Chronic and complex medical conditions rarely have easy answers. But as meditation teacher Juliana Sloan reminds us in this healing practice, we can always meet suffering with creativity, kindness, and compassion.
Learning to live with pain and illness is challenging and arduous. Often, you can go 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 recognize or know how to handle.
This week, meditation teacher and hypnotherapist Juliana Sloan offers an imaginative meditation that brings softness and self-compassion in the midst of discomfort.
Meditation that brings comfort and kindness to pain and illness
Read the guided meditation script below and practice, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to audio exercises.
This meditation uses imaginative, mindfulness-based practices to address discomfort, illness, and pain in your body. These practices have been shown to be extremely helpful in managing symptoms, as well as helping us find ways to approach difficult health situations with more patience, kindness, and more space. First, get comfortable and find a place where you can sit or lie down and really relax. Close your eyes or soften your gaze if it feels comfortable. Now imagine that any part of your body that you are paying attention to becomes softer, begins to relax, and becomes more comfortable. Start by focusing on the muscles around your mouth. It brings the muscles around your mouth into a state of relaxation, relief, and comfort, allowing them to simply release. Next, pay attention to the space inside your mouth. The surface area of the upper part of the mouth and the sides of the cheeks. Focus your attention on the back of your tongue. Then start relaxing the back of your tongue. Lower your tongue from the roof of your mouth or allow it to soften, loosen, and rest. Bring your attention to your cheeks and jaw, loosening and softening them. Your mouth may feel slightly open, and your cheeks may feel heavy and loose. Now focus on the muscles around and behind the eyes. Relax the muscles around your eyes. Shift your attention to your forehead, softening and relaxing your forehead muscles. Focus on the top of your head and imagine that your scalp can even relax as you direct your attention there. Now direct your attention to the back of your head, as if the relaxed state is flowing to the back of your head. Lower your neck and shoulders, allowing them to loosen, soften, and relax. Focus on the space between your shoulder blades and breathe into that space a feeling of softness and relaxation. Shift your attention to your arms and hands and begin to relax and soften all the muscles in your arms and hands. As if the arms and hands just become heavy, as if their comfort, their ease, their relaxation are saturated. The same softness flows into your chest and stomach. Even down to the legs and feet. Next, choose a sensation that doesn’t feel too overwhelming. It could be the location of a particular symptom or pain in your body. Focus your attention on where you had the symptoms or where you feel discomfort. Let’s move a little closer to it with curiosity, creativity, and even resourcefulness. Just imagine. If this sensation had a color, what color would it be? You may notice certain colors, dark or light. Notice how big that color is and how much space it takes up. Imagine what qualities, what resources this color will require. For example, this color may require tenderness. Maybe it requires patience. Perhaps it requires further understanding. Feel what supports this color in your body here. Once you get there, imagine if that resource, its supportive nature, had a color, what color would it be? Now imagine that once you have a supportive and beautiful quality to that color, you can wrap it around the first color using this resource, this support, this other helpful color. And as you do so, you can imagine this supporting color moving into that space, changing the color of the entire area, and filling it with the supportive energy of that color. You might imagine this as wrapping the area in color and infusing the space with that color so that it has a healing balm or medicinal value, bringing kindness, patience, and understanding. Imagine that beautiful supporting color starting to move outward. This color may fill your body so that you can rest. Please spend some quiet time with this image. Notice what’s different. Know that you can send that very supportive and calming color right where you need it right now. Let’s rest in that color a little more. Then, slowly walk back to your room, stretch, and open your eyes.
