Good question! I picked it up from a friend at a LW meetup a decade ago, so it didn’t come with all the extra baggage that vipassana meditation seems to usually carry. So this is just going to be the echo of it that works for me.
Step 1 is to stare at your index finger (a very sensitive part of your body) and gently, patiently try to notice that it’s still producing a background level of sensory stimulus even when it’s not touching anything. That attention to the background signal, focused on a small patch of your body, is what the body scan is based on.
Step 2 is learning how to “move” that awareness of the background signal slowly. Try to smoothly shift that awareness down your finger, knuckle by knuckle, keeping the area of awareness small by ceasing to focus on the original spot as you focus on a new spot. Then try moving that spot of awareness gradually to the base of your thumb, and noticing the muscle beneath the skin.
Use Case α is harnessing that kind of awareness to relax physical tension and even pain. The next time you have a paper cut or a small burn, once you’ve dealt with it in the obvious objective ways and now just have to handle the pain, focus your awareness right on that spot. The sensation will still be loud, but it won’t be overwhelming when you’re focusing on it rather than fleeing from it. Or the next time you notice a particularly tense muscle, focus your awareness there; for me, that usually loosens it at least a little.
Step 3 is the body scan itself: creating awareness for each part of your skin and muscles, gradually, bit by bit, starting from the crown of your head and slowly tracing out a path that covers everything. This is where a guided meditation could really help. I don’t have one to recommend (after having the guided meditation at the meetup, I got as much of the idea as I needed), but hopefully some of the hundreds out there are as good as Random Meditating Rationalist #37 was.
And Use Case β, when you have a migraine, is to imagine moving that awareness inside your skull, to the place where the migraine pain feels like it’s concentrated. (I recommend starting from a place where the migraine seems to “surface”—for me, the upper orbit of my left eye—if you have such a spot.)
There’s something quite odd about how this works: your brain doesn’t have pain receptors, so the pain from the migraine ends up in some phantom location on your body map, and it’s (conveniently?) interpreted as being inside your head. By tracing your awareness inside your skull, you walk along that body map to the same phantom location as that pain, so it works out basically the same as if you were in Use Case α.
Good question! I picked it up from a friend at a LW meetup a decade ago, so it didn’t come with all the extra baggage that vipassana meditation seems to usually carry. So this is just going to be the echo of it that works for me.
Step 1 is to stare at your index finger (a very sensitive part of your body) and gently, patiently try to notice that it’s still producing a background level of sensory stimulus even when it’s not touching anything. That attention to the background signal, focused on a small patch of your body, is what the body scan is based on.
Step 2 is learning how to “move” that awareness of the background signal slowly. Try to smoothly shift that awareness down your finger, knuckle by knuckle, keeping the area of awareness small by ceasing to focus on the original spot as you focus on a new spot. Then try moving that spot of awareness gradually to the base of your thumb, and noticing the muscle beneath the skin.
Use Case α is harnessing that kind of awareness to relax physical tension and even pain. The next time you have a paper cut or a small burn, once you’ve dealt with it in the obvious objective ways and now just have to handle the pain, focus your awareness right on that spot. The sensation will still be loud, but it won’t be overwhelming when you’re focusing on it rather than fleeing from it. Or the next time you notice a particularly tense muscle, focus your awareness there; for me, that usually loosens it at least a little.
Step 3 is the body scan itself: creating awareness for each part of your skin and muscles, gradually, bit by bit, starting from the crown of your head and slowly tracing out a path that covers everything. This is where a guided meditation could really help. I don’t have one to recommend (after having the guided meditation at the meetup, I got as much of the idea as I needed), but hopefully some of the hundreds out there are as good as Random Meditating Rationalist #37 was.
And Use Case β, when you have a migraine, is to imagine moving that awareness inside your skull, to the place where the migraine pain feels like it’s concentrated. (I recommend starting from a place where the migraine seems to “surface”—for me, the upper orbit of my left eye—if you have such a spot.)
There’s something quite odd about how this works: your brain doesn’t have pain receptors, so the pain from the migraine ends up in some phantom location on your body map, and it’s (conveniently?) interpreted as being inside your head. By tracing your awareness inside your skull, you walk along that body map to the same phantom location as that pain, so it works out basically the same as if you were in Use Case α.
Hope this helps!