Discomfort during body scan

[PeterMABH]

I attended an 8 week course in Mindfulness last year and found it incredibly difficult. I love the idea behind it and could see the benefits and fit the practice into my life with little adjustment. This year I have tried again and come across the same problems. When approaching any form of breathing centered meditation I started to feel nauseous, my chest tightened, my breathing became erratic and I felt a lot of discomfort – not pain more of an unbearable itch.

The body scan was the worst for me. I used to claw at my arms or clench my fists to detract from the unpleasant feelings when doing the shared practice, and the only way I could get through the longer sessions was to actively follow train of thought and refrain from focusing on the body as it bought on the discomfort and tension. Since this initial failure I have found benefits in running long distances as a form of meditation, but I feel this is more of a distraction through endurance rather than building emotional resilience.

Does anyone have any tips, as when sharing my discomfort with the group and session leader I was met with a puzzled looks. I have a feeling it’s simply my anxiety fueled rumination, but I just need to be able to get calm it enough to start but can’t. Any sensible suggestions are very welcome.

Thanks,

Pete

[Happyogababe]

Hi Pete & welcome to the forum,

I'm sure the experienced guys will have some good support. I've learned a lot & had great support from them.

As regards the response that you get when doing body scan or breathing meditations I haven't experienced anything to the extent that you have, but on occasions I do become aware of slight anxiety when I follow the breath. In these instances I leave the breath alone and either focus on body or sound or walk. Importantly, I learned to accept that its how it is at this time.

One thing that helps me enormously is a tip from a book by Eric Harisson. In it he suggests doing three deep sighs every so often during the day. He says it's one of the fastest ways of relaxing the body and calming the mind. It works for me and allows me to be in the moment, fully.

I had an aversion to body scan some years ago, this time around its something that I really like to do to ground myself.

Have a good day.

[PeterMABH]

Thanks for the welcome and the advice.

I will keep trying and the shorter practices are definitely beneficial in finding focus during the day. I do feel I need to practice for longer in order to 'train the brain' into working better for a more robust emotional stability. Really struggling to find people who have a similar deep aversion to meditation and would love to hear some stories of how to overcome this stubborn hurdle. I had used long-form drone and field recordings as an audio support and found that helped as an external focus before bringing it back to the body scan. Acceptance is one of my biggest failures so I will try to focus and persist in my journey well aware that it will be challenging and interesting in equal measure!

Pete

[Matt Y]

Hi Pete,

As a general principle, any time discomfort arises, give it a little more attention than you normally would. In other words, explore it with interest / curiosity / acceptance, as a means of developing a greater capacity to tolerate such feelings. However, don't hold your attention on discomfort indefinitely, especially if it's worsening / becoming unbearable. In those cases, a stoic, 'grin-and-bear-it' attitude probably won't help. Instead, deliberately divert your attention to sounds (or whatever else has a calming effect for you) or simply let your attention drift.

Remember, there is no right or wrong experience. Some people love the bodyscan, others don't. There is no one meditation technique that's right for everyone. There are people who never use the bodyscan at all, but still derive great benefit from meditation. Be interested in what works for you, and think of meditation as a means of exploring your own reactions, responses and experiences. That way, you get to understand what is effective in your case.

[PeterMABH]

Thanks for taking the time to comment Matt. You are right. I will try and embrace things with a little more curiosity and acceptance. I will research some more meditative techniques as I do feel the body scan isn't for me. I found calm and strength through other practices before so will explore techniques new and old.

Thanks again,

Pete

[JonW]

Hi Pete.
Welcome to the forum.
How do you get along with mindful movement?
All best,
Jon

[Gareth]

Hi Peter,

My advice would be very similar to Matt, really. I have derived a lot of benefit from meditation, and I hardly ever use the body scan at all. I seem to have more of an affinity to sound based meditation. This fits in really nicely with my avid music consumption.

The 8-wk course is there for a reason. It gives people a grounding in the principles of the practice. After that, your practice is your own. Feel free to experiment and find what works best for you.

