In the past, mediation was left to hippies, and most people didn’t want to embrace it. However, after noticing the benefits of the practice, most people are leaning towards meditation as a way to reduce everyday issues like stress and anxiety. The scientific community has been studying meditation in-depth and has given much positive feedback on meditation practice.
Our bodies communicate to us through sensations. For example, you feel light and physically relaxed when you’re happy. However, when you’re upset, you feel a sensation of unease in your gut and heart. These sensations are ways in which the body is sending you a message. When you listen to these sensations, you can manage whatever life throws your way.
What is BodySensing?
BodySensing is a type of meditation that uses the body as an entry point to know our essence. It can also be described as a form of Yoga Nidra meditation where you experience yourself from gross sensing to more subtle levels. Eventually, you’re able to experience pure awareness.
BodySensing can profoundly nourish the connection with yourself and everyone around you as you move towards unitive consciousness. It helps you discover a deep sense of calm and well-being that remains in your nature.
BodySensing meditation helps you feel embodied by using your physical senses to inform your behaviors and mind. Regularly practicing BodySensing can calm your central nervous system, which helps you achieve deep mental and physical relaxation. It also increases your body’s ability to deal with stress and experience feelings of well-being, health, and wholeness.
How your body communicates
Our bodies constantly communicate with us; the problem is that we don’t listen. BodySensing helps you increase interoceptive awareness by listening effectively to your body. Commonly, we don’t listen to our bodies. Think about all the times you didn’t listen to your body and the message it sent you.
For example, when you feel tired, you push your body’s limits by consuming caffeine. When you’re feeling sad or angry, you mask it with substance use. All these ways to mask your feelings and thoughts eventually become a habit that distances you from your body.
By practicing BodySensing, you’re rebuilding the relationship between you and your body that you long destroyed. You relearn how to listen to your body. When you don’t listen to your body when it’s giving you subtle signs, it’s starts shouting to get your attention. That’s why many illnesses start with subtle signs and then increase with severity as you don’t tend to them.
BodySensing practice can help you regain the ability to listen to your body even when giving you subtle cues. When you’re able to recognise the early symptoms of stress, like heaviness, irritation, discomfort, and tightness, you can deal with these symptoms and keep yourself from experiencing more harmful conditions like high blood pressure, fatigue, low blood sugar, depression, and anxiety.
Illnesses such as food intolerance grow gradually, and we often don’t notice the symptoms until they’re magnified. Through BodySensing, you can catch these symptoms when they’re still subtle and get an Intolerance Test to discover the problematic foods. Our bodies constantly communicate with us; our only problem is we’ve stopped listening and learned how to mask what we’re feeling until it’s too late. We can, however, prevent this by learning BodySensing.
How to practice BodySensing
There are many ways to practice BodySensing, and you can practice whichever you can when the opportunity presents itself. You can practice BodySensing meditation when walking, biking, or even doing yoga. What BodySensing requires is for you to place attention on your body.
Don’t think about anything else other than how your body is feeling. You can do this by scanning your entire body, from your toes to your head. BodySensing means you’ll focus on every part of your body and try to understand how it feels.
When you’re starting, you can do this seated comfortably. This can be in a chair with both your feet firmly planted on the floor or lying down on your back with your feet stretched out and your hands on your side. Alternatively, you can seated in a cross-legged pose. As long as you adopt a comfortable position, you can practice BodySensing.
When practicing BodySensing, you switch your mind from thinking to feeling. Once you start feeling, the body naturally relaxes because you’re giving it attention. The longer you can feel your body, the deeper it relaxes.
According to research, regular BodySensing practice grows the brain-body connections through strengthening and creating neural pathways. You must be patient with yourself, and regular practice will help you achieve calm and a mind-body connection.
When practicing BodySensing, you can do it by sensing one body part at a time. For example, you can send your individual and even your fingers. If you’re doing an activity like walking when practicing BodySensing, you can move with slow awareness and include principles of mindfulness, which include non-judgemental awareness of the present moment.
Benefits of BodySensing
BodySensing, as a meditation approach, offers numerous benefits. These include:
- Deeper Connection with Self: When we use the body as the starting point, BodySensing helps us connect more deeply with ourselves. You can even notice subtle symptoms of illnesses like food intolerances before they become severe.
- Calmness and Well-being: It can bring about a deep sense of calm and enhance our overall well-being by fostering a stronger connection with our true essence.
- Realisation of True Nature: Through practicing BodySensing, you can directly realise your true nature as a unified consciousness embodied within.
- Non-Dual Perspective: It introduces a non-dual perspective that embraces the unity of elements often perceived as separate, promoting a sense of oneness. Often, we feel separate from others, but by practicing this form of meditation, we embrace oneness. It helps break through the limitations of perceiving separation, allowing a deeper understanding of essential oneness.
- Increased Awareness through Movement: BodySensing isn’t limited to stillness; it can be practiced through various movements like yoga, walking, or dancing, allowing the body’s intelligence to express itself freely.
- Healing and Release of Tensions: For some, this practice has led to profound healing by releasing deeply held tensions and symptoms. When we let tension develop and stay within the body, it can cause more harm than good. We also often notice symptoms of an illness when there is a physical manifestation. However, BodySensing helps us figure that out long before it affects us physically and terminally.
- Yoga Nidra Experience: BodySensing is similar to Yoga Nidra; it, therefore, guides practitioners through different layers of sensations, emotions, and thoughts to reach a state of pure awareness.
- Daily Life Implications: It translates into daily life by enhancing spontaneity, responsiveness, and authenticity in decision-making and interactions.
- Sense of Freedom: BodySensing can bring greater freedom as conditioned patterns dissolve, allowing pure awareness to be expressed through individual uniqueness.
Final thoughts
BodySensing is a meditation that helps you figure out your body and how it’s feeling. This can help you notice symptoms within your body before they become severe and handle them by finding the root cause. If through BodySensing, you notice symptoms such as bloating, contraption, headache and other digestive symptoms. Then, get an Intolerance Test to check if you’re suffering from food intolerances and what these triggers are so that you can feed your body better.
