Find a comfortable place and settle in. It needs to be somewhere quiet, where you won’t be disturbed. You’re going to be here a while. Fifteen minutes at the absolute minimum. The method is called Beddhism because for most of us, the most comfortable place in our lives is our bed.
So, go to bed. Lie down, get comfortable.
Close your eyes.
Let yourself feel all the sensations in your body.
Do not do anything else for at least 15 minutes.
That’s it.
Your body is constantly feeling sensations. All the time, all over, your body is busy producing sensations. So many sensations that there’s no way to feel them all.
Take a second and try to feel all the sensations in a given part of your body. Pick the middle toe on your left foot, say, or the back of your right palm, or the inside of the lower part of your left cheek. “There aren’t any sensations there” may be your first reaction. But wait a minute and really look. Focus in.
Oh, there they are! I didn’t notice!
For me, the most prevalent type of sensation is kind of a prickly feeling, pins and needles. There can be a sense almost of electricity moving from one place to another.
There are also various kinds of pressure, which range from so slight they can barely be noticed, all the way to outright pain.
There is often a sense of a clenching, here or there. Sometimes if I try I can relax the clenching, but other times I can’t figure out how.
There can be sensations of heat or cold. There can be digestive sensations: a feeling like you need to use the bathroom, or a little bit of nausea. You can be lightheaded.
A super common sensation I notice when I’m lying quietly is the beating of my heart. Sometimes I feel it in my chest, but often I feel the blood being pushed in other places. When I clench my wrists, sometimes it’s there.
It’s very much worth taking some time to notice the location of sensations. Notice that some places seem to have more sensations, and more powerful sensations, than others. For me, the most powerful emotions seem to sit in my stomach, but they can also be in the chest. It was a very strange day when I realized that I had strong sensations running through my back, which I had almost never consciously felt. (I’ve been aware of back pain, to varying degrees, for years ... but the number and intensity of the little electricity sensations moving up and down my back were surprising. How did I not notice those for so long?) Sensations in the chest can sometimes be very interesting, and are sometimes scary when they get strong because they make me think about heart attacks. Those in the neck and throat area are hard to notice at first, but then when I do they also can be scary, no doubt because we all like to breathe. Various weird things sometimes happen in my ears. Are there ever sensations inside your eyes, other than pain? See if you can notice those. What about the back of the neck? The scalp? Sometimes the little electricity in my scalp turns into an itch. My arms and legs often seem to have the fewest really interesting sensations going on, but sometimes after I’ve been anxious for a while I feel a strong buzzing in my forearms that turns into a “falling asleep” feeling. It feels much better after I shake my arms for a while. Sometimes the electricity throughout my upper body turns into an itch in my underarm, and it’s super attractive when I feel the need to scratch that.
Notice things like that. Really delve into it. Take your time. Like I said, allow 15 minutes at a bare minimum.
Another thing you may want to notice is how your sensations change as your thoughts change.
If specific emotions come up as you do this exercise (anger? fear? boredom? anxiety? sadness?), your goal is to let those emotions be. Don’t resist them. Instead, take the time and notice how the emotions translate into specific sensations. Again, just notice where in the body the sensations are happening. But if no specific emotions seem to come up, that’s fine too. Just sit with the sensations and notice what they are doing, how they are changing.
If you feel stupid, or like this is a waste of time: please trust me. This is super, super important.
(1) You are getting in touch with your feelings ... and, as I said, anxiety is what results when you refuse to be in touch with your feelings. So this is directly an anti-anxiety exercise.
(2) When your emotions start to arise, you will be able to notice what they are doing more clearly because you will have noticed what your body felt like before the emotion came up.
(3) When your more frightening emotions come up, you will be less frightened of them. You will learn that even the scariest emotions are just feelings in your body ... and you will have spent plenty of time feeling the sensations in your body, so you won’t run away from them. Again, your anxiety is caused by the fact that you run away from the scary emotions in your body. This exercise is laying the foundation so that you won’t run away in the future.
Mind and body
If you have anxiety, you’ve spent hours struggling inside your mind. One of the problems is that your anxious mind lies to you. It tells you things that are demonstrably false ... but you find yourself believing them. It is a struggle to disbelieve your anxious thoughts.
The book “Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy” by David Burns is one of the classics in the field of mental health. The author says that anxiety and depression always come with what he calls “distorted thinking.” We believe things, about ourselves and the world, that are both false and negative. If we didn’t do this kind of distorted thinking, we wouldn’t be anxious in the first place.
(This is a book that I very highly recommend picking up. If you happen to have Amazon Prime, the e-book can be borrowed and read for free from Amazon [as of this writing].)
The approach to anxiety that “Feeling Good” takes is cognitive: it deals with the mind. Beddhism is different: we’re mostly interested in the body.
One huge advantage to Beddhism is that your body does not lie to you. Your anxious mind lies constantly. Your body never does.
Your body says that your months and years of fighting with your anxiety have worn you out, and muscles are hurting all over your body. That’s true!
Your body says that you are scared. This is true (for now).
Your body says that your stomach hurts. Very true!
And so on.
Take some time to listen to your body. A critical part of the path to healing is simply accepting that what your body is telling you is true.
