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Body scan meditation

A body scan is a meditation in which you move your attention slowly through your body, one part at a time. You notice what’s there: warmth, pressure, tingling, tightness, or nothing much at all. You aren’t checking your body for faults, and you don’t try to change or relax what you find. You notice it, and move on. Most days your body barely gets a glance. A body scan gives it your full attention for a while.

Where it comes from

Jon Kabat-Zinn made the body scan a core part of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. That’s the eight-week program he began at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979. It has roots in Burmese insight meditation. One of the teachers who shaped his version was Robert Hover, who taught in the tradition of U Ba Khin. In that tradition, meditators sweep their attention through the body. The scholar and monk Anālayo traces the practice back further still, to one way of reading the Buddha’s instructions for mindful breathing.

How it reached us:

1846–1923The Burmese monk Ledi Sayādaw spreads insight meditation among lay people
1937U Ba Khin begins insight meditation with the lay teacher Saya Thet Gyi
1973Jon Kabat-Zinn trains with Robert Hover, who taught in U Ba Khin’s tradition
1979Kabat-Zinn has the idea for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on a retreat, and begins it that year
2022A review of 14 trials finds a body scan alone makes a small difference to mindfulness

How to do a body scan

Lie on your back, or sit comfortably. Close your eyes, or keep them open and resting low. Let your breathing find its own pace. Give it anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour.

Take a few slow breaths, and feel the weight of your body where it’s supported.
Bring your attention to the toes of your left foot. What’s there? Warmth, coolness, the touch of a sock, or nothing you can name.
Stay for a few breaths. Then move to the sole, the heel, the top of the foot and the ankle.
Work slowly up the leg. Then cross to the other foot, and up that leg.
Carry on through the hips, the belly, the back and the chest. Then the hands and arms, the shoulders, the neck, the face and the top of the head.
Finish by feeling your whole body at once, breathing. Then look around, move a little, and go on at your own pace.

A few moments of it might sound like this:

Now the left foot. The toes. The sole. The heel, resting where it rests. If there’s warmth, notice warmth. If there’s nothing much, notice that. Then let the foot go, and move to the ankle.

The route is only a way to begin. Some body scans move part by part, as above. Others sweep through larger areas, or start at the head. You could even spend a whole practice with your hands.

If it doesn’t go as you expect

You feel very little. That’s common, especially at first. You don’t need to invent a feeling. “Nothing much” is something you noticed, so it counts, and you can move on. Some parts, like the hands and the face, are easy to feel. Others, like the shins, are quieter.

It doesn’t relax you. A body scan often becomes relaxing, but you don’t have to make that happen. You may notice tension you can’t release. Let that be something you noticed, not another job to do.

Your mind wanders. It will. When you notice you’ve been thinking, go back to the last part you remember. There’s no need to start again from the feet. Noticing that you wandered is part of the practice, not a failure. There’s more on this in Meditation for beginners.

You fall asleep. A body scan lying in bed often ends in sleep. If you want to stay awake, sit up and keep your eyes open. Keep a little light in the room, and choose a time earlier in the day.

You have pain somewhere. You don’t have to stay with anything that hurts. You can rest your attention near it, or move past it.

Paying attention to your body is uncomfortable. For some people, especially after trauma, close attention to the body can bring up more than it settles. Keep your eyes open if that helps. Rest your attention on the sounds around you, or on a part that feels neutral, like your hands. Skip any part you like, and stop whenever you need to. If it’s often hard, a trauma-informed therapist can help.

For sleep, or for staying awake

The same practice can do two different jobs. Lying in bed at night, a slow body scan helps you let go, and you may fall asleep partway through. Night Weight works this way. It hands your body to the bed, part by part, starting from the feet, then leaves you with rain and music. Sitting up in the day, a body scan helps you arrive in your body and stay alert. Here, in Your Body moves from your feet to the crown of your head. It finds one steady place, and rests in your body as a whole. For more on sleep, see Sleep meditation.

What the research says

The body scan is usually studied as one part of a larger program, so it’s hard to say what it does on its own. A 2022 review gathered 14 trials that tested a body scan by itself. Compared with doing nothing, it made a small difference to how mindful people felt. The studies were of low quality and varied a lot. The authors concluded that a body scan alone isn’t enough to improve health. One small study from 2017 found something narrower. People who did a 20-minute body scan every day for eight weeks got better at sensing their own heartbeat. So try a body scan for what it is, a way of spending time with your body, rather than as a treatment.

In these meditations

Here, in Your Body, a body scan from the feet to the crown. It adds a small cue to come back to later: a hand on the chest and the word Here.
Night Weight, a body scan for falling asleep, with no wake-up at the end.
Quietly Ripe gathers your attention slowly up through the body, to the middle of the forehead.
All of The Body, in one playlist.