Beneficial for:
Relaxation, meditation and sleep.
How to do it:
- Firstly, lay down in a comfortable position which supports the whole of your body.
- When you are comfy, take notice of your breathing. Find a gentle, repetitive rhythm, allowing breaths to become deeper as time goes on.
- As you are doing this, notice how your body becomes heavier and you pick up on sensations within your body like weight, temperature, stiffness and even pain. Don’t be alarmed if new sensations appear out of the blue, this is completely natural.
- Now pay attention to your toes. Allow them to become heavier and more relaxed as time goes on. (If you are struggling to relax your toes, crunch them up as hard as you can for 5 seconds and then release. This will allow you to notice a change in sensation which is the feeling you want to achieve.)
- Now bring that relaxed sensation from your toes and pull that feeling into the whole of your feet, again allowing them to relax and become heavier.
- Continue this pattern of relaxing each part of your body one bit at a time, up to your knees, then hips, shoulders, down through the aims to the fingertips, neck and head.
If you are struggling to complete all of these steps in a single sitting, that’s okay. Instead, go at your own pace, just focusing the body scan in your feet. As this becomes easier, progress into more regions of the body, one step at a time.
A body scan can be done as frequently as necessary but every day, before you go to sleep, is a healthy way to get to sleep quicker or more deeply. This technique if well practised only takes 5 minutes.