the thickness of your pre-frontal cortex, which is responsible for reasoning, judgment, and emotional regulation. Mindfulness practice is also linked to a thicker insula, which helps us perceive emotions and internal sensations. Current research indicates meditation may even rehabilitate the deterioration of brain tissue that occurs with aging. Mindfulness is also associated with less activation of the amygdala (which processes fear and aggression).

We are USING OUR MINDS TO CHANGE OUR BRAINS!

And the changes aren’t just restricted to the brain — mindfulness can help lower blood pressure, and also boost the body’s immune system. One study even found that simply practicing mindfulness made subjects’ psoriasis heal faster! As Chade-Meng Tan writes, “when you talk about how meditation can help you heal in this context, it’s not just woo-woo talk by some New Age person; it’s something so tangible, you can see it and actually measure it with a ruler.”

We can’t put ourselves in the fMRI machine each day to see how our patterns of brain activation are changing, nor are we likely to have our brain’s gray matter weighed any time in the near future. But there are some ways we can investigate how mindfulness is transforming our mental and emotional experiences so far.

One way we can explore this mind-body-brain connection is by observing how we experience pleasant and unpleasant events. In the downloads for today, you will find two calendars — one for keeping track of unpleasant events, and another for keeping track of pleasant events over the course of a week (you can take Sunday off!). By paying attention to what happens in the body and mind as these events occur, you can start to more clearly identify your triggers. You can also see how your body and mind are affected by simply recalling an event from earlier in the day or week!

This short video gives you another fun little experiment for observing the mind-body-brain connection! (the “outtakes” on this video feature my daughter as film-director and mommy-distractor )

I’d also like to encourage you to return to the “Intentions and Stress Assessment” that you completed as part of the Bonus materials for the course. If you’ll recall, the stress assessment asked you to identify some of the biggest stressors in your life, and rate them 1-10. As we are approaching the midway point (!) of Brilliant Mindful YOU!, take some time to complete the third column on the second page. Has your rating or experience of that stressor changed at all after three weeks of practice? {It’s okay if it hasn’t! Remember our attitude of non-striving }

{While you’re at it, you may also want to reflect on your intentions for the course and what brought you to the course — has anything changed or shifted for you?}

Finally, you can take some time to reflect on the questions below:

Questions for Reflection

What areas of your body do you notice stir up either positive or negative thoughts?

What is one thing you have noticed about your body this week that you hadn’t really noticed before?

With the exception of mindful eating, the practices we have learned so far have been stationary. In this lesson, we are learning the practice of mindful walking.

Mindful walking can be practiced informally, simply being aware of the sensations of walking – the feeling of the feet on the ground, the muscle movements of the body, the sense of the body in space (known as proprioception).

It can also be a formal practice, and one that you could do in place of your traditional seated practice (again, this course is all about introducing you to various mindfulness practices, and, as your own best teacher, you can decide which ones work best for you).

I tend to like seated meditation, so when I first learned mindful walking, I was skeptical (oh, that constantly judging mind!) But there are some powerful benefits to the practice, and it is great for people who prefer a more “active” practice (though this certainly is not a calorie-burning exercise!)

Watch the video below for my instructions on mindful walking.

Can you believe you are halfway through the course already? Great work, brilliant mindful YOU!