You may not like what it’s telling you. You may prefer that you weren’t so scared all the time, or that you weren’t in so much pain. But it’s true. Listen to your body, trust it. It’s telling the truth. You do need a break. You do hurt, a lot. You really are suffering more than you should be.
There’s something very peaceful that comes up when we sit in the feelings of the body for a while. The feelings themselves may be quite intense, of course, but there’s a peace as well. I think a part of the peace simply comes from knowing that we are not being lied to. To rest in the body and feel its sensations is to confront an important part of the truth about ourselves.
Sit with the experience
People often say “I’m feeling anxious.” Or similar things: “I’m feeling really worried about such-and-such” or “I’m so angry right now!” They say these things with the expectation that I will sympathize with them for going through a difficult emotion.
That’s not my reaction anymore.
If I know that you’re an anxious person, and you tell me that you’re feeling anxious, I have a very different reaction. I rarely say it out loud (except to those who know me well), but what I want to say is: “Oh, good for you! This can be a really important moment. Sit with your anxiety and let it be what it is, and learn from it.”
Sit with your experience (whatever it is) and let it be what it is. Pay attention! Something important is happening!
Remember, this is your life. This is your experience. Nothing bad is happening, it’s just sensations in your body. Focus on them!
Make a promise to yourself that you will sit in your sensations when they happen. No matter how unpleasant they may get, they are still just experiences being generated by your body. Your sensations are your body talking to you. It’s telling you the truth and it wants to be heard. Listen to it!
OK, but what exactly am I supposed to be doing?
I use a few sentences pretty much interchangeably. “Feel your feelings.” “Pay attention to your sensations.” “Focus on your body.” All of these mean more or less the same thing.
When I was reading about (and doing) Buddhist meditation, one of the important distinctions was attention versus awareness. Instead of trying to write this up myself, let me go find a book that lays it out pretty clearly.
Whenever we focus our attention on something, it dominates our conscious experience. At the same time, however, we can be more generally aware of things in the background. For example, right now your attention is focused on what you’re reading. At the same time you’re also aware of other sights, sounds, smells, and sensations in the periphery.
The way attention and peripheral awareness work together is a lot like the relationship between visual focus and peripheral vision. Try fixing your eyes on an external object. You will notice that, as you focus on the object, your peripheral vision takes in other information elsewhere in your field of vision. (John Yates [aka Culadasa], The Mind Illuminated, pp. 19-20)
The distinction is pretty simple and intuitive, I think. (Let me know if I’m wrong, please!)
In classical Buddhist meditation, you’re normally instructed to pay attention to the breath. Focus on it. The goal, as Culadasa explains it later in the same chapter of that book, is to “work with your attention and your awareness in order to cultivate stable attention and mindfulness.”
In Beddhist meditation, you pay attention to the feelings in your body. Make the sensations the focus of your mind. Unlike Buddhism, the goal isn’t to cultivate anything or to do anything in particular. The goal is simply to pay attention. By paying attention to the sensations in your body, you set the stage for yourself to feel better.
So. Pay attention to your body. Focus on each of the sensations that’s going on in there. Really get interested. To the extent that there is a mental/narrative component to the process, it might sound something like this:
“That’s a weird sensation. It kind of hurts. Where does it hurt? It’s in my belly, a little bit on the right. It feels like it’s pulsing. Can I feel the pulse? How fast is it going? Oh now it stopped pulsing and it just hurts. It’s like a blank wall of discomort, not quite pain. It reminds me of having a stitch in my side from too much running. Oops now it’s gone. No it’s still there but I’m more interested suddenly in this other feeling, a little farther back. It makes me want to stretch my back. OK, I’ll stretch my back. Oof. OK that feeling got more intense, almost painful, but it also felt good. Was that just a muscle cramp? Anyway it’s better. The belly sensation is back.”
It’s not necessary to talk your way through it like this, of course. Sometimes when I’m having a hard time focusing, I do use some words sort of like that. But over time, the words drop away and there is nothing left but the sensations, and me striving to notice them.
If there’s a specific sensation that seems important, try putting your hand on the spot. Notice where, exactly, your hand is. “It’s on my left side, about three inches up from my waist.” Next time you’ve having a sensation, you can put your hand on the same spot, to test if this sensation is in the same place or not. If you notice that a particular unpleasant sensation keeps recurring in the same spot, that tells you something important! If the sensation moves around your body, that probably means something different. What does it mean? I don’t know; I’m not you. But if you pay attention and really decide to listen, your body will tell you.
I’m having some scary and unpleasant sensations come up!
Good! That’s wonderful news! Keep it up!
The worse the sensations feel, the better it is.
I mean that sincerely. Pain, fear, sadness, anger, all of it: the more the better. Focus on all of the sensations. Go deeply into them. And when it feels like you can’t go any deeper … keep going.
Kent, your guidance in that last paragraph – on welcoming all the sensations reminds me of Jed McKenna's "enlightenment trilogy" books and his spiritual autolysis method of shedding. Are you familiar? It's said that Jed McKenna was a nom de plume and it was also announced he passed a few years ago. The books are a deep, poignantly outrageous fun read. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/149961.Spiritual_Enlightenment