The Micro-Motor Body Scan: A Somatic Vipassana Practice

Somatic practice works with the body's own intelligence - attention, sensation and movement - as a doorway into awareness. The Micro-Motor Body Scan is the practice I use to work with somatic attention, the first of the three stages behind the Somatic Insight Training.

The Micro-motor scan is inspired by deep vipassana meditation practice in the tradition of S.N. Goenka where we spend many hours moving the attention systematically through the body until we integrate more and more of sensory experience into our meditation and way of life. It is also inspired by the subtle movements often found in somatic practice that I explored through Butoh dance, Body-Mind Centering, Feldenkrais and Qi Gung.

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 to subtle. From solidified feelings - often experienced as tension - to completely blind or numb areas where our mind has learnt to block out sensory awareness due to pain or unwillingness to feel. To subtler and subtler layers of sensation down to the cellular level. A vibratory aliveness - what the Buddha called rupa-kalapa - the smallest sub-atomic unit of matter. What Body-Mind-Centering calls cellular breathing. The felt sense that our cells are movement and all other forms of movement and sensation grow from that base layer. Tibetan Buddhism also calls this the subtle body, and Daoists call it the flow of Qi.

Access to these subtler sensations can often be helped along through subtle intentional movement. Movement that helps to not artificially 'freeze' the body into stillness that we often impose on the body from the mind rather than letting the vivid, alive stillness arise from sensations. We allow the tissues to move in the ways they want to, and the nervous system to release, through yawning, sighing, twitching, burping and digesting, or spontaneous deep breaths. This allows the nervous system to self-regulate, letting a deeper ease and calm abiding emerge as we see sensations clearer and clearer.

From Micro-Motor to Wisdom

More and more, the sensations and movements are noticed to be self-changing, continuously moving, and we see how gripping, clenching at subtler and subtler layers is 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.

This awareness of micro-sensations and micro-movement is of course extended into daily life where thoughts, interactions with others, emotional movements, environments and the rhythms of life change the nature of these. Feeling them with awareness, equanimity and spaciousness supports tolerance and love.

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.

In my experience, it's helpful to work both passively and actively - passively, "resting with experience as it is," and actively, through giving permission for self-organising movements and intentionally working with unifying and unblocking energy.

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 the 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 - a course that has been brewing for some years.