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Body scan and body awareness

Practice Library

Body scan and body awareness

20 teachings in the library cover this practice.

  • Guided Meditation - Befriending Anxiety David Oromith · 16 minutes · recorded November 24, 2025

    A low-level worry or grievance is invited to the surface, whatever shouts loudest, and located in the body as a felt sense, with the palm of the right hand over the chest to signify kindness. You then breathe space around the feeling with a deep in breath, neither suppressing nor indulging it, before warmth and compassion are brought in, supporting yourself as you would a friend. It closes with slow breathing, in for five and out for seven.

  • Guided Meditation - Sitting with a Difficult Emotion as a Hurting Friend David Oromith · 21 minutes · recorded October 26, 2025

    A recent worry or difficult emotion is brought up from under the surface and held as if it were a hurting friend. David asks for no fixing and no dialogue, only hello. We follow how it maps across the body, a swirling, a tightening, a pressure, then the narratives and memories, listened to rather than believed. When the mind starts problem solving, the exhale lengthens. It closes on three energetic breaths sighed out through the mouth.

  • D4S1 - The Dzogchen Approach to Mindfulness of Breathing David Oromith · 86 minutes · recorded August 21, 2025

    The last of the breathing methods: we move attention off the sensations of the body and rest in awareness itself, noting only whether the breath is long or short. David takes it back to the Buddha's own instruction for mindfulness of breathing, to go to a forest, sit at the foot of a tree or find an empty room, sit with the back straight and establish mindfulness in front of you, and sets that beside the Dzogchen teaching of releasing awareness into the space ahead, eyes open, with no object of focus at all.

  • D1S2 - Body Scan: The One Practice That Is Only About Rest David Oromith · 30 minutes · recorded August 18, 2025

    The outlier of all the practices, in that it is not part of any sequence: a guided body scan that is really just about rest, with shavasana offered as a good posture for relaxation. David moves attention from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet, asking for the tactile sensations themselves rather than a mental image or map of the body, and says this is the only one where it may be all right to have a little nap at the end.

  • Guided Meditation - Mindfulness of the Body David Oromith · 22 minutes · recorded October 31, 2024

    Bare attention on the whole field of bodily sensation, then a close inspection of it element by element: firmness, moisture, warmth, movement. Of each one David asks whether anything in it is stable, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant from its own side, and whether anything says it is yours.

  • Session 1 - Mindfulness of the Body David Oromith · 91 minutes · recorded October 31, 2024

    This first session on mindfulness of the body opens with an extended teaching, tracing how the Buddha added inquiry to shamatha to found vipassana, and a cup shows how perception differs from concepts we add on top. In the body scan that follows, we take attention to sensations of solidity, moisture, temperature and motion, asking whether each is permanent, pleasant and truly ours. Afterwards the group discusses separating pain from sensation, and how calling something mine builds a false sense of ownership.

  • Reducing Attachment Whilst Still Enjoying Hedonic Happiness David Oromith · 30 minutes · recorded February 4, 2024

    In the body scan meditation, good for relaxation and well suited to lying down, we move attention slowly through the whole body. David talks about the difference between worldly happiness, which is real and fine to enjoy, and the lasting well-being that comes only from within. He shares a story of holding a bird loosely on an open palm rather than gripping it in a fist, showing how to enjoy life's pleasures without grasping at them, in the world but not of it.

  • D1S3 - Teaching the Four Factors Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 92 minutes · recorded January 6, 2024

    A body scan run in reverse opens the session, then loving kindness extended from oneself to a benefactor, a friend, a stranger and all beings. Rejoicing in what is virtuous joins every practice from here on. Tenpa places the practice within the three vehicles and reads the short Mahayana sutra Teaching the Four Factors, in which the Buddha gives Maitreya the four opponent powers of regret, remedy, resolve and reliance. Regret is practical, not moralistic; guilt concludes that we are bad people.

  • Interdependence in Difficult Circumstances David Oromith · 35 minutes · recorded October 29, 2023

    In the body scan we move attention through the whole body, before David talks about interdependence, using the familiar image of a cup of coffee and the vast, uncountable web of people behind it. He explains why blaming a single cause, a late bus, a slow computer, a frozen laptop, misses the many conditions that actually produced a difficult situation, and why a broader view, looking from every angle as the Dalai Lama suggests, helps us respond with less anger and more realism.

  • D1S3 - Stillness, Silence and Spaciousness Michael Lobsang Tenpa · 61 minutes · recorded August 25, 2023

    Two shamatha practices to make loving kindness possible. The first settles the body in relaxation, stillness and vigilance, and closes with a reverse body scan. Between them Michael Lobsang Tenpa passes on Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's three pillars, stillness for the body, silence for the speech, spaciousness for the mind. The second is mindfulness of breathing, attended to as tactile waves moving through the whole body.

