Passive Progressive Relaxation – The Body Scan

1.     Lie down on your back in a comfortable place, such as on a foam pad on the floor or on your bed (but remember that for this use, you are aiming to stay awake, not fall asleep). Make sure that you will be warm enough. You might want to cover yourself with a blanket or do it in a sleeping bag if the room is cold.

2.     Allow your eyes to gently close.

3.     Feel the rising and falling of your belly with each inbreath and outbreath.

4.      Take a few moments to feel your body as a “whole,” from head to toe, the “envelope” of your skin, the sensations associated with touch in the places you are in contact with the floor or the bed.

5.      Bring your attention to the toes of the left foot. As you direct your attention to them, see if you can “direct,” or channel, your breathing to them as well, so that it feels as if you are breathing in to your toes and out from your toes. It may take a while for you to get the hang of this. It may help to just imagine your breath traveling down the body from your nose into the lungs and then continuing through the abdomen and down the left leg all the way to the toes and then back again and out through your nose.

6.     Allow yourself to feel any and all sensations from your toes, perhaps distinguishing between them and watching the flux of sensations in this region. If you don’t feel anything at the moment, that is fine too. Just allow yourself to feel “not feeling anything.”

7.     When you are ready to leave the toes and move on, take a deeper, more intentional breath in all the way down to the toes and, on the outbreath, allow them to “dissolve” in your “minds eye.” Stay with your breathing for a few breaths at least, and then move on in turn to the soul of the foot, the heel, the top of the foot, and in the ankle, continuing to breathe in to and out from each region as you observe the sensations that you are experiencing, and then letting go of it and moving on.

8.    Bring your mind back to the breath and to the region you are focusing on each time you notice that your attention has wandered off.

9.    Continue to move slowly up your left leg and through the rest of your body as you maintain the focus on the breath and on the feeling of the particular regions as you come to them, breathe with them, and let go of them.

From Jon Kabat-Zinn’s

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face

Stress, Pain, and Illness. (New York: Delta Book, 1990, p. 76-77)

The Body-Scan

One very powerful technique we can use to reestablish contact with the body is known as body scanning. Because of the thorough and minute focus on the body in body scanning, it is an effective technique for developing both concentration and flexibility of attention simultaneously.

It involves lying on your back and moving your mind through the different regions of your body.

We start with the toes of the left foot and slowly move up the foot and leg, feelings the sensations as we go and directing the breath in to and out from different regions. From the pelvis, we go to the toes of the right foot and move up the right leg back to the pelvis. From there, we move through the torso, through the low back and abdomen, the upper back and chest, and the shoulders.

Then we go to the fingers of both hands and move up simultaneously in both arms, returning to the shoulders. Then we move through the neck and throat, and finally all regions of the face, the back of the head, and the top of the head.

We wind up breathing through an imaginary “hole” in the very top of the head, as if we were a whale with a blowhole. We let our breathing move through the entire body from one end to the other, as if it were flowing in the top of the head and out through the toes, and then in through the toes and through the top of the head.

By the time we have completed the body scan, it can feel as if the entire body has dropped away or has become transparent, as if its substance were in some way erased. It can feel as if there is nothing but breath flowing freely across all the boundaries of the body.

As we complete the body scan, we let ourselves dwell in silence and stillness, in an awareness that may have by this point gone beyond the body altogether. After a time, when we feel ready to, we return to our body, to a sense of it as a whole. We feel it as solid again. We move our hands and feet intentionally. We might also massage the face and rock a little from side to side before opening our eyes and returning to the activities of the day.

The idea in scanning your body is to actually feel each region you focus on and linger there with your mind right on it or in it. You breathe in to and out from each region a few times and then let go of it in your mind’s eye as your attention moves to the next region. As you let go of the sensations you find in each region and of any of the thoughts and inner images you may have found associated with it, the muscles in that region literally let go too, lengthening and releasing much of the tension they have accumulated. It helps if you can feel or imagine that tension in your body and  the feelings of fatigue associated with it are flowing out on each outbreath and that, on each inbreath, you are breathing in energy, vitality, and relaxation.