[Gem]

As usual, I go online to find some information, but as someone who practiced mindfulness in depth, I can say the 'information' easily accessible online is OK at a very superficial level, and I find it really hard to fins something worth linking.

There is a whole process which starts with the hard physical body along with the crude, chattering, emotionally reactive mind, and it progresses to subtler levels that people might call the subtle body, emotional body, vibratory body, energy body, light body or something like that... which is really just means the level at which you perceive feelings in the body.

Initially you would scan by just feeling one part at a time, like start to feel the crown, then move to forehead, back of head, eye area, nose, mouth, cheeks, ears, neck, throat, shoulders, etc all the way to tippy toes. That would take 10 or 15 minutes or maybe a bit longer depending, but it allows you to closely examine every inch of the body, being conscious of what it feels like.

Before that it is best to just do breath awareness for a few months because we'd need a mind capable fairly acute perception and able to stay on task without getting distracted for too long. If the perception is kinda dull and the mind wanders off for long periods of time, you don't really feel much going on and you lose track of things halfway through.

I feel like I'm going too detailed, and people want a 'just do this' for today, and it is fine to body scan and find tensions and relax them, that's great, but I'm trying to talk about a healing process that goes further and unwinds really deep knots and blocks so there's more of a free flow.

It takes time, and some people like to imagine it like layers of an onion, peel off the solid outer and then the next, and the next, healing the psychological content of each layer as you go. It will heal to the level your perception is capable of penetrating. Beyond that capability things by definition remain unconscious, but with continued practice they too 'come to light' in conscious awareness where they dissolve away.

Many people will say it's for beginners because people want to be 'more spiritual' than someone else, but people go to great heights spiritually without full body awareness, and all that old stuff is still caught in the layers. If people want the high spiritual experiences and bypass the 'physical' sure there is a 'God experience' or other ultimate attainment, but you end up physical and regenerate and carry old trauma from moment to moment, from life to life.

The aim of this is purification or what we like to call 'healing'. There are many aspects to that, such as remaining neutral, no-ego, etc, which we understand better with growing wisdom...

Anyway, it make no sense unless you 'see it for yourself', and thread-philosophy is pretty useless without real-life discovery and insight, so I merely suggest maybe give it a try and see what happens.