Chronic, complex illnesses rarely have easy answers, but as meditation teacher Juliana Sloan reminds us in this calming practice, we can always meet our suffering with creativity, gentleness, and compassion.
Learn to live with pain and illness it’s hard, hard work. Often people may go months or even years without providing 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 work with.
This week, meditation teacher and hypnotherapist Juliana Sloan offers an imagery meditation that evokes gentleness and self-compassion in the midst of discomfort.
Meditation to bring comfort and kindness to pain and illness
Read the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.
- In this meditation, we will use some imagery and mindfulness-based practices to deal with discomfort, illness, or pain in the body. These techniques have been shown to be very helpful in managing symptoms as well as finding ways to deal with difficult health situations with more patience, more kindness and more space.
- Start by getting comfortable, allowing yourself to find a sitting or lying position where you can truly relax. Close your eyes if you feel comfortable, or soften your gaze.
- Imagine that right now any place in your body where you are resting can begin to soften, relax and feel more comfortable. Start by focusing on the muscles around your mouth. Invite those muscles around your mouth to relax, relax, comfortably, letting those muscles just relax.
- Now pay attention to the space inside the mouth. Surface area of the mouth, sides of the cheeks. Focus on the back of your tongue. And let the back of your tongue relax. Allow that tongue to descend, perhaps from heaven, or simply allow it to soften, loosen, or calm down.
- Pay attention to your cheeks and jawline and just let that jawline, those cheeks, relax and soften. As you do this, you may feel your mouth opening slightly, or you may feel your cheeks becoming heavier and looser.
- Now pay attention to the muscles around and behind the eyes. Allow the muscles around the eyes to relax.
- Shift your attention to the forehead, allowing those forehead muscles to soften and relax. Focus on the top of your head and imagine that by stopping your attention on the top of your head, you can even allow your scalp to relax.
- Now bring your attention down the back of your head, almost as if the relaxation could just flow down the back of your head. Down the neck and shoulders, allowing those shoulders to loosen, soften and relax.
- Notice the space between your shoulder blades and breathe into that space a sense of softening and relaxation. Let your attention flow to your hands and hands, inviting all the muscles in those hands and hands to begin to relax and soften, as if these hands and hands could become heavy, as if they were imbued with this comfort, this lightness, this relaxation.
- Let the same softness flow in the chest and abdomen. Down into your legs and your feet.
- Now choose a sensation that won’t be too overwhelming. It can be a specific symptom or a place where the pain is felt in the body. Focus your attention on the place where the symptom was or where you are experiencing discomfort. Get a little closer to it with a sense of curiosity and creativity and even resourcefulness.
- Now imagine: if this sensation had a color, what would it be? You may notice a certain color, whether it is dark or light. Notice how big this color is, how much space it takes up. Imagine what qualities and resources this color might need — for example, it needs kindness. Maybe you need to be patient. Maybe it needs more understanding.
- Feel what can support this color here in the body. If you come across this, imagine if this resource, if this support had a color, what color would it be? Once you have that support, that beautiful quality in its color, imagine that you can take that resource, that support, that other useful color, and you can wrap it around that first color. And as you do that, you can imagine that now that supporting color is moving into that space and changing the color of the whole area, filling it with that support, that color energy. You can imagine it almost as if you are enveloping that area with a color, and that color has a healing balm or healing quality as you fill the space with that color, bringing that kindness, patience, or understanding.
- Imagine that this auspicious, beautiful color can begin to move outward. It could fill the body to rest in that color.
- Spend some time in peace with this image. Notice what is different. Know that right now you can direct this color, so supportive, so soothing, anywhere you want. Let’s rest in this color for a moment. Then carefully walk back into the room, stretching and opening your eyes.
