Today is Ground Hog’s Day. And maybe the proverbial ground hog came out and saw his shadow. He or she could. It’s certainly sunny enough. The question is whether his or her burrow is still buried under mountains of snow.
An NPR discussion likened it to a modern day illustration of samsara. A man wakes up and bumbles through a day and then has to spend eternity repeating that day to get it right before he can move on to another day. The original script called for 1000 nights (Arabian?) narrowed down to 40 for Hollywood. Nevertheless, a fairly lengthy undertaking reminiscent of many of our own struggles for real change in our lives.
Those who took MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) know that body scan is the first practice introduced. The instructions are to lie on the ground or sit in a chair, to close or lower our eyes and begin to pay attention to our bodies starting with the left big toe, then the next toe and the next, moving our attention from body part to body part from toe to head paying attention to what can be sensed in each part - pressure- hard or soft, sensations and textures - rough or smooth, rigid or pliable, temperature - warm, cool, vibrations, resonances, air moving on skin. If there is no sensation, simply noticing that and moving on. The practice was experiential and over the three weeks of practice, students became more sensitized to the variety of sensation that might be present in the leg or the upper arm or the belly or even inside the head. Sometimes the experiences were thoughts or feelings, memories, fears, old injuries, grief about what was missing. Certainly many of the thoughts were about body image, not liking this, liking that.
Some people thrived on this practice - becoming more relaxed and more attuned to the body with each passing day, learning what the word embodiment meant from the inside out. One teacher was famous for putting whole swaths of the class to sleep during his guided body scans. Others struggled to feel comfortable in their own bodies.
This was the body scan developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 for MBSR. The body scan predated JKZ, however, developed probably in Myanmar with the lineage of S.N. Goenka and taught in living memory by Goenka himself. A more general body contemplation from which it was derived has roots in the Buddha’s teachings as in the Sattipathana Sutta in this way:
4. The Reflection on the Repulsiveness of the Body
And further, monks, a monk reflects on this very body enveloped by the skin and full of manifold impurity, from the soles up, and from the top of the head-hairs down, thinking thus: "There are in this body hair of the head, hair of the body, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow, kidney, heart, liver, midriff, spleen, lungs, intestines, mesentery, gorge, feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, grease, saliva, nasal mucus, synovial fluid, urine.”
Here “from the soles up, and from the top of the head-hairs down" is thought to mean a comprehensive contemplation rather than a systematic scan developed by the masters of Myanmar and later by Jon Kabat-Zinn. The experience of contemplating skin, flesh, and bones is more conceptual rather than experiential investigation of sensations but the purpose of rooting mindfulness in the body is the same.
Venerable Analayo introduced the topic of the origins of the body scan in this way:
This article explores the historical background to the body scan practiced in MBSR by tracing it back via vipassanā meditation taught in Myanmar to a particular interpretation of the third step in the canonical instructions on mindfulness of breathing. Although the body scan as such would presumably have been unknown in early Buddhism, its practice does appear to have developed from an aspect of perhaps the most popular meditation practice in ancient and modern Buddhist traditions: mindfulness of breathing.*
I have practiced the anatomical parts contemplation a number of times. But it wasn’t until taking this Sattispatthana course with and as developed by Venerable Analayo that I more fully comprehended how different the practice was in MBSR from what the Buddha instructed in this teaching. In the Sattipathana Sutta, the contemplation of the anatomical parts is less about the experience of different sensations in the body and more about bringing mindfulness to the different parts of the anatomy, mostly unseen and unfelt, and holding these parts - the pleasant, the unpleasant, the neither pleasant nor unpleasant in calm non-reactive awareness. The Buddha called this section “Reflection on the Repulsiveness of the Body.” The practice was intended to balance or offset the sense of desire the body evoked in the young monks - to bring a balanced view of the body to the celibate monks and to enable them to root their mindfulness in their bodies without getting carried away by desire.
The idea of the practice for modern day practitioners is to gain a more balanced view of the body - tempering any aversion we may have to our bodies, how they look, how society judges them and calming any sensual cravings inspired by our bodies and the bodies of others. In this practice we are invited to view our bodies much the way a farmer would view a bag of grains that he plans to sow:
Just as if there were a double-mouthed provision bag full of various kinds of grain such as hill paddy, paddy, green gram, cow-peas, sesamum, and husked rice, and a man with sound eyes, having opened that bag, were to take stock of the contents thus: "This is hill paddy, this is paddy, this is green gram, this is cow-pea, this is sesamum, this is husked rice." Just so, monks, a monk reflects on this very body enveloped by the skin and full of manifold impurity, from the soles up, and from the top of the head-hairs down…”
Tonight we’ll practice the body scan in this style as developed by Venerable Analayo and found on his resources page on the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. Ven. Analayo simplifies the scan to three general body parts - skin, flesh, and bones. A practitioner can expand upon these three general categories or not as suits their practice.
This practice and the two that follow - The Reflection on the Material Elements and The Nine Cemetery Contemplations (Reflection on Mortality) - are not generally taught in the west in Vipassana or Insight courses as they are powerful practices and can be uncomfortable and unbalancing without the firm establishment of mindfulness to monitor the impact of the practice and its effects. Many practitioners are better served gaining a basis of mindfulness of the body rooted in breath awareness or in experiential or sensory investigations of the body first.
We will follow this practice with other more nurturing body scan practices before moving to the next practice in the teaching.
*Anālayo, B. Buddhist Antecedents to the Body Scan Meditation. Mindfulness 11, 194–202 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-019-01259-8