Let’s start with an exercise. You’ll find a guided version at Two Ways a Body-Scan Feels, but let’s do the brief version for now:

Close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths to clear yourself.

Now begin a body scan, starting with the feet. Feel your toes; your feet; your ankles... move upward gradually, moving on each time you can really feel an area.

Continue this only for 3-5 minutes, just long enough to get a feel for it. After you return, continue reading.

Now let's take a moment and notice something. There are two basic ways to do the exercise we just did:

1. You can "be a head-self," reaching out to check in on different parts of the body. The seat of awareness is the head, and everything is felt by extending that seat of awareness to touch other areas. Or,
2. Each area of the body can come into its own awareness. The foot becomes aware of itself, without the head's involvement. The thighs bloom into their own vivid life, without the "Manager" from the head checking in. The hands step into their own vibrant life as hands.

Which one feels more like the way you did it automatically? If you're like 95% of us, you started out with option 1. For a lot of people, option 2 sounds maybe possible, but a bit outside of their normal experience. For some others, option 2 sounds like gibberish—maybe like gibberish they'd really like to understand, but can't find a hand on yet.

Take another couple minutes—maybe start with an area of the body that already feels quite accessible, quite alive. Allow it to bloom into awareness. Let it wake up to its own experience. Let it turn up the volume, increase the space that's open to it in your awareness. This isn't something you're doing, it's something you're allowing, something you're noticing as it happens. Let it happen.

This exercise is simple, but it’s the beginning of something that can change your life.

When we open to the experience of the body, allowing everything in that experience to present itself to us, we are making a radical turn—a turn away from the filtered, sanitized version of experience that the head-self allows to trickle into our awareness; a turn towards the unknown and unexpected.

Real transformation only comes from the unexpected; anything else is merely change.

SR2. Two ways.mp4

please see note on videos; this video covers the same material as the text, and I suggest you revisit it later to review the same material in a fresh way

<aside> 🎯 This exercise is a simple way to open up to the experience of the body, allowing everything in that experience to present itself to us. This is the first step towards a real transformation of our relationship with the body. There are two ways to do a bodyscan: either by "being a head-self" or by allowing each area of the body to come into its own awareness.

</aside>

To dive deeper into why this simple move is so revolutionary, let’s continue to our next entryway.

Next: 3. Finding Spontaneity