I’ve been meditating for 12 years. Here's what I’ve learned.

What a Body Scan Actually Feels Like

It's 6:00 a.m. and I'm lying in the dark beneath a quilt on the sofa, a small pillow under my knees, another behind my head. The house creaks its quiet while my headphones are playing a favorite meditation. The calm voice in my ears is walking me through a body scan.

The voice guides my awareness — not in any conceptual way, but to really feel the breath moving in my belly, before traveling down to the toes of my left foot. For the next 40 minutes, my attention moves between his voice, specific parts of my body, and the flood of images, tasks, and mental notes that keep surfacing like Whac-A-Mole.

This morning ritual is one I genuinely have come to love, though it was not always so. This morning is no different. Thoughts and images seep in from nowhere, but his voice guides me back to my "ankle, the shin in front and the calf in back, the knee…the front of the left thigh, the webpage I need to revisit, the Dr. appointment I forgot to make, the lower back."

Crackers, I just missed several minutes on my right leg. In that fraction of a second I am suddenly aware that my upper body is bracing. Tension has taken over my neck and shoulders and my entire back has somehow curled and contorted to one side. And my thighs are clenched. Interesting.

I return to the voice…"the middle back, upper back…the shoulders..." And so it goes: sensory awareness, flickering brain zoomies and pulses of tension. This morning, I estimate that I was consumed with thoughts for 20 out of 45 minutes. And each time I become aware of the thinking, I notice my body clenching and am able to release it and return to sensation. It’s not that I’m so focused on my body, it’s more that I am holding an awareness of my mind as I scan through my body.

All forms of meditation used to drive me nuts. Being still was difficult, and the endless mental noise would overwhelm me. In fact, any attempt to stop thinking would usually backfire. A torrent of thoughts would rush in, along with more bodily contortions. During one period, I still remember realizing my left thumb would tense, every time, all on its own, into an extreme thumb out claw-like position. Now, I understand this is the way it is. Our brains like to think. And thank goodness for that. 

How I Got Here

Twelve years ago, a friend invited me to join her for a stress-reduction class. I was curious, and stressed in the way that becomes invisible when it's been your baseline long enough — doing what was expected, being who everyone needed me to be.

That class was a fork in the road of my life.

Originally developed for patients navigating chronic pain and illness, the 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course — MBSR — was developed by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979. What I learned later was that he drew from 2,500 year old Buddhist meditation traditions and adapted them for a Western medical context. But what strikes me most is this: in Buddhist tradition, mindfulness is a path toward equanimity given the universals of human existence — sickness, aging and death.

What Appears When I Stop

Back on the sofa, the recording continues. Kabat-Zinn's voice is now focused on the head — “the forehead. Just breathing with the forehead, letting it soften…”. 

When I've been still long enough and the mental chatter has quieted just enough, something else appears: phosphenes. Phosphorescent shimmers and shapes that surface behind closed eyes in the absence of light. My inky landscapes of inner stillness produce exquisite acid green auroras that shift into concentric lavender rings and blobs of ultramarine blue. They don't appear when my brain is in full chatter mode. I can't will them to come. They arrive, just as rest arrives, when I finally stop bracing against my life.

The recording ends. My breath fills my throat, my upper chest, and moves down toward my diaphragm. I feel the back of my ribs expand around my lungs as my back presses against the sofa. I wiggle my toes and stretch.

I feel deeply rested, alive and profoundly present.

The practice that began 2,500 years ago as a path toward equanimity with death — I find it on a sofa in the early morning, half-caught in a current of looping thoughts. Not because I've mastered anything, but because I keep returning. 

Some days are more easeful than others, but in giving myself this sacred time of attention, I give myself love and care and in the process, my experience of stress – and of my life – is transformed.

Michelle A M Miller, co-author
The Good Enough Guide, a guided journal & manifesto