Body Scanning - The Art Of Self Massage

How's it going, everybody? We're here in Southern California. Let me turn this down just a touch. We're here in Southern California with our physical body scan today. So what we're going to be focusing on is physically bringing awareness to our body from the head all the way down to our feet. And we're going to be physically doing this by not only bringing awareness to each part of our body, but we're going to be physically doing a small massage on ourself. So what's really great about this type of practice is you can do it literally anywhere, and this is great for promoting relaxation and circulation within your body.

So if you want to find yourself a comfortable seated position somewhere, you can see I'm on the couch, you know, like, I've got a lot of space to kind of move out, move around, you know, I can stretch over here. So I expect you guys to have a nice seated area, get comfortable. The whole point is to make yourself feel good in this space. So let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start with the top of OUr HeAd and move all the way down our body. So I really like to start with, you know, these pressure points in my head.

You can close your eyes and start to focus on your breath and the touch. So I like to start with my temples here, and this is a really great spot. You can really start to just touch and feel what it is that feels good for you, you know. So here I like to do a little circular motion and just maintaining the breath, you know, sometimes tapping on the face is an excellent way to, like, gain this relaxation, to kind of, like, restore the muscles. JUst a light tapping on your cheeks. This is so good.

Feels so good for Your muscles and your face and all of this. Really good for relaxation. I also really like this pressure point in your face here. It's right near your eyes. Just be careful because you're so close to your eyes. I like to press quite hard up on the top of your brow right here and then in towards your nose. So you're kind of feeling it on the top of your nasal passage here. This is a really great pressure point as well. You just hold that one breathing and another one is this right here in your third eye.

Again, be careful when pressing hard. You don't want to slip your finger into your eye or something, so be very careful with this pressure point. A slight circular motion is really nice in this space. And, you know, we're just focusing on what feels good here, you know, anything that feels good to you is probably okay. Anything that doesn't feel good or causes you pain will lay off just a little bit or reduce the pressure, whatever you need to do to make that comfortable. So we'll go through and finalize this face with some tapping, always remembering to breathe, just light tapping all over those facial muscles and those pressure points that we just brought awareness to.

And you should already feel that your face is quite relaxed after this, after you really give it a good kind of facial massage and all of that. Now we can start to move down a little bit, maybe even feel our ears, see what that is all about. And, you know, we're really not trying to change the way that we're feeling in any space. We're just the observer here. So, you know, imagine that you're kind of, like, looking at it from a third perspective. We're not judging. We're not trying to change. We're just.

We're just being here and being curious with ourself. That's all that we're doing in this space. So let's go ahead and move to our jaw and go underneath the jaw, feel what that feels like, or maybe even open up your mouth and really feel like what it feels like to stretch out your face and your jaw and your facial muscles. And we're getting to know ourselves better through this, essentially. So now, obviously, one of my favorite places is in the neck area here. This is a fantastic place. And there's a lot of stress that gets held in the back of our neck.

So this is one space that I'm massaging on a regular basis all the time, doing small circular motions with your neck and massaging each one of these muscles on the left and the right. You'll feel these big spaces, especially when you lean down, they'll kind of pop out. And we want to really dig into those. Those are really strong muscles. They hold our head up all day. And like I said, they hold a lot of stress. So to work these out really helps to relieve stress and add promotion or add relaxation into your day.

So give that a nice, good massage. We can start to roll our neck out, kind of feel the extension, feel the extension. There's all these tendons up and down our neck, and we can feel it start to get a bit tight as we rotate our neck around. We can feel all these things. And to stretch that and just hold it here. And we can touch and feel these tendons. They're very, very tight now. And it feels great to both stretch and give a light circular massage in each one of these areas. And again, this is so great.

I mean, you can even, I even do this when I'm driving. You know, I can just sit here and drive and massage my neck and switch hands and do this side, you know, so you can really do this anywhere without too much distraction. Distraction or causing any trouble or anything for you. Okay, so let's move down to our shoulders. We're getting into this shoulder muscle up here, really feeling that. And we can start to give some circular motion here. Really feel that shoulder muscle. And we're going to go down each arm individually.

So I'll start here with my left arm. And I really want to just feel what, what is my arm feeling like today? And again, we're just bringing awareness to our body. We're not judging it. We're not trying to change anything. We're just getting curious and getting to know ourselves. So just keep that, keep that reminder. Let's move on down to our bicep here. Really feel what that feels like, fully relax it, and give it that, you know, that muscular massage here, you can really kind of shake it out, get that blood flowing through your arm.

And we're going to move down to our forearm here. Also, for me, my forearm is always, it gets really tight, especially with, like, handstand work and stuff like that. So this is a space that I always am massaging as well. So as we move all the way down to our hand, you can see if we go like this, we can really stretch out all the tendons here. And even if you go up and down, you'll see my hand start to clench. And I'm not doing that. I'm actually massaging the tendons. So it's forcing my hand to clench up.

See that? So you can try that. It feels really nice as you go down, really massaging all those tendons. Let's give our wrist a little roll back and forth, get out any pops, open it up, try that. And we're going to go ahead and now massage the palm of our hand. Notice any sensations that come up in any one of these places. And let's bring some attention to each of our fingertips, starting with the pinky, noticing any, any sensations here in our hands. Okay. Moving along each finger, massaging them any way that you like, really.

Anything that feels good to you is. Okay. Moving over here. And finally, we'll go to our thumb on our left hand, and we're gonna work our way back up the right side of our arm. So now we're gonna continue with our right Pinky and kind of like make this loop all the way back up here and then we're going to continue down, right, so here, continue with your fingers breathing, remembering to breathe as we touch and feel really just doing anything that feels good. We're promoting the circulation here all the way down into the very tips of our fingers.

Even so, this is really great. This is really, really great for circulation. This will add energy for you and your day. It's really fantastic. You see? Yeah, it's really nice. And you know, honestly, you can do this anytime, which is so beautiful. So let's go ahead and go from our palm here, our right hand just doing a circular motion or palm fully relaxing that hand. And let's do some wrist rotations here. So go ahead and wrist rotate. You can kind of flex it to start and feel what it feels like all through your forearm.

Now let's go ahead and open up our hand and do that full rotation. Now we can switch sides, even really get any of those pops and clicks out. And let's go ahead and just shake out those wrists now. Now that we have a nice massage going in there. And another one that I like to do, and you can practice too, is prayer hands. So this is a really great stretch for right here as we finish that. So you can just kind of press down and then we push down like this. And you should feel it in your fingertips all the way up to here and you'll feel your forearms, the tendons really start to light up and that feels really great.

So we can start there and let's turn over and then it gets more intense. And so this, this is a really great stretch. This is one of my favorite stretches to do. Ooh, wonderful. There we go. Let's continue with this arm. Go ahead and give that stretch, that tendon stretch. You can see my fingers are moving. That is not my control. That is because of massage. See that? My fingers kind of contracting up and down. Yes, that's good. All right, and let's go ahead and move to our bicep on our right here.

Really relax this arm at this point. You know, we've kind of done a lot of motion already and we want that blood flow to be working for us at this point. So go ahead and give that a good massage. You can even do a few circular rotations with our other arm and really start to work that out. Noticing any sensations all along the way. We're noticing the sensations that come out and we're just observing exactly how we feel throughout all of this. Alright, so now that we've kind of finished both of our arms.

Go ahead and shake that out. And we're going to work our way down our chest here. So you can feel kind of like your upper pec here, right in front of your shoulder. So there's a lot of things that go on in this area, especially if you do any sort of push up work or handstand work, any sort of like, strong working out with your upper body like this. This space is going to be quite sore and quite big. So this is another space I really like to put a lot of attention into, kind of near our heart space here.

See what that feels like. It doesn't need much of a massage, more of just a light touch. And you can get all the info you need here. There we go. Good. Okay, let's go ahead and move down to our stomach. So this spot, you're going to feel a lot of sensation. Obviously, you hold a lot of things in your guts, not only the food that you have, but also a lot of emotional qualities get so stored up here in our gut. So you might start to feel a lot of things as you kind of be very careful touching around here because you can touch something that might be painful.

So be very light with your touch, especially if this is your first time touching your stomach and you're going to get a lot of info out of this. If you feel a sharp pain, that's probably going to tell you something and obviously lay off. But feel around again. You're the observer. Don't judge when something pops up, something that's painful, something that maybe even causes an emotional response. These are all just bits of information that help you to become more in tune with yourself. So let's go ahead and kind of like, just like a cat kind of like paws into something.

We're just gonna paw into our stomach area all along there. Let's go to our sides and feel that side body. Oof, that's a good one. You can even move a little bit to the back. So I really love the lower back area also. It's probably one of my favorite massages for self massage. And we can kind of just knead into the back of our backs here. There we go. And for you, you can do this at home. You know, once you kind of gain this practice, if you find any spaces that you feel need extra attention, of course, go ahead and sit with that with yourself.

And that's a great time for you to really tune in with that part of your body and get to know it well. So we're going to go ahead and move down. I'm going to move to the side so you can see a little bit better. And we're going to move down to our thighs here and really give that a nice assumption all the way down to our knees. And you'll notice this feels really great immediately. So we have our legs, they're obviously carrying us for the entire day, so we really need to give this a bit of attention.

Our thighs are one of the biggest muscles that we have other than our glutes. And, you know, when we do give it massage and touch them and bring awareness, we start to notice how much we really needed that. So this is, this feels quite nice as well, obviously promoting the circulation down into our toes at this point. So slowly working that blood flow all the way down through our knees. So let's go ahead and touch our knees. It doesn't require much of a massage, more of just kind of bringing awareness again to our knee area.

Looking at it, touching it a little bit, noticing if there's any pain, noticing any sensations, maybe you feel nothing. And that's okay, too. And just being the observer, you'll notice I say the same things quite often because, you know, a lot of these practices are about repetition and kind of rephrasing and rewiring the brain to, you know, become comfortable with these kind of terms. So as we move down into our calf, bringing awareness to our calf, each one, one at a time. Yeah, you can see this tendon right here or this artery.

And we want to really promote some, some blood flow by pushing this artery down into our foot. I mean, that's really going to kind of boost our blood flow and make it a lot faster than our body can actually produce. So if we're actually, like, removing all the blood from our calf into our ankle, we're going to start to kind of hype up our circulation. So this is also really great for injury. I had a sprained ankle once, and by doing this type of massage, actually heal the ankle in less than 24 hours.

So it can be quite miraculous, even. So, let's bring it down to our ankles. We're almost done here and we're just going to go ahead. If you can't bring your ankle up, that's fine. I usually like to kind of really bring it up here and give it a good massage, so let's just work that out. We've kind of gone from our head all the way down to our foot. Here's the last step of this process and really roll this sucker out, really feel what that is like, these are the bits that carry us day in and day out.

They do such a good job of it, we should pay more attention to them. You know, our foot is very important. Okay. And our other foot. And we're about done here. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this practice. Just one more roll out of the left and still breathing through all of this. All right? And that is about it. So we worked from the head all the way down to our toes. And like I said, this is really great for promoting relaxation, circulation into the body, kind of building up a relaxed energy. And it's a really great practice that we can just do any time during the day.

I mean, like, this is so simple to just sit down in a work chair and do this even while you're driving, while you're watching tv, it doesn't really matter, you know, and you can really hop in and give yourself a self massage and make yourself feel a lot better. So I think this is an underutilized practice that all of us have the capability of using. It's just a matter of bringing awareness to it and actually trying. So with that, that's the end of our practice, our physical body scan. So I hope you enjoyed that.

Take that tool with you through your day, and I will see you next week for another practice. All right, thanks, guys. See you next time.