Chronic, complex health conditions rarely have easy answers—but as meditation teacher Juliana Sloane reminds us in this soothing practice, we can always meet our suffering with wisdom, gentleness, and compassion.
Learning to live with pain and illness is challenging, difficult work. Often, people can go months or years without adequate answers. Life turns completely upside down. The body you thought you had suddenly becomes something you don’t know or know how to work.
This week, meditation teacher and hypnotherapist Juliana Sloane offers a mindful meditation that invites tenderness and compassion in the midst of discomfort.
Meditation That Brings Comfort and Grace to Pain and Illness
Read and practice the guided meditation text below, pausing after each passage. Or listen to the audio practice.
- In this meditation, we will use some mindfulness and mindfulness-based practices to work with discomfort or illness or pain in the body. These practices have been shown to greatly support symptom management, as well as finding ways to meet challenging health conditions with more patience, more kindness, and more space.
- Start by taking it easy, allowing yourself to find a place to sit or lie down where you can really relax. Close your eyes if that feels comfortable, or soften your eyes.
- Imagine that right now, any place in your body where you rest your attention may begin to soften and become more relaxed and comfortable. Start by focusing your attention on the muscles around your mouth. Invite those muscles around your mouth to go into relaxation, relaxation, comfort, to let those muscles just relax.
- Now notice the space in your mouth. The top of the roof of your mouth, the sides of your cheek. Put your attention behind your tongue. And allowing the back of your tongue to begin to relax. Let that tongue come down maybe from the roof of the mouth or let it just soften or relax or come into rest.
- Bring your awareness to the cheeks and jaw and just let that jaw, those cheeks relax and soften. You may feel your mouth open slightly as you do, or you may feel those cheeks get heavy and loose.
- Bring your attention now to the muscles around and behind the