[TimD]

Hi Pete,
I admire your willingness to keep persisting despite very difficult experiences. As others have helpfully said though, it may be that, for now, doing body scans is not the most helpful way to practice mindfulness and cultivate your capacity to approach what you are experiencing mindfully.

I have replied at some length as I am just in the process of clarifying my own ideas about these issues in preparation for a day symposium I am involved with that is focusing exactly on what you are talking about here Pete - and in preparation for a workshop I involved with exploring ways of offering the body scan in a way that is accessible to those who may struggle with it.
So it was useful for me to respond to your specific experience as a way of giving a context to broader principles. This is by way of saying, forgive me please for going on a bit... I think it can be helpful to get a sense of the principles around a practice so we can then make informed choices about how we apply those principle to what fits with our own experience. But that involves going on a bit - and this is just my perspective. There are other equally valid ones.


Also, Pete, would it be ok if I shared the account you posted here of your experience at this symposium and on this training? I know this is an anonymous public forum and I could do it anyway but I prefer to ask...


I have met a good number of people who have struggled in a similar way to yourself and who have also felt a failure by not having the same experiences as others and, sadly, have also not been supported effectively by the group facilitator.
I think this can be because it is easy to focus on doing the practice as what is important in itself rather than taking a step back and considering what is the point of a particular practice.

One recent example is someone who felt really agitated when invited to start a mindfulness practice by having awareness of her feet on the floor and body in contact with the chair. That was enough for her to spend the rest of the practice feeling really unsettled and dealing with a turmoil of thoughts stirred up by just the opening minute of a practice.

The point of mindfulness practice is to cultivate mindful awareness with its qualities of purposeful attentiveness to what is being experienced now and (as has been said above) a warm curiosity to what is being experienced.
The first quality of purposeful attentiveness is often more readily available as it overlaps with what we do in life anyway, particularly with more enjoyable experiences. It is easier to direct the purposeful attentiveness towards what is pleasant or neutral.

It is the second quality of warm curiosity that is often less familiar and takes time to cultivate. It is generally easier to be warmly curious to what is pleasant or neutral than to what is unpleasant. We have layers of habitual learning that trigger powerful automatic protective/avoidant responses such as fear, anger or disgust when we focus the attention on what is unpleasant. Until we have cultivated our capacity to offer warm curiosity to what we are experiencing then we risk, as has been mentioned, using 'grin-and-bear-it' as our way of enduring the experience, with very little warm curiosity in evidence.

So, in practicing mindfulness to cultivate these qualities, we ideally would start with a focus for the practice that is a physical sensation that we find neutral or pleasant. So as has been helpfully mentioned already, this could be any physical sensation - what we can hear, see, taste, smell touch or physically feel in the body. We can do this with the body still or moving. As we practice bringing purposeful attentiveness to this chosen focus we will find the attention wanders all over, repeatedly. Can we bring warm curiosity to whatever arises as the attention wanders? At times it is difficult to do so or we forget or drift off. When we realise this has happened can we offer warm curiosity to all of that?

At the start of cultivating mindful awareness it is helpful to chose a focus for the practice that maximises the available attentiveness and warm curiosity we have to offer. Choosing a focus that is unpleasant or distressing is like jumping in the deep end when learning to swim.
A common aim of a mindfulness course is to help cultivate the capacity to offer purposeful attentiveness infused with warm curiosity towards what, for us, are difficult experiences. This allows us to linger in those difficult moments with open awareness and kindness to self and other and then respond insightfully. In this way we experience greater emotional stability and tend to be less driven by automatic reactions. This is why mindfulness is different to relaxation: in mindfulness we are simply noticing how it is and the reactions stirred up by how it is, pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. This is why you can't fail at mindfulness practice: you are just noticing how it is. If it seems impossible to engage in a mindfulness practice because it is stirring up unpleasant reactions, it is a moment of mindfulness to notice the thoughts, feelings and sensations associated with those reactions. The cultivation of an attitude of kindness to self is an intrinsic aspect of the practice of mindfulness and it is an expression of this to ask: 'Is it an expression of an attitude of kindness to myself, right now, to engage in a mindfulness practice that generates such unpleasant reaction?'. A good guide this is 'Would I ask a close friend to do what I am making myself do?'.

