Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

BODY SCAN

Settling Attention

Let us begin by sitting comfortably for 2 minutes. Sit in a position that enables you to be both relaxed and alert at the same time, whatever that means to you.

Now, let us breathe naturally and bring very gentle attention to the breath. You can either bring attention to the nostrils, the abdomen, or the entire body of breath, whatever that means to you. Become aware of in breath, out breath, and space in between. Scan Body

Head

Now bring your attention to the top of your head, ears, and back of your head. Notice sensations, or lack of sensations, for 1 minute. Face

Now move your attention to your face. Your forehead, eyes, cheeks, nose, lips, mouth, and inside of your mouth (gums, tongue) for 1 minute. Neck and Shoulders

Move your attention to your neck, the inside of your throat, and your shoulders for 1 minute. Back

Move your attention to your lower back, mid back, and upper back for 1 minute. The back carries a lot of our load and stores a lot of our tension. So let us give our backs the kind and loving attention they deserve. Front

Now move your attention to the chest and stomach for 1 minute. If it is possible for you, try to bring attention to your internal organs, whatever that means to you. Entire Body at Once

And now, bring your attention to your entire body all at once for 1 minute. Scan for Emotion

Did you find any emotion in your body? If there is any, just notice its presence in the body. If not, just notice the absence of emotions, and catch one if it arises in the next 2 minutes. Positive Emotion

Let us now try to experience a positive emotion in the body.

Bring to mind a memory of a happy, joyous event or a time when you were optimal and productive or a time when you felt confident.

Experience the feeling of positive emotion. Now, bring your attention to your body. What does that positive emotion feel like in the body? In the face? Neck, chest, back? How are you breathing? Any difference in level of tension? Let us just experience it for 3 minutes. Returning to Grounding

Let us now return to the present. If you find an emotionally charged thought, just let it go.

Bring your attention to either your body or your breath, whichever your mind finds more stability in. And let’s just settle the mind there for 2 minutes.

(Long pause)

Thank you for your attention.

Notice that we only invite you to bring up a positive emotion in this exercise, not a negative one. We wait until the next chapter to do an exercise involving negative emotions because that is when we introduce tools for dealing with them. In class, we also do not want to ask our participants to bring up negative emotions without first introducing tools to manage them because doing so would upset our lawyers, and we like our lawyers.

I want to encourage everyone to try out the formal body scanning practice because it has many important benefits. First, it works better than just merely bringing mindfulness to day-to-day activities. The main reason is focus. When you are doing normal activities, you can likely only dedicate a small percentage of your attention to your body, unless you have a highly trained mind, like Thich Nhat Hanh does, or your activity involves devoting full attention to your body, as in competitive dancing, or you are Thich Nhat Hanh engaged in competitive dancing. In contrast, if you are doing nothing else but formal body scanning, you can focus far more of your attention to your body, and attention is what drives neurological change.

One of the participants in our Search Inside Yourself class is a manager called Jim. After a few weeks of practicing body scan, he told me, “I realized that I suppressed emotions into my body. That made me experience physical disablement that would frequently cause me to miss work. This practice has helped me come to work more frequently.” Jim has nine direct reports, so his practice benefited at least ten people at work. (“Jim” is not his real name, but I assure you he has a real body.)

“Scan your own body!”

A second benefit of body scan is it helps you sleep. I know that because in MBSR, participants practice body scan lying down, and in every class, at least one person ends up snoring (with everyone else thinking, “Stop snoring. I’m trying to meditate, damn it!”). I am not entirely sure why body scan is so conducive to sleep, but from my own experience, I can think of a few reasons. By bringing attention to the body, we are helping it relax. Very often, bodily tension builds up because we are not paying attention to the body, so the mere presence of attention corrects that problem. Also, body scan and other gentle, mindfulness-based exercises bring the mind to rest. So body scan relaxes both the body and the mind, and if you do it lying down, it is easy to fall asleep. If you have problems sleeping, this might help you.

Journaling

Journaling is the practice of self-discovery by writing to yourself. It is an important exercise to help you discover what is in your mind that is not in a clear, conscious view. Usually, when we write, we are trying to communicate a thought with another person. This exercise is different. You’re not trying to communicate with somebody else. Instead, you are trying to let your thoughts flow onto paper so you can see what comes up.

The exercise itself is very simple. You give yourself a certain amount of time, say, three minutes, and you are given (or you give yourself) a prompt, which for our purposes is an open-ended sentence such as “What I am feeling now is…” For those three minutes, write down whatever comes to mind. You may write about the prompt, or you may write about anything else that comes to mind. Try not to think about what you’re going to write—just write. It does not matter how closely you follow the prompt; just let all your thoughts flow onto the paper. There is only one rule: do not stop writing until your time is up. If you run out of things to write, just write, I ran out of things to write. I have nothing to write. I still have nothing to write .... until you have something to write about again. Remember, you are writing to yourself, for yourself, and you will never have to show this to another person unless you want to. Hence, you can do this with full honesty.

You can think of journaling as mindfulness of thoughts and emotions; paying moment-to-moment, non-judging attention to thoughts and emotions as they arise; and facilitating their flow by putting them on paper. There are a couple other ways of looking at it. My engineer’s way of looking at it is an unfiltered brain dump—dumping your mind-stream onto paper. A more poetic way of looking at it is seeing your thoughts as a gently flowing stream and trying to capture that flow on paper.

This practice is so simple, you may wonder if it does anything useful at all. I wondered the same thing the first time Norman Fischer explained it to me, but the research blew my mind. A study by Stefanie Spera, Eric Buhrfeind, and James Pennebaker had a group of laid-off professionals write to themselves about their feelings for five consecutive days for twenty minutes each day. 10These people found new jobs at a much higher rate than the people in the non-writing control group. After eight months, 68.4 percent of them found jobs, versus 27.3 percent from the control group. Those numbers just blew my mind. Usually, if an intervention can make a difference of a few percentage points, you can publish a paper. But here, we are not talking about 3 percentage points. We are talking about more than 40 percentage points! And all it took was one hundred minutes of intervention. Oh, wow.