Body Scans and Breathing for Beginners: The Red and Blue Light Technique

Meditation is never easy, but it’s particularly hard on the beginners. It’s easy to set high expectations and then to be brought back to the messy reality of the actual experience of meditation which consists of constant distractions, confronting the frequently intense mental chatter and facing an enormous number of unusual sensations. Especially if you tend to dissociate, jumping into the uncensored reality of your emotions can be a terrifying experience. No need to say that this highly demotivating and it often gets people to give up meditation altogether. Techniques such as the ones I will describe here help you descend into that internal chaos slowly and more securely.

There are quite a few techniques available that give you (a bit more) control over what you experience and that help you stabilize your focus: labeling the breath, counting the breath, etc. Some of these techniques rely on visualization and common culturally over-determined metaphors to help you stabilize your focus and slowly begin developing a language to describe your emotional experiences in meditation and outside of it. I recently wrote about how we can use the ubiquitous notion of elements to learn about different bodily experiences. In this blog, I will describe a similar, although simpler approach.

In this blog, you will find three different exercises:

1.      Using visualization of light to work with breath

2.      Using breathing and light to work with your body

3.      A body scan using these three metaphors.

Blue and red light

Visualizing your body filling with light isn’t a new technique and it’s been used in secular and more mystical meditation traditions in a variety of ways. In this set of meditations, we will use two different types of light: blue and red.

When I learned this type of meditation – and it’s been so long ago that I can’t remember exactly who taught it to me – I wasn’t explained why blue and why red, so I thought about those colors and associations I have with them and I came up with my own explanation, as I find that I need to know why I’m doing something in order to really benefit from it. I understood that the idea was to stabilize my focus but I thought more could be gained from such interesting choice of colors.

My line of thinking was the following: use commonsense associations, personal and cultural, with those two colors. Here’s what I came up with:

Speed: red is fast, blue is slow.

Dynamics: blue is inert, red is agitated.

Heat: blue is cold, read is hot.

As you can see, blue and red light don’t carry any heavy spiritual or esoteric meanings for me. I like to tailor my thinking and my meditation using simple and obvious metaphors, because I appreciate simplicity wherever I can have it. (That’s not all that often considering that my main professional interest is the human psyche, something that we can describe as many things but not as simple.) Think about your own associations with these colors and see if you can add something new. Draw on your personal tastes, associations and even religious and spiritual beliefs. Your direct experience will either verify or invalidate these associations. Keep what works. It’s useful to have a system to work with before you dive into the meditation itself, because that way, you’re likely to minimize anxiety, as you will have a structure in place and a system to interpret what you experience.

Working with your breath

The simplest way to use blue and red light is with the breath. The meditation is the simplest one you can imagine. Sit and observe your breath. The “twist” here is that you visualize inhaling blue air and, as it fills up your lungs, you visualize it turning red. You exhale red air.

Inhale blue, exhale red.

This allows you to direct your attention more easily and depending on your ability to visualize, you can make it a rather dynamic exercise, keeping your focus with less effort. As always, whenever you get distracted, you come back to the visualization.

If you follow the system of associations I outlined above, what this exercise does is also help you remove tension. You inhale calm air, and it becomes hot (red) in your lungs, exhaling tension. For this to work, the specific associations that I mention have to make sense to you. But even without this additional effect, a dynamic but simple visualization like this will help you be less distracted.

Breathing in light to work with the body

Another approach is to extend the scope of your visualization. In fact, you can use this as a separate meditation or you can make it the second stage of the previous one. In this meditation, you’ll keep the basic idea: breathing in blue light and breathing out red light. What makes this distinct is that breathing is not limited just to your nostrils and your lungs. You visualize breathing in through your entire body, through every pore. You are filling out your body with blue light, watch it turn red and  expel it as you exhale.

What remains when you exhale? Let your visualization tell you!

It’s very useful to begin this meditation by spending a few moments feeling your entire body. You can feel your toes and then your scalp and then everything in between. Just rest in that awareness and slowly introduce the visualization.

Body scan with light

A body scan is a type of meditation where your focus on each part of your body in a specific order and observe any sensations that you may observe. As with mindfulness of the breath, you don’t interfere with your experience, you just observe it.

If you need guidance to do a body scan, you can play any pre-recorded body scan that feels good for you and layer this technique on top of it. You can also do it alone, simply decide on the order that you want to “walk” your focus through your body. In my own practice, I usually start with my scalp, my face, neck, then I go to my left hand, shoulders, right hand, chest, abdomen, back, pelvis, left leg and right leg. I try to focus on as many details as I can such as feel every toe or finger individually, etc.

The red/blue light comes in play as a part of awareness. Instead of simply feeling sensations, you visualize them. Allow your mind to spontaneously generate images, color your body parts in blue or red, whatever comes naturally. At the end of the body scan, take a look at the totality of your body and see what color dominates! What does that tell you?