Hello, Real Happiness community!
Today’s meditation felt good for me. How did it feel for you? It made me wonder, though how many of us struggled with this short body scan meditation? It’s funny how impatient you can feel even during a 13-minute session, right? I find the body scan to be really helpful in spite of my impatience.
When we listen to guided meditations, it’s rare to focus outside of the instruction. The body scan usually makes me hyper-aware of my lack of attention to most areas in my body. That awareness typically makes me feel guilty for not noticing how much I’m neglecting areas of my body, which, in turn, makes me more aware that I need to be kind to myself. I continue on like this for most of any meditation I listen to, constantly moving between listening and judging and letting go of that judgment.
The other challenge for me with the body scan is that my mind doesn’t like the slowness of it. I want to speed it up because we all know what parts of the body come next when we do the scan. I think, “Hurry up already!” but then I have to ask, “Hurry up to do what?” The mind has such trouble slowing down and being present unless there’s some larger goal or purpose behind it. But the whole point really is to slow down, right? So, the body scan is the perfect opportunity to do just that. Sharon created a short body scan that felt helpful this morning. If nothing else, I realized how much I need to offer compassion to myself for the judgment and difficulty I had in allowing myself to be present during a meditation that I so desperately wanted to put on fast-forward.
Watching the mind do what it does can be entertaining, most of the time. Here’s hoping we can all offer loving-kindness to ourselves during these daily practices if not provide a good laugh while reminding us that we’re all so very human.
