body scan

What Does It Mean to “Check in With Yourself”?

If you do guided meditations or yoga, you are bound to be instructed to “check in with yourself” at some point. Most commonly, teachers use this as a starting point for a mind-body practice because it makes sense to start the practice where you are. The only problem is, of course, that not all teachers offer additional guidance to tell us how to check in with ourselves. This post is offered to clear up that mystery.

For those who know about interoceptive awareness, checking in with yourself may be the norm. But if you have never heard the word “interoceptive” before, then some additional explanation may be needed. The term interoceptive means awareness of your inner experience. While this might be second nature to many of us, it may feel weird and new to those of us accustomed to living busy and worldly lives. When someone instructs you to “check in with yourself”, they are telling you to activate and note your interoceptive awareness.

This gives you a general idea about how to begin checking in with yourself, but you may still need to know specifically where to focus. Ideally, when you check in with yourself, you can scan your mental, emotional, and physical states. First, this would require a pause and then a simple acknowledgement of the physical sensations, emotions, and thoughts that may arise for you.

Now, if you are new to this process, it may be challenging at first to interpret what you note in your interoceptive awareness. You may not immediately be able to put words to sensations or clearly identify all emotions. That’s okay. The point isn’t to self-diagnose on a deep level, but instead just to touch in with your inner experience and see what’s there. If you stay open-minded and make the practice of checking in a habit, you’ll soon notice patterns that will help you understand more about what your mind, body, and emotions are telling you.

Why is checking in important? If you are using it at the start of your meditation or yoga practice, it may help you understand what kind of practice you need. Do you need a rigorous practice or a gentle one? Do you need to stretch yourself or give yourself a break? Do you need a specific focal point or can you just rest in open experience? When you can more regularly note where you are, you are more likely to give yourself what you need and have a better experience with practice.

In much the same way, making a habit of checking in with yourself throughout your day is a great way to manage your energy levels and needs so you can be proactive about self-care. This may help you head off emotional reactivity caused by fatigue or hunger or notice the signs of loneliness, anxiety or growing anger. You can do this by briefly pausing for a few breaths, scanning through your body, asking yourself “how do I feel,” and listening to what arises.

My favorite way to check in with myself is first to look for rushing or pushing forward. If I notice it, I try to pause or intentionally slow down. Then I do a quick body sweep by scanning for sensations in the most emotionally reactive parts of my body: eyes, brow, jaw, neck, shoulders, hips, and hands. If there’s tension, I scan my mind and emotions for clues about what’s going on with me. This usually takes about twenty to thirty seconds at most but it’s enough time to change the way I’m relating to my day and myself.

The important thing about checking in with yourself, however, is not the procedure you follow but the habit of checking in regularly. One of the reasons that mindfulness practices can be so transformational is that they create mental space to check in with your inner experience regularly. Now you know what the teachers mean when they tell you to “check in with yourself” at the beginning of your guided meditation or yoga practice. You can now use these steps to check in with yourself to improve your meditation experience and bring more awareness to your life.

If you want to learn more about the body sweep technique mentioned in this post, check out this two-minute video from our YouTube channel:

Want to learn more about mindfulness and compassion? Check out my new book, How to Be a Badass Lawyer, for a simple guide to creating a meditation practice of your own in 30 days. And to share mindfulness with your little one, check out my new children’s book, Mommy Needs a Minute.

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Companion Guided Meditations from How to Be a Badass Lawyer

It’s World Meditation Day today, a day to raise awareness about the practice of meditation and its benefits. To honor the day, I’m sharing four new guided meditations with a variety of practices and a range of times. These meditations are the recorded companions to the practices offered in my book, How to Be a Badass Lawyer.

As the book explains in more detail, these practices are offered to help you build a regular meditation practice. They offer a variety of practices so that, over time, you can better understand your body, mind, and emotions. With this foundation, you should have the basic skills needed to do the dynamic and transformational practice of loving-kindness. In addition, they range in time so that you can gradually build up your tolerance for meditation practice.

Keep reading to learn more about and try each practice.

Breath Focus Practice

Most meditation practitioners and teachers start with the breath and there’s good reason for that. It’s always with you and the breath is the link between body and mind that can reliably help you calm down. This means that getting comfortable with your breath and being able to use it as a tool is not just helpful as a resource for meditation practice but also a good tool for life. If you need help finding your breath, read more here.

But if you are ready to go, check out this 5-minute practice to get started.

One thing that can get overlooked when it comes to mindfulness is that the body is an essential part. Mindfulness of thoughts is only one aspect, but the body is a link that can help us cultivate awareness even of thoughts. Why? Because contemporary life invites us so frequently to reside in our heads and ignore our bodies.

Body scan is a practice that can help us get reacquainted with our bodies. It is a simple practice that many consider deeply relaxing. You systematically feel the sensations in the body. This is a practice that can help you understand how to take better care of your body (i.e. recognizing signs of stress or physical needs), relax and rest, and understand your emotions better.

To try this 10-minute practice, check it out here.

