Chronic and complex medical conditions rarely have easy answers, but as meditation teacher Juliana Sloan reminds us in this soothing practice, we can always confront our suffering with creativity, gentleness, and compassion.
Learn to live with pain and illness It is difficult and arduous work. Often, people can go for months or even years without adequate answers. Life is completely turned upside down. The body you thought you had suddenly becomes something you don’t know or know how to handle.
This week, meditation teacher and hypnotherapist Juliana Sloan offers an imaginative meditation that calls for grace and self-compassion in the midst of discomfort.
Meditation to bring comfort and kindness to pain and illness
Read and practice the guided meditation text below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to audio exercises.
- In this meditation, we will use some visualization and mindfulness-based practices to deal with discomfort, illness, or pain in the body. These practices have been shown to be very supportive of managing symptoms, as well as finding ways to face difficult health situations with more patience, more kindness, and more space.
- Start with comfort, and allow yourself to find a place to sit or lie down where you can truly relax. Close your eyes if it feels comfortable, or lower your gaze.
- Imagine that right now, any place in your body where you are resting your attention can begin to soften, relax, and become more comfortable. Start by focusing your attention on the muscles surrounding your mouth. Invite those muscles around your mouth to move into relaxation, rest, rest, and allow those muscles to relax.
- Now notice the space inside your mouth. The surface area of the roof of your mouth and the sides of your cheek. Place your attention on the back of your tongue. Allow the back of your tongue to begin to relax. Let that tongue come down perhaps from the roof of the mouth or allow it to soften or loosen or rest.
- Bring your awareness to the cheeks and jaw and allow those jaws, those cheeks to relax and soften. You may feel your mouth open slightly as you do so, or you may feel your cheeks become heavier and more pliable.
- Now bring your attention to the muscles around and behind the eyes. Let those muscles around the eyes relax.
- Move your attention towards the forehead, and let those muscles in the forehead soften and relax. Notice the top of your head and imagine that while you focus your attention on the top of your head, you are also allowing your scalp to relax.
- Now pass your attention to the back of your head, just like that relaxation can flow to the back of your head. Lower your neck and shoulders, allowing those shoulders to relax, smooth and relax.
- Notice the space between your shoulder blades, and breathe that feeling of softness and relaxation into that space. Let your attention flow to your arms and hands, and invite every muscle in those arms and hands to begin to relax and soften, as if those arms and hands could become heavy, as if they were imbued with that comfort, that ease, that relaxation.
- Let the same softness flow to your chest and stomach. Down to your legs and feet.
- Now, choose a feeling that doesn’t seem too overwhelming. It may be a specific symptom or a place where there is pain in the body. Place your attention there on that place where the symptoms appeared, or where you feel discomfort. He approached her a little with a sense of curiosity and creativity And even the trick.
- Now imagine: If this sensation had a color, what color would it be? You may notice the specific color, whether dark or light. Notice how large this color is, and how much space it takes up. Imagine what qualities, what resources this color might need – for example, maybe it needs kindness. It may take patience. Maybe it needs more understanding.
- Feel what might support this color here in the body. When you get there, allow yourself to imagine if that resource, if that supporting property had a color, what color would it be? Once you have that supportive, beautiful quality in its color, imagine that you can take this resource, this support, this other useful color, and you can wrap it around the first color. And as you do that, you can imagine that that supporting color is now moving into that space and changing the color of the entire area, filling it with that supporting energy that provides resources for that color. You might imagine this as if you were enveloping that area in color, and that color had a healing balm or medicinal property when you flooded the space with that color, bringing that kindness or that patience or that understanding.
- Imagine that this supportive and beautiful color can start to move outward. It can fill the body so you can rest easy in this color.
- Spend some quiet time with this image. Notice what’s different. Know that you can now send this very supportive and soothing color anywhere it is needed. Let’s rest on this color for another moment. Then gently return to the room, stretch and open your eyes.
