A Body Scan Meditation Script You Can Read Aloud
Here is a complete body scan meditation script you can read aloud, running about ten minutes at a gentle pace. Invite the person to lie down or sit, guide their attention slowly through the body a region at a time, and leave real silence between the instructions. The words are below and you are welcome to use them exactly as they are. What I want to tell you, though, is that the script is the easy part, and the thing that actually makes a body scan land is something the script cannot give you.
I have been teaching mindfulness for over twenty years and have trained more than 500 teachers since 2013. Almost every new teacher I meet is worried about the wrong thing.
The body scan script
Read this slowly. Slower than feels comfortable. The bracketed notes are for you, not to be read out.
Find a position you can stay in for a while. Lying down is traditional, and sitting is completely fine if lying down isn’t available to you today. Let your arms rest a little away from your sides, and let your legs be uncrossed.
If it feels okay, let your eyes close. If you’d rather keep them open, soften your gaze towards the floor. [three breaths]
We are not here to change anything. We are here to find out what is already going on. So bring a bit of curiosity with you, the way you might look at something you have not seen before.
Take a moment to feel the weight of your body being held. The floor, or the chair, or the bed is doing the work of holding you up. Notice the places where you are supported. [three breaths]
Now bring your attention down to both feet. Just the feet. Whatever is there, warmth, coolness, tingling, pressure, or nothing at all that you can name. Nothing is the wrong answer. [three breaths]
Let your attention widen to include your ankles and your lower legs. Feel the contact with whatever is underneath you. If you notice tension here, you don’t need to send it away. Keep it company for a moment. [three breaths]
Move up now to your knees, and then your thighs. Large muscles, often working hard all day. See if you can bring a little kindness here, the way you would to a friend who had been on their feet since morning. [three breaths]
Now your hips and your lower back. This is where a lot of us hold things. Notice what’s there without needing it to be different. [three breaths]
Let your attention come to your belly. Feel it rising and falling. You are not controlling the breath, you are being breathed. [three breaths]
Up into your chest and your upper back. Perhaps you can feel your heartbeat. Perhaps you can’t, and that’s fine too. [three breaths]
Now both hands. Fingers, palms, the backs of the hands. Hands do so much and get noticed so rarely. [three breaths]
Let that spread up through your wrists, your forearms, your elbows, your upper arms, and into your shoulders. If your shoulders have crept up towards your ears, you don’t have to pull them down. Just knowing about it is often enough. [three breaths]
Bring your attention to your neck and your throat. [three breaths]
And now your face. Your jaw, which may be holding more than you expected. Your mouth. Your eyes and the small muscles around them. Your forehead. [three breaths]
And finally the whole head, and then the whole body together, from your feet to the top of your head, all at once, breathing. [a longer silence here, up to a minute if the group can take it]
Before we finish, notice how you are, without deciding whether it is good or bad. Then, in your own time, let your eyes open, and have a stretch if your body would like one.
That is the whole thing. Now the parts that matter more.
Why the script is the easy part
The first body scan I ever led out loud, I was nervous. I had no idea whether it was doing anything at all for the person in front of me.
The mistake I made, and I only understood it afterwards, was that I wasn’t doing the body scan myself. I was reading a set of instructions out to someone and hoping they would somehow work. My attention was on the words and on whether I was getting it right.
At the end they said they’d really enjoyed it. But I noticed my own body was tense, and I hadn’t been present for a single minute of it.
What I gradually learnt is to practise the body scan myself while I’m guiding it. When I say “bring your attention to your hands,” I bring my attention to my hands. It changes the pacing, because you stop rushing when you’re actually feeling something. And it changes your tone of voice, which matters more than people realise. Your students are not only receiving your words. They are receiving how present you are while you say them.
That is the one thing a script cannot do for you, and it is the whole job.
Why I stopped saying the word “relaxation”
The classic MBSR body scan script uses the language of relaxation quite freely. I have taken it out of mine.
