If you get a sense of your abdominal muscles notice if you are breathing into them.
Is the breath moving the muscles in and out?
Can you get a sense of how you feel on the inside of these muscles?
Can you get a sense of how it feels facing outward from these muscles?
And when you get a sense of this front part of the lower abdominal region just clench
your tummy muscles in and then just let them drop.
Notice any reaction.
Then bring your attention up to the upper body.
We've got the muscles of the chest, the pectoral muscles, the breathing muscles and once again
its quite useful just to notice how the breath is moving this part of the body.
When we are stressed out quite often the breathing is up here and it can be a little bit accelerated
and a bit shallow.
When we are relaxed, the breathing can drop into the belly and become much deeper and
slower.
So just take a minute now to notice your upper breathing muscles and to sense the speed of
the breathing, how deep or shallow it is.
When you get a sense of feeling this part of the body I'd like you to take a deep breath
mmm hhhhaaa and then just release it let it come flying out, do it once more, mmmmm hhhaaa
and then allow your breathing to return to normal and just get a sense of how this part
of your body is responding to it.
You may notice the front of your ribcage, you may notice across the back of the ribcage
and the spine.
How far does it feel from your sternum at the front to the back on the chair or on the
couch behind?
Does this feel a long way or a short way?
Then we come to the shoulder muscles.
Its very useful to feel the shape of your muscles.
See if you can feel where your shoulders are.
Do they feel pushed in to the neck?
Do they feel pushed up towards your ears?
Do they feel like they are going straight up towards the ceiling?
Do they feel like they are pushing backwards?
Do they feel hunched and rounded forwards?
Don't worry if you can't feel your shoulders.
A lot of people have a lot of tension in the shoulders and when there is a lot of tension
the body can be very numb.
And as you bring your attention to the shoulders notice how they are.
Notice in particular their position.
That's a really useful thing for the shoulders and then just give them a wriggle, just clench
and relax them by wriggling them and then drop them and let them relax and notice any
more awareness creeping in as you do that.
With your arms can you feel where your arms are?
Are they relaxed by the body on the side or maybe you've got them resting on the body.
See if you can feel the shape of your arms and in particular notice whether you can feel
inside them or not.
Maybe you can feel the inner part of your lower arms much more readily than your upper
arms.
Do you arms feel thin?
Do they feel strong and wide?
Do they feel that sort of thin feeling?
Can you feel the temperature of your arms?
Then I want you clench and relax your arms, you have to use kind of the whole arm and
hand system to clench and relax the muscles.
Then notice once again any reaction or movement.
Then bring your attention to your hands.
Can you feel all the fingers and the thumbs?
Can you feel your palms?
Are they buzzy?
Do they feel that tired nervous frayed feeling?
Do they feel calm smooth and relaxed?
And then just wriggle your fingers stretch your hands and let them relax.
See if you can get a sense of how they react having moved them.
Almost at the end now.
So take your attention to the neck.
Necks are notoriously numb in my experience.
I don't know why this is but a lot of people often feel nothing, they can feel like there
is a gap between the head and the body.
Sometimes people can feel aches and pains there.
Just see if you can get a sense of your neck and how far from the back your neck feels.
Does your neck feel squashed flat or does it feel long and thin?
Can you feel your throat at the front?
If you maybe swallow, can you feel the place that swallows after you have swallowed?
And the general neck shape, if you just move your head a tiny fraction of a millimetre
to one side and then back to the middle and a tiny bit to the other side and then back
to the middle.
With these tiny movements its often much more revealing with the neck.
We are used to looking around very automatically, but if we slow it right down we can often
feel much more of our neck.
Or you can just push your nose down slightly or move your head back, and that's another
way of accessing the neck.
Then we come to the jaw, another place we are used to talking with and moving around
automatically.
So once again its really revealing to notice the jaw with tiny little movements.
So if you just relax the jaw and then open it a tiny bit and then relax it or move it
to one side or the other side but a little bit, that's much better than the way I just
did it, just feeling into your jaw, and then you can just move it around, clench and relax
it and then relax.
What are you left with?
And then finally we've got the muscles of expression.
You can move your nose, twitch your eyes, moves your cheeks around and see if you can
get a sense of the face sitting on the front of the head.
Some people can move their scalp.
I can't do that.
Some people can move their ears.
I can't do that.
All the way through just noticing the feeling that you are left with in the various parts
of the body.
If you can't sleep or if you are struggling with tinnitus I recommend doing this technique
often.
If you don't feel like doing it I wouldn't recommend forcing yourself to do this.
The last thing we want to do is to is to stress ourselves out.
But if you practice this you can expect to feel more and more in detail what's going
on inside.
Its like a voyage of discovery through the felt sense of the body and it can be incredibly
grounding and very very helpful.
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