Joy Practice

Now, I bet you are wondering why I would tell you to practice joy. I have good reason. Did you know that, from a stress standpoint, the body doesn’t necessarily differentiate between what we consider positive emotions versus negative emotions? Thus, if we get more understanding and tolerance for positive emotions, we can understand all of our emotions better.

For many lawyers and professionals, though, positive emotions are the easiest ones to overlook. We are busy and expect good results so we may gloss over accomplishments and peaceful times because we are habituated to handle crisis situations. When we focus on joy, we heal and nourish ourselves and we cultivate emotional understanding at the same time.

Try this 15-minute practice, which incorporates breath and body work as well here.

Loving-Kindness

The final practice in the book is my favorite: loving-kindness. It is a practice where meditators focus on the body, usually the area around the heart, and wish others well. Though you may not think wishing will do a lot, research says otherwise. This practice is associated with reduced stress, improved relationships, and may even lead to more ethical conduct.

You can modify the practice to support your needs and goals and I have a guide here that can help you do that. This 20-minute practice, however, includes the traditional people, groups, and phrases. You can check it out here.

To learn more about the practices and how they fit together, check out my book, How to Be a Badass Lawyer. Good luck with the practices and please reach out if you have any questions.

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What Is Body Scan Meditation and Why Should Lawyers Try It?

When people think of meditation, they typically think of the breath as the focal point. But in truth, meditation can use almost any focal point and the focal point doesn’t necessarily have to be a singular, stagnant object. One of the most beneficial practices that I incorporate in my routine is the body scan. With this practice, the focus is on the sensations in the whole body, rather than exclusively focusing on the breath. Traditionally, this practice flows systemically through the body, flowing from one part or region of the body into the next.

Most commonly, body scan meditations start at the crown of the head and proceed down to other parts of the body until you reach the feet and toes. There are, of course, many potential methods and starting points for body scans. For instance, you could start with the toes and work up or do a body scan that focuses on the chakras or plexuses along the spine. Regardless of the particular method you try, the object of a body scan meditation is to feel the sensations in the body and notice what you feel, rather than to think about the body.

Body scan meditation can sometimes feel more manageable to new meditators because the practice is more active than breath practice. Because the focus of body scan is to flow through the body, the mind has to work a bit more to stay focused on the sensations in the body. For this reason, it may not seem as hard to keep the mind engaged with the focal point as it does in the early phases of learning breath practice. In addition, in my experience, getting into the body is a great (perhaps the best) way to get out of your head. It is for this reason that resting in sensations during a body scan can be deeply relaxing even to new meditators and after relatively short periods of time.

Body scan meditations are very useful for attorneys because they remind us to pay attention to and take care of our bodies. In law school, we learn to emphasize rationality in making decisions for our clients. While separating fact from emotion is critical, we lawyers are still human beings with human bodies. To do our best for our clients, we need to understand and respect the limitations of our own bodies so we can fulfill our responsibility to our clients. As I’ve written before, emotions are sensations in the body, so body scan practices may also have the incidental benefit of building emotional intelligence and tolerance when powerful emotions arise.

Even outside of emotions, however, the body awareness that body scan practice engenders can have more fundamental benefits for lawyers and professionals. Some of the most common bodily issues that can impede us from doing our best work are represented in the acronym HALT, which stands for hungry, angry, lonely, tired. These symptoms are fundamental to the human condition, but in our fast-paced world it is easy to skip lunch, push our emotions to the side, miss out on social opportunities, and deprive ourselves of sleep.

Body scan meditations are excellent for lawyers because they remind us that we are not merely brains filled with legal strategy, but people who must be fed, rested, and cared for. If you practice body scan meditation, you will develop the skills to notice the symptoms of various conditions and emotions in your body in the early and more subtle stages before they get to the point where they affect your performance, outlook, or demeanor. These skills are not only necessary to performing our responsibilities as lawyers, but they are also beneficial for anyone who wants to be a top performer in a high-stakes environment.

Finally, body scan is building block to support further growth in your meditation practice or just when dealing with the difficulties of life. When you start a meditation practice, it can seem like the focal point is the object of practice. As your practice advances, you may learn, however, that the focal point is really a tool. In other words, the point of practice is not just to focus on the breath or the sensations of the body. It is, instead, to build the skill of resting with the breath or the body.

If you can learn to do this with body scan practice, then you have one more tool at your disposal when meditation or life throws you curve balls. For example, perhaps troubling thoughts or overwhelming emotions come up during your practice. A meditator proficient in body scan might be able to shift focus to a less reactive part of the body, such as the feet, to rest from the experience until they find enough stability and calm to proceed with normal practice. You could also do this in life, if for instance you have tense meeting with opposing counsel and need to keep your cool.

In short, body scan is a simple practice to learn and may be more accessible to new meditators than other styles of practice. It offers many benefits that support a meditation practice and build coping skills for life. Lawyers in particular could stand to benefit from the practice, so give it a try.

Do you want to try body scan meditation? Check out our meditations that incorporate body scan techniques.

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