Increase Body Awareness through Movement and Attention

A body scan that incorporates both movement and stillness can be relaxing and enlightening.

Photo by Imani Bahati on Unsplash

In the virtual group meditations I lead, I like to take requests and then improvise a customized meditation. Recently, one person asked for a body scan, and another asked for progressive muscle relaxation, so I decided to create a hybrid of the two.

With a body scan, we tend to focus on individual body parts and just notice what’s happening without doing anything different with that body part. Progressive muscle relaxation instead involves tightening each body part as much as we can, holding the tension, and then relaxing, which helps us to notice the difference between a tense state and a relaxed state. Sometimes it can be difficult to relax, but if we over-tighten the muscle then it’s easier to let it go.

We can use mindfulness meditation to move each body part in whatever way feels right — wiggling something, or touching it, or tightening a muscle if that feels like the right thing to do — and then allowing it to come to rest and noticing the difference in sensation between movement and stillness.

I’m a licensed mental health counselor who enjoys sharing mindful meditations and information about mindfulness. Below is a transcript of a meditation I led on this topic, and at the end…