Okay, but really, I loathe body scans in meditation. There’s no variation I can sense between sessions. I’ve read that you can get physical signals that give you more information about your state than mental signals alone can, and this is why it’s useful, but I can’t feel anything. I do get tightness in my chest/stomach when I’m very anxious, there’s a certain way my ADD meds make my torso feel when they kick in, but otherwise nothing in day to day life. I feel like I’m being had when I have to try to listen to my knees, when I can barely sense that I have knees when I’m sitting still. (I guess I could take this as an opportunity to control my anger? I get reliably angry! It’s like being told to imagine “what if red is actually green” for ten minutes!)
I don’t know what % I should believe “I’ll likely unlock something after N months of trying, I should keep doing it” (since many people seem to find it very valuable, and write about meditation assuming the reader can get it) and what % I should believe “I am a person who doesn’t get physical signals in the way meditation teachers describe”.
I’ve been trying this on and off for over a year, probably ~20 sessions totaling 10 minutes each.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, because I’ve been reading The Body Keeps The Score which is all about this kind of thing. I have mostly the same experience as you.
One possibility is that you’re not the kind of person who needs this. TBKTS kind of suggests there are two ways of getting no signal from your body. The first way is being so traumatized you’re completely numb. The second way is being so healthy that your mind and body communicate successfully on a background level, and your body doesn’t have a backlog of crises to shove at you as soon as it feels like you’re paying attention. I know people who, for example, have no idea that they’re hungry or thirsty or tired or sore or so on until someone reminds them to check their body, and then they think something like “Oh, I’m starving, I guess that’s why I’ve been miserable the past five hours”. This isn’t at all my experience - I just instantly notice I’m hungry and then decide whether or not to eat. My guess is this is a combination of genetics, trauma history, and Mysterious Factors. Maybe those other people need body scans.
But on the other hand I know that people say eg dancers are “really in touch with their body”, and I’m definitely not graceful or anything like that, so maybe there’s another level of being in touch with your body which I haven’t achieved, and if I did achieve it body scans would feel meaningful to me. But I think this is probably something different, so I’m not sure.
FWIW, I can attest that e.g. learning climbing as a couch potato nerd does interesting things to your body awareness - I wasn’t all that much aware I even had a body most of the time, before. Solving puzzles with center of mass, friction and muscle tension as your tools is a really quick way to make your mind pay attention. I’ve heard advanced yoga practicioners can feel the location of their every vertebra - sounds ridiculous but maybe?
This may be far more straightforward than you think - you’re not using your body much so your kinesthethic sense is underdeveloped. Not noticing hunger etc. seems more like a perceptual filter / sensation intensity thing. People I’ve known who forget to eat are just really prone to hyperfocus.
![victoriousvocabulary:
“ MEDIATOR
[noun]
a person who mediates, especially between parties at variance; reconciliator; peace maker.
Etymology: from Late Latin mediātiō, perhaps via Middle French mediation/mediacion) from mediārī, “intervene”, from...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/530c81d4113fe0e2199917be04e737b2/tumblr_oeuyxy97J61r47bczo1_500.jpg)
