Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

yourself that "you," whoever you are, are not just a
resident of your head.
You can also focus on different areas in either a free-
flowing or a more systematic way when practicing
meditation lying down. We introduce the people in our
clinic to lying-down meditation in the form of a forty-
five-minute body scan. Not everybody can sit for
forty-five minutes right away but anybody can do the
body scan. All you need to do is lie here and feel
different regions of your body and then let go of them.
The body scan is systematic in the sense that we
move through the various regions of the body in a
particular order. But there is no one way to do it. It
could be done scanning from head to feet or from feet
to head or from side to side for that matter.
One way to practice is to inwardly direct your breath
in to and out from the various regions of your body as
if you could breathe right in to your toes or your knee,
or your ear, and breathe out "from" those places.
When you feel ready, on an outbreath you just let go
of that region, allowing/inviting it to dissolve in your
mind's eye (your imagination) as the muscles
themselves let go and you drop into stillness and
open awareness before moving on and connecting
with the next region of the body, which you would