The Micro-Motor Body Scan: A Somatic Vipassana Practice
Updated: Sep 9
Somatic practice works with our body's own intelligence - attention, sensation and movement - as a doorway to Vipassana insight and awake awareness. The Micro-Motor Body Scan is the practice Vipassana at Home uses to deepen somatic attention, the first of the three stages of the Somatic Insight Training.
The Micro-Motor Scan is inspired by the Body-Scanning Vipassana meditation practice in the tradition of S.N. Goenka where meditators spend many hours moving their attention systematically through the body. More and more of sensory experience opens up and becomes available and seen with equanimity. This helps bring to the surface unconscious patterns of holding, tensing, ignoring or reacting that manifest as physical sensations or blind spots. This sensory awareness is slowly integrated from our meditation into our way of life. The Micro-Motor Scan is also inspired by the subtle movements often found in somatic practice such as those explored through Butoh dance - a Japanese theatre that works with extremly subtle, slow movement, Body-Mind Centering (BMC) - a system of somatic practice working with experiencing anatomy and developmental movement Feldenkrais - where awareness is cultivated through micro-movement and Qi Gung - where micro-adjustments and micro-releases help to allow a freer flow of Qi - life force energy in the body.
What if we can systematically work with micro-movement to allow us to access and open deeper and deeper layers of bodily sensation, feeling and movement?
Our conscious experience of sensations has many layers ranging from gross (obvious, solid, coarse) to subtle (fine-grained, vibratory, light).
From solidified feelings - often experienced as tension - and completely blind or numb areas where our mind has learnt to block out sensory awareness due to pain or subconscious unwillingness to feel sensation.
To subtler and subtler layers of sensation down to the cellular level. A vibratory aliveness - what the Buddha called rupa-kalapa - the smallest experiential sub-atomic unit of matter. What BMC calls cellular breathing. The felt sense that our cells are movement of expansion & contraction and all other forms of movement and sensation are built on that base layer. Daoists name it the flow of Qi and the sense of gross, blocked sensations, Zhi.
The phenomenon of stagnation (Zhi) occurs precisely because the act of grasping disrupts the fluid, pre-reflective state of the body
Access to these subtler sensations can be opened through subtle intentional movement and micro-releases. Movement that helps to not sub-consciously 'hold' the body into stillness that we often impose from the mind "top-down.
Rather, letting the vivid, alive stillness arise from the bottom-up - from sensations themselves. We allow the material of the body to move in the way it wants to - trusting the self-organising intelligence and the nervous system to release. Sometimes through yawning, sighing, twitching, burping and digesting, or spontaneous deep breaths. This allows the system to self-regulate, letting a deeper ease and calm abiding emerge as we see sensations clearer and cleaner and allow the body, in its own pace to come to a deep silence, stillness and awake awareness.
From Micro-Motor to Wisdom
More and more, the sensations and movements are noticed to be self-changing, continuously moving, and we see how physical gripping, clenching at subtler and subtler layers is felt tension and resistance in the body-mind. What Vipassana meditation names the three characteristics of experience. And more space opens up - an inherent spaciousness in all sensory and motor experience - what later Buddhism calls Shunyata - Emptiness becomes more accessible as an experience.
This awareness of micro-sensations and micro-movement can be extended into daily life where thoughts, interactions with others, emotional movements, environments and the rhythms of life reveal themselves as subtle or gross movements. Feeling them with awareness, equanimity and spaciousness supports tolerance and love in our life.
Principles of the Micro-Motor Scan
Let sensations move. Let micro-movement come from within the sensations, from within the tissues themselves rather than being directed from the top-down or from the outside.
Listening. The foundation for micro-movement is listening to the sensations. This allows the movement to be discovered rather than imposed, explored rather than executed.
Tension masks Sensations. Physical or mental tension will prevent subtler sensations to be felt and subtler movements to be accessible. Mental tension in the form of grasping, holding, tightening or aversion will manifest as inaccessibility to sensations and micro-movements. Invite softness and release in the micro-movements.
Alternate periods of moving with periods of resting. Cycles of activation and listening in rest allows us not to get caught in habitual movement and open up both the sensory and motor sides of movement. Rest gives us access to deeper and subtler sensations and movement helps us connect to areas and liberate them from holding.
Play with the threshhold of perceivable movement. Allowing micro-movements to get subtler and subtler, perhaps being all but invisible.
Any movement you can feel is a real movement. You might not be able to tell from the outisd eyou are moving, but you can feel something moving deep inside. That is already a movement.
Dont be limited by your current image of the body. We have subconscious imagery of our bodies - perhaps from something anatomical we learnt in the past, or the way we saw our bodies moving from the outside. Letting those go and allowing new, intuitive imagery to arise or playing with new imagery helps to open up new movements and gives us access to other layers of sensations.
Movement is not just musco-skeletal. We often think of movement as happening in our muscles and joints. But this reduces movement to pure mechanics and engineering. Allowing perceived movement to be subtler and in counter-intuitive places such as our brain, our organs, or outside of our body helps open up other layers of sensations and movement - energetical, emotional, imaginary and attentional that make up our present-moment experience. Movement of Mind is also Movement of the Body.
Vipassana at Home is curious to integrate somatic practice with Vipassana Meditation
Both stillness and moving meditation have insights to teach us. In stillness, a deeper access to emptiness, awareness and the subtle movements of mind. In movement, the integration of the breathing, living and embodied. I think this quote by BMC founder Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen illustrates this Body-Mind relationship well:
The mind is like the wind and the body like the sand: if you want to know how the wind is blowing , you can look at the sand.
In my experience, it's helpful to work both passively - "resting with experience as it is," and actively - through giving permission for self-organising movements and intentionally working with unifying and unblocking energy through micro-movement.
I am curious to let both of these areas inform each other - how movement can open and give us a deeper, fluid access to awakened silence and spaciousness and how stillness can help us move through this life with more ease, openness and awakeness.
Most of all, this matches my own need to integrate and re-associate with my body. To allow my practice to be embodied and include my whole being into a deep, authentic and spontaneous expression.
The Somatic Insight Training, starting on October 3rd, is my first big attempt at this bridging.
Comments