Week Two

Last week you found your flashlight.

Now, we’re going to move it.

What to Focus On This Week

The target of your attention in this week’s practice is body sensations. The workout is not only keeping the flashlight steady, but also moving it—your focus becomes something you smoothly sweep through the body. Notice that this week’s schedule is still asking you to continue with your basic Find Your Flashlight practice, every other day. What we’ve found through our work with various cohorts is that interleaving the practices in this way is the most effective way to build that core attentional strength.

Find Your Flashlight is going to be a lifelong practice—you don’t “progress” past it. You keep expanding this practice—noticing more-nuanced changes in your moment-to-moment experience; the arising of an emotion, sensation, or thought; the urge to shift away; the feeling of returning back. The granularity will also increase the more you practice. It will strengthen your capacity to perform and benefit from the other practices as well; meanwhile, the other practices will inform this one. You may feel more moments of insight—aha! moments when you suddenly feel a sense of knowing, understanding, or perceiving something that had previously eluded you. This could be about a mental habit you have, or a challenge in a relationship, or a more fundamental understanding of the nature of things (for example, impermanence and interdependence).

What Week Two Might Feel Like

Be aware that when you introduce the Body Scan, you may notice more pain and discomfort in the body. This can seem like a downside at first, and in fact we wondered exactly this with soldiers: Why do we want to make them more aware of discomfort and pain when they have to go out and experience it? But more knowledge of the body translates into greater capacity to act to intervene with anything you notice going on. (Foot pain, when attended to, could signal a soldier to notice that she needs more padding in her boot. This can be the difference between completing a fifty-mile hike successfully versus spraining her foot.) You will also notice that your story about the pain may keep the pain around for longer or with more intensity. You’ll be able to parse the monolithic experience of pain, separating it into undulating shifts of sensations—tightening, piercing, warmth, and so on. The pain will begin to be seen as more of a constellation, and the stories about physical sensations may quiet, as you notice the mind-wandering and return back to the raw data of the physical sensations.

Frequently Experienced Challenges

Some people find it challenging to perform the Body Scan on their own. If you find it difficult or distracting to guide yourself through it, seek out guidance, such as a recording to follow.

And, watch out for a feeling of “chasing the high.” You might have had a couple really good, successful-feeling sessions last week. Don’t let yourself fall into this striving or chasing mode. Mindfulness practice as attention training won’t look (or feel) like exponential upward improvement. Often, “success” doesn’t look like success. A session that feels like a failure was probably a great workout for your brain.

How Week Two Skills Will Show Up in Your Life

Whenever anything happens—at work, at home, wherever you are—there’s a whole constellation of sensations that show up in the body. Stress, anxiety, elation, fear, sadness, excitement—they each have associated physical sensations. You’ll be noticing this more and more. This means that you can take action as you tap into these sensations, notice them quickly, and understand what they mean. For example: I know that I’ve gotten a lot better at realizing the sensations that begin to build when worry sets in. I feel it first in my chest, but then I check in with my jaw, which I usually find I’ve been clenching. With this awareness, I can intentionally relax my jaw and pay attention to the issue causing the worry, or at least acknowledge that I’ve gotten lost in a simulation, and then be able to engage with the next moment in the best way. These are micro-interventions that can help us course-correct as we become more attuned to our minds and bodies.

Integrate the Body Scan into your day. Remember: it takes zero minutes to add this into a task you might otherwise perform mindlessly. Do the Body Scan in the shower as you wash from head to toe, or as you just step in and feel the water washing over you. Don’t miss it.