Mindfulness and relaxation are not the same thing. Mindfulness is about awareness. If relaxation turns up, lovely, but it is a side effect and not the aim. The moment you tell someone in a body scan that they are relaxing, you have handed them a target to fail at, and the person with a racing mind now has one more thing to feel bad about.
The research supports treating them as different practices rather than two words for one thing. A randomised controlled trial by Shobha Jain and colleagues, published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine in 2007, put 83 distressed students through either a one-month mindfulness meditation training, a somatic relaxation training, or no treatment. Both active groups reduced distress about equally. But only the mindfulness group showed significant reductions in distractive and ruminative thinking, with a moderate effect on rumination (Cohen’s d = 0.57), and the analysis suggested that the drop in rumination was part of how mindfulness reduced distress in the first place.
Read fairly, that study does not say relaxation is worthless. It says the two do different work. So instead of relaxation I lean on curiosity, and I add something the standard script mostly leaves out, which is kindness. Encouraging people to be kind towards their own bodies is the single change I have made that gets the warmest response, year after year.
What do you say when someone falls asleep?
You say it’s fine, and you mean it.
When I was first teaching the body scan I ran a group in my own home. Five or six people lying on the carpet in front of me, and by the end more than half of them were asleep, some of them audibly snoring.
What I say now is that your body knows what it needs. Sometimes it needs meditation and sometimes it needs sleep. If it needs sleep, then sleep is a good outcome. Sleep is genuinely good for your health, and if someone is short of it the meditation was never going to work well anyway.
The wider point for anyone guiding this is to accept whatever people’s experience turns out to be. Some will say it was pleasant. Some will say it was unpleasant. Some will have been asleep from the knees up. All sorts of things happen, and people are on their own journey. Try not to take any of it personally as a comment on your guidance. If falling asleep during practice is something you want to think about more, I have written about why you fall asleep when you meditate.
What mistakes do new teachers make?
Three come up again and again.
- Thinking you are not allowed to use a script. You are. Use one at the beginning, openly. Nobody in the room minds, and it frees up the attention you would otherwise spend trying to remember what comes next.
- Thinking you have to start at the feet and travel upwards. There is no rule. You can start at the head, start in the middle, or start with the hands. Changing the route keeps both of you awake to it.
- Not leaving gaps. This is the big one. New teachers fill every second with words, usually out of nerves.
On that third one, here is the practical fix. After a set of instructions, count three cycles of your own breathing before you say anything else. That is roughly thirty seconds of silence, and it will feel far longer to you than it does to them.
Pace it to the room. Beginners need shorter gaps and more frequent guidance, because too much silence early on leaves people stranded. More experienced meditators genuinely appreciate a decent block of silence, especially towards the end of a practice. Counting your own breaths does a second job too, because it puts you back in your body, which takes you straight back to the point I made earlier about tone of voice.
How long should a body scan script be?
The version above runs about ten minutes read slowly. The classic MBSR body scan is around 45 minutes, which is wonderful and is also more than most people will do at home on a Tuesday.
Ten minutes is a good teaching length. Three minutes works as a taster at the start of a session. If you want to stretch it, don’t add words, add silence and add more regions of the body. A long body scan is not a longer script. It is the same script with more room in it.
If you are working through this because you want to teach mindfulness properly rather than occasionally, that is a different conversation, and I have written honestly about how to become a meditation teacher, including my own unglamorous route into it. The training I run is over on the teacher training page. I go into the body scan in more detail in Mindfulness For Dummies, which is on my books page.
A free guided body scan
The best way to learn the pacing is to be led through it a few times by someone else and steal shamelessly from what works. This is my own recording, free, no sign-up needed. Listen as a student first, then listen again as a teacher and pay attention to where the silences fall.
If you’d like the version for your own sleep rather than for teaching, I have written that up separately as the body scan I actually do in bed.
One last thought. If you are nervous about leading your first one, that nervousness is not a problem to solve before you start. Just do the practice with them rather than at them, and let the silences be longer than feels comfortable. That is most of it.