In relaxation, in contrast we are aiming to help the body relax and we are 'successful' when it is more relaxed and 'fail' when it is not. We can have a meaningful mindfulness practice that is not at all relaxing - but this has to be considered in the context of what is also cultivating kindness to self. Otherwise what we are doing is more like attention training than mindfulness practice.

The difficulty with structuring any mindfulness course is that the focus for any given practice will be a neutral or pleasant focus for some but an aversive focus for others.
With MBSR (and its derivatives) the length of the initial practices is potentially problematic for a good number of people, especially those who find the focusing on the body aversive for whatever reason. It is also hard to share that the body scan is experienced as unpleasant if the first 4-5 people reporting back in a mindfulness class are up-beat. You can easily think that it is meant to be ok or pleasant and you are wrong to be finding it awful. This is why it is so important for the class facilitator to actively invite participants to share what was difficult, a struggle or unpleasant.

There is a sad irony for some in that they are starting the mindfulness course to help them develop their capacity to be able to meet difficult experience more resiliently and their first major practice in session 1 is 30-45 minutes of difficult experience and the home practice is a daily dose of the same. And yet it is week 5 of the course when approaching difficulty is the focus of that session.
So for you Pete, you were being asked to do week 5 content in week 1 and all the home practice with its breath and body focus is week 5 content. And for many week 5 is too soon to be approaching difficulty with any sense of kindness to themselves... they need much more time to get a sense of stability in their mindfulness practice before approaching what is difficult in a helpful way.

So I would suggest that you explore ways that you can bring the qualities of warm curiosity and purposeful attentiveness to neutral or pleasant sensations. Everyone is different, so try different physical sensations as the focus for your mindfulness practice. A sensation that 'invites you in' is helpful. One that is an effort to direct your attention towards or you have to force yourself to do so is not so helpful.

Running can be really good for this - the key question to as is are you 'waking up to what is present right now' as you run? It is easy to go into pleasant flow states in any type of mindfulness practice - such flow states where we get absorbed and lost in what we are focusing on can be very restorative in their own way but lack that quality of present moment awareness of mindfulness practice.

So what would be the focus while you are running that allows you to be attentive to what is physically present? Your feet on the ground? The air on your skin? And, when your attention wanders off, how is it to be warmly curious about the experience of wandering off and returning back to your chosen focus for the practice?
And I would suggest starting small and building - aim to do a length of practice that feels easy to do - perhaps as you run from that lamp post to that tree. If you end up doing more that is ok, but as soon as you start to be forceful, 'making yourself be mindful' then stop. At it is easy to lose the warm curiosity we are seeking to cultivate in mindfulness practice if established habits of how you force yourself or make yourself do something get triggered.
There could be a number of points on your run that trigger some mindful running... so that you build to have a number of times of practice within the run.

I find people who struggle with the body scan are often ok when the body is moving and they use the sensations of movement as the focus.

You were concerned running may be a distraction - but whether something is a distraction or not is a matter of the intentions you bring to what you are doing. You can be running with an intention of using the physical sensations available while running as a means to cultivate present moment awareness or you could be running to be filling your awareness with an activity that drowns out difficult thoughts or feelings. Both are ok - we all need time out from our struggles. The question is whether in the longer term the things we do to bring some ease start getting in the way of us doing what matters to us. It may be a mixture of mindfulness and distraction and that is ok - cultivating mindfulness can be effectively done in the midst of an activity that brings some relief from struggles in life.

As has been suggested, sounds can be a really helpful as a focus, as can holding an object - a cold or hot drink can be a great focus for practice.

It could be that you never use the body as a focus for your mindfulness practice and that is fine. There are no 'mindfulness police' saying what we should do - well only the ones we invent in our own minds...

One of the aims of a body scan is to provide an experience of directing the attention, noticing it wanders, returning the attention and then choosing to shift the focus of the attention. For those who find the body generally an ok focus for mindfulness practice what the body scan offers is a diversity of experience as the attention shifts around the body. Some places there is a lot to notice, some places less. Some places are pleasant. some places less pleasant. This offers all sorts of opportunities to cultivate warm curiosity to all that is happening during the body scan and a kindness to self about how we will have times when we are more engaged and times when we drift off or snooze.

The same 'mental muscles' cultivated by the body scan could be cultivated by engaging in any sense: what sounds can you hear right now? How is it to choose one and notice how the attention drifts and then return to it? Then what happens when you shift to another sound? Or this could be done for objects you can see.

What complicates the body scan is that, in addition to these opportunities to cultivate mindful attention, it also helps cultivate embodied awareness. For many of us we spend much of the day immersed in mental activity or caught up in our external senses. The body can be uncharted territory that we barely register. If mindfulness is about engaging with what is present, bodily experience is an important part of what is present. This cultivation of embodied awareness is a bonus with the body scan for those who are ok with being aware of the body.
It is a major obstacle that can be very disruptive to learning how to cultivate mindfulness for those who find focus on the body triggers unpleasant reactions.

It is often useful to do something that has elements of body awareness but also movement like pilates, yoga, qi gong or tai-chi before returning to body focused practices.


A reason you might at some point return to the body as a focus for mindfulness practice (having taken time to establish a real sense of connection to the forms of mindfulness practice you find helpful) is that the body can offer a way of meeting difficult moments of life in a resourceful and resilient way.
If we can stay with the body's reactions to distressing moments - waves of fear, anger, distress as physically felt in the body, and do so with warm curiosity we can find a sense of inner strength even when emotions are churning. We are engaged but not overwhelmed by what is happening. We can also find that focusing on the body during times of strong emotions is stabilising in contrast to focusing on the mind which tends to be destabilising at such times. We can also find with more body awareness that we pick up on the early signs of emotional surges before they get so strongly triggered, opening up the possibility of soothing ourselves and/or doing something to address the brewing feelings before they are full blown.

So in time (months...) as you get familiar with neutral or pleasant focuses for your practice you could explore how it is to shift from these neutral or pleasant focus points to then briefly bring the attention into the least agitating areas of the body. And then back to the neutral/pleasant focus. Can you bring some warm curiosity to this experience? Little by little you can develop your capacity to engage in the body's experiences. Doing this for short periods.

But I wouldn't be in a rush to do this (as to rush is to sustain the forcing ourselves, making ourselves attitudes). It could also be good to work with someone as a facilitator for your own practice. Personally I disagree with the 'Just do it!' mentality that is a classic phrase associated with MBSR - the point is cultivating the capacity to 'be' with what we are 'doing' with compassion. Just 'doing it' can end up reinforcing self-critical or self-bullying attitudes - the very attitudes a mindfulness course is supposedly helping us become aware of and then hold in a broader context of self-compassion.

Best wishes with your practice and thank you for sharing your experience of the body scan. It is brave to do so. It is really important that these experiences are known about otherwise there can be an assumption everyone is fine with the body scan.

Tim

[TimD]

I meant to add that finding the breath an unpleasant focus is not that uncommon either. The same ideas relate to being attentive to the breath as relate to the body scan. Every group I run will usually have 1 or 2 people who prefer another anchor for their attention other than the breath.
In some ways the breath can be more difficult for some than the body as a whole as the breath gives immediate feedback on emotional reactions affecting the breathing pattern and the breath can have active associations with distressing experiences.
There is nothing essential about the breath as a focus for mindfulness practice - other types of external or body sensations can be used just as helpfully.

[JonW]

Thanks Tim. Great posts.
Best wishes,
Jon