Body Scan: This is How The Mindfulness Exercise Works

The Body scan belongs to the mindfulness exercises and should help us to feel our body better. We explain how the training works.

What’s The Body Scan?

The Body scan is a mindfulness exercise from the fields of yoga and meditation, in which one gradually feels one’s whole body and accepts all the sensations that emerge – regardless of whether one classifies them as good or bad. The body is “palpated” from within and accepted as it is. This should reduce stress and make it easier to relax.

During the first attempts, the body scan seems to some people to be a rather trivial exercise or even a waste of time. In order to get involved, it is advisable to get the right instructions from a coach familiar with meditation and to give the scan some time before assessing the effect. It is also important not to directly try to change an unpleasant sensation during the body scan – it is only a matter of recording the actual state.

What are The Advantages of The Body Scan?

The exact feeling of the body has the following advantages:

• Your own body is better understood – you draw a precise picture of it
• Stress is “let go”
• Relaxation becomes easier
• Body and mind harmonize better with each other

How Does The Body Scan Work?

Here comes the instruction for the body scan, so you can start directly:

1. Lie on the floor and make sure you stay awake during the exercise.
2. Close your eyes – but only if you don’t tend to fall asleep easily. Otherwise leave them open.
3. Feel your whole body from head to toe and perceive it as a whole.
4. Now let your attention glide to the toes of your left foot and engage with everything you perceive: How warm or cold are they? Is it tingling somewhere? Where do the toes point? It can also help to imagine directing one’s own breath to the place one feels it: In this case it is a calm breath from the nose through the chest, belly and leg to the toes.
5. Tip: It is not bad if you do not feel anything – this is also an intensive perception.
6. Focus attention for a moment on your own breath and how it flows through the body.
7. Now the feeling of the body gradually continues to the soles of the feet, heels and ankles. Again, let the breathing wander into the respective part of the body, register how it feels and then let this sensation go straight away.
8. Be sure to briefly redirect attention back to breathing between each individual part of the body.
9. If thoughts that deviate from the exercise appear, concentrate again on breathing until the thoughts evaporate.
10. After the foot, use the same method to gradually feel your way completely through the body, via the left and right leg to the trunk, arms, neck and shoulders and finally via the head to the crown. Focus your attention exclusively on your breath and the sensations of the various body regions. Then consciously let go of the feelings.

In order for the body scan to develop its relaxing effect, it should ideally be performed at least once a day for 45 minutes each.

3 Common Problems with Body Scan and What Helps against It

Especially beginners of meditation often encounter difficulties during practice and wait in vain, for example, for them to feel something. Here we explain typical bodyscan problems and what helps against them:

• I fall asleep all the time: This happens to many people, especially when the scan is done in the evening after a hard day’s work. It is better to do such exercises in the morning and perhaps change your posture from time to time.
• I suffer from unpleasant sensations during body scan: It can be difficult to get fully involved in feeling a body part, because you associate it with a past injury, for example. Get involved with this feeling, learn to make peace with it and let go of the feeling instead of avoiding it. This only postpones the pain to a later moment. Letting go can be a longer lasting process – but it is worth it.
• I feel no change: stress builds up and piles up symbolically higher and higher the longer we ignore it. That’s why you also have to give the body scan some time to tackle this stress tower and you shouldn’t give up after two or three exercise intervals because you don’t directly feel an improvement. Some time and intensive practice are the prerequisites for the body scan to have an effect.