Your body keeps a ledger you never asked for. That tightness in your jaw after a meeting, the shoulder that creeps toward your ear during a deadline, the lower back that locks up on Sunday evenings before the work week starts: these aren’t random malfunctions. They’re data.

Most people notice physical stress only when it becomes pain. By then you’re managing a backlog. The earlier you catch the signal, the less it costs to process.

A five-minute body scan you can do with music

Pick a song that slows you down (something without lyrics works best, though not always). Sit or lie down. Close your eyes.

Start at the top of your head and move downward. Forehead. Jaw. Neck. Shoulders. Chest. Stomach. Hips. Legs. Feet. At each station, ask one question: am I holding something here?

You’re not trying to fix anything yet. You’re building the habit of noticing. That’s the whole practice for now.

What most people find

The jaw and shoulders are the usual suspects. They hold tension from communication: what you said, what you didn’t say, what you’re rehearsing. The stomach and chest carry emotional weight. The lower back stores power dynamics: feeling unsupported, carrying too much, bracing for something.

These patterns map directly to the seven pillars in the M&M framework. Your body is literally telling you which pillar needs attention.

Making it stick

Do this once a day for a week. Same time, same song. After seven days you’ll have a baseline map of where your stress lives. That map becomes the starting point for targeted practice.

The Earth Practice goes deeper into this. But the body scan is where everyone starts, because you can’t work with something you haven’t noticed.