Awareness of the Body: Reflection

It’s been almost two weeks since I started on the second phase for the course in Maitreyabandhu’s book. This post is a quick reflection on my progress during this phase. What to read more about this phase’s focus (awareness of the body) you can go to my previous post.

In addition to the first week’s commitments for routines, this second phase introduced three new elements into the course: the health audit, body scan, and mindfulness walk.

Health audit

Since I found a nice way to integrate the health audit into my daily to-do list workflow, I maintained a pretty consistent diary of my physical health habits: sleep, being outside, exercise, eating, and drinking (only missing 1 out of 11 entries). Each of them I scored on a 5-point scale as explained in my previous post.

Without going into too much detail, I was quite happy with how I scored on being outside (4) and exercise (3.6), whereas I was surprised how poor I performed on my eating and drinking habits (2.9, and 3.2 respectively). In the upcoming phase, I want to keep maintaining this diary and see if I can get those last two above 3.5. 💪

Being more mindful of my health-habits is a nice addition to my daily workflow. I feel like it makes it easier to understand why I feel a certain way (grumpy, sleepy, etc.) and accept that that’s a consequence of my (lack of) actions. Furthermore, while I always assumed my eating/drinking habits were quite good, this reflection in the end tells me there is still quite some room for improvement.

Mindfulness walking

This didn’t go so well. I found like I had surprisingly little time to go for a walk, and often decided to substitute the ‘mindful walking’ for ‘mindful cycling.’ While that’s better than nothing, I feel like cycling allows for much less ‘deep’ awareness. Because you are participating in traffic quite intensely, you need to keep significant mental bandwidth available for that. Also, the weather being very autumn-ish also didn’t help. 🌧️

For the next phase, I want to set a minimum of 3 mindful walks per week, so that there are at least some deliberate moments to practice. Furthermore, when the weather is rainy, I can (at least in the office) take a mindful walk down-and-up the stairs.

Body scan

I really liked the idea of doing a body scan whenever I get home. However, doing so didn’t prove to be so easy, and often I simply forgot about it since there are so many things that draw my attention as soon as I step through the door (I worked a bit more on the house this weekend, so hopefully this will be less from now).

To make sure I do at least one body scan per day, I will combine it with my 10-minute morning meditation. This is not a substitute for doing a body scan when I get home—that’s still on the table, too.