Body Scan forms the core of the lying down practices that people train in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. It consists in sweeping accross the body with an affectionate, openhearted, interested attention to its various parts, usually starting from the toes on the left foot, then moving up to the sole, the heel the top of the foot and so on. The aim is to systematically bring attention to each of the part of the body and attend to the variety of sensations that we can feel in each area. Attending to body sensations is remarkable and doing it in a systematic way even more so. Being able to pay attention to any part of our body without moving a muscle and having the ability to feel any sensations that are present at that moment. With body scan we are tunning into those sensations and allowing ourselves to become aware of what is already happening in our body. Things we usually ignore as they are so mundane or familiar we hardly know they are there or rather here. And of course, by the same token we could say that most of the time in our lives we hardly know we are there, I mean here, experiencing the body, in the body, of the body . . . the words actually fail the essence of the experience. When we speak about it, as we’ve already observed, language itself forces us to speak of a separate I who “has” a body. We wind up sounding hopelessly dualistic.there is the body and its sensations (object), and there is the perceiver of the sensations (subject). They appear separate and different. Then there are moments of pure perceiving that arise sometimes in meditation practice, and sometimes at other very special moments in life. However these moments should be available to us at all times. Perceiving unifies the apparent subject and apparent object in the experiencing itself. Subject and object dissolve into awareness.

Awareness is larger than sensation. It has a life of its own separate from the life of the body, yet intimately dependent on it.