It is Monday again and I didn't do my homework. I feel like an eleven year old girl who is formulating in her head how she will explain this to the teacher. I already have a list of really good reasons prepared.
The homework though is for my Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction class. You heard me right. The homework that I did not do is for stress reduction. I am a full -time, married working mom and I avoided practices that would aid me in reducing stress. How do I explain this?
Well, I could tell you that the link the teacher sent us to do the Body Scan practice would not open. I could tell you I don't have a computer at home right now to download the practice onto. Both are true. Both are part of my prepared speech for my teacher tonight when we reconvene and she asks: "did you do your homework?"
If I were to be more honest though, meaning, if I were to speak about the underlying truth of me versus the superficial truth about links and computers, I'd say I experienced a surprising aversion to the whole assignment of spending 30-45 minutes holding my awareness on all the different parts of my body while laying in stillness.
Before I started this class I already had been meditating on a regular basis for several years. I had also been doing yoga classes off and on for well over a decade and more recently doing a regular home practice too. In this MBSR class I will be deepening my meditation and yoga practices too. Great. No problem. Bring on the homework. But body awareness? Body awareness without movement to distract me with the athleticism of balancing in eagle pose. Mindfulness that is not focused on my over-active mind? This is hard for me.
My colleague lent me her copy of the book "Full Catastrophe Living" by Jon Kabat Zinn in preparation for this class. This book is kind of an adjunct if you will to the class itself and the MBSR research being done at UMASS by Dr. Kabat Zinn. In this book he writes about "being in your body" by practicing the body scan meditation. He says, "it is amazing to me that we can be simultaneously completely preoccupied with the appearance of our own body and at the same time completely out of touch with it as well." Yeah, that would be me all right.
Look at me even right now! I am reading & writing about the body scan rather than actually doing the body scan. I have successfully implemented my favorite defense mechanism of all: intellectualizing. This defense mechanism is an 'ol go-to behavior to avoid my vulnerabilities...Have you ever heard of people who are detached from their bodies be described as "neck up" people? That is me they are talking about.
But what am I so afraid of in vulnerability? What is it I fear? What would happen if I were to lay in stillness and just notice my body?Not try to change it. Improve it. Label it. Criticize it. Love it. Just let my body be. Exactly as it is.
According to Dr. Kabat Zinn "by the time we have completed the body scan, it can feel as if the entire body has dropped away or has become transparent, as if its substance were in some way erased. It can feel as if there is nothing but breath flowing freely across all the boundaries of the body...in an awareness that may have by this point gone beyond body altogether."
To me, this describes surrender. Letting go. Not using my mind and intellect to sustain the illusion of keeping me safe by constantly surveying and responding to my surroundings. And that is scary to me. To not be in complete control. To not allow my Self or Ego, that took me a long time to shape and come to terms with, be the Alpha. To take my hands off the wheel and begin to trust again. Ah yes, this is vulnerability, and this is scary.
The body scan meditation forces me to lead with a part of myself I am less familiar with, my body. A part of me that I am less confident in and therefore less willing to allow a space of faith to guide me.
Today I ask myself: what would it mean to surrender to a place of vulnerability? Where in your life can you allow the less confident parts of yourself steer the ship?
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