  • Cultivating Wholesome Emotions David Oromith · 30 minutes · recorded January 8, 2023

    The session opens with a body scan to settle the room into stillness, before we rest attention on the breath, with counting to hold focus for the twenty minute practice. David talks about deliberately cultivating wholesome states such as love, compassion and joy, not only managing difficult emotions as they arise. Drawing on the Dalai Lama, he explains how love strengthens our immunity to anger, compassion prevents cruelty, and empathetic joy counters jealousy.

  • Failure and Guilt David Oromith · 36 minutes · recorded October 23, 2022

    The meditation this week is soothing and relaxing: we ease tension through a body scan before settling attention at the nostrils with a count to seven. David turns to failure and guilt, building on last week's talk on attachment. He explains that Tibetan has no word for guilt, only one that translates as intelligent regret that decides to do things differently, and offers this as the way through failure without turning it into self-hatred.

  • Acceptance and Seeing Life As Like a River David Oromith · 31 minutes · recorded July 3, 2022

    Five slow breaths and a body scan lead into open awareness, where we welcome whatever arises, sound, sensation or thought, without labelling it good or bad. David develops the image of life as a river, sometimes gentle, sometimes turbulent, always flowing, using his and Manu's own house move as an example. He talks about the difference between accepting the current and fighting it, and finding what choice remains when nothing else can change.

  • Making Meditation a Simple Priority David Oromith · 27 minutes · recorded January 9, 2022

    We settle into stillness with a body scan, before resting our attention on the natural breath, with counting to seven offered for those who find it helpful. David talks about making meditation a daily habit rather than a rescue for panic, comparing it to brushing your teeth: not a cure but psychological hygiene that prevents imbalance from building up in the first place. He suggests simplifying practice to something as easy as noticing the sounds around you whenever it starts to feel like a chore.

  • Guided Meditation - Heartful Presence with Neil Seligman David Oromith · 14 minutes · recorded April 7, 2021

    This is a guided meditation on Heartful Presence with Neil Seligman. This practice helps you tune into the body with loving awareness and notice what is arising in your awareness. In this practice, we explore the energy of the heart through deep listening, focusing on body sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts.

  • Guided Meditation - A Body Scan of Feeling Tone, Pleasant, Unpleasant and Neutral Lama Alan · 25 minutes

    Lama Alan leads a scan of the whole body, moving a field of awareness from the crown through head, arms, torso and legs, noting at each place not the sensation itself but whether it feels pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. You stay still, and when the impulse to shift arises you examine the feeling behind it. The scan then opens to the whole body, where you ask how feelings arise and dissolve, and whether you can attend without grasping or preference.

  • Guided Meditation - Body Scan, Moving a Three-Dimensional Field of Awareness Through the Body Lama Alan · 41 minutes

    Lama Alan moves a field of awareness slowly through the whole body, beginning as a small patch at the crown of the head and widening until it is three-dimensional. It travels down the head, arms, torso, legs and out to the toes, stabilising on each in breath and shifting on each out breath. Three faster sweeps follow, then the field opens to illuminate the whole body at once, with nothing added to what is sensed.

  • Summary of Practice Glen Svensson · 81 minutes

    The last session draws the four modules together and turns to how to integrate the practice into daily life: shamatha first thing and vipashyana after it, the body scan for impermanence, brief moments of questioning appearances, and an evening review of one negative thing done, one positive thing done, and one thing received. In the guided loving kindness practice we work outwards from a sphere of light at the heart. Glen Svensson also distinguishes an autonomous self from an inherently existent one.

  • Searching for Self Glen Svensson · 74 minutes

    The body scan returns unguided, at your own speed and in your own sequence. In a second practice we look for a self in the body, in the mind, and in the two together. Glen Svensson then opens the teaching on emptiness by reading Lama Alan Wallace on what is really there: what we know of the world is only appearances to the mind, and even physics, as Heisenberg put it, shows not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

  • Impermanence Glen Svensson · 64 minutes

    The teaching opens and closes with a guided body scan in which we move from the crown of the head to the tips of the toes on one question: is anything in the body stable, or is everything changing moment by moment? Glen Svensson sets out what vipashyana is, why shamatha has to underpin it, and the four distorted views it works on. Impermanence, he argues, is good news, and he gives the image of the kayak of mindfulness on the river of life, rather than grabbing at flowing water.

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