I’ve claimed in the past that meditation has helped me with my physical fitness efforts. I was unable to verbalize what I meant by this other than “it’s increased my self-awareness”. I now have a pseudo-scientific theory on how it has worked.

I’m gonna be specific about what I’m referring to when I say meditation. I’m referring to the body scan exercise. It’s a routine where you move your attention all over the surface of your body starting from head to toe and then back again.

As you move your attention around, you start noticing various types of sensations. Pain. Itching. Tickling. Tingly goosebumps. On a day where I’m feeling particularly alert, I’ve been able to sweep up and down in a couple of breaths and feel myself being enveloped in a tingly goosebump layer and go into a trance like state where I lost all track of time. A body high not unlike the kind that smoking up some Indica has gotten me. It was mind blowing to me that I could achieve the same feeling purely with my mind that I could by consuming an intoxicant. There is a downside to this sensation because all sorts of addictions are egotic in nature but we’ll come back to that later.

Back to the topic of this post.

When you’re scanning your body, the command center of your nervous system (your brain) is checking in with the frontline troops (the endpoints of the nerves). Doing this periodically strengthens the neural transport infrastructure of your body. What this means is that you are better able to sense changes on more parts of your body than you were able to before. And also better able to send instructions to specific parts of your body.

Before starting off on meditation, I used to struggle with the specific instructions that say yoga teachers give (eg. create space in your lower back, create space between your pelvis and lower abs etc.) Lately, I’ve been able to follow these instructions almost to the dot. Which means I’m better able to pick up the form that a teacher is trying to communicate to me. At its core, this is an improvement in the efficiency of the time I invest in working out.

The technique of Vipassana is essentially the body scan. But just like with every exercise, learning it under the right teacher means you get the form right. On Day 4, when we started doing the body scans, I noticed a huge blind spot on my front torso, especially my tummy. I introspected on this in the ample silent free time and realized this has something to do with my mental body image. My brain has not yet fully adapted to the recent (~2 years) changes in my physical structure. In my brain, I’m 50 lb heavier. And that difference between my mental body image and my physical body is most prominent on my tummy and my chin. This is something I’ve known for a while. If my conversation with you has gone beyond small talk, I’ve probably mentioned that in my head, I’m a fat kid. My refusal to accept the size of my tummy for most of my life led to a few things including this blind spot, a hunch in my upper back as I subconsciously walked in a way designed to “hide” my tummy as much as I can and my tendency to sleep on the side in a semi-fetal position. The chin discrepancy is something I realized as I was trying out something that Hannes had suggested I do in the lovely text full of advice he sent right before I switched off my phone. He asked me to not look at my reflection in the mirror to further increase the sensory deprivation. I tried this on days 2,3,4. Every time I passed by the mirror, I’d catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and then my brain would fill out the rest. It was always a fatter me specifically with a double chin. I panicked on day 5 and skipped this exercise. After further introspection, I realize that this might be enhanced due to the image I have on my DL (https://imgur.com/a/KRCIxh9) which is something I still see on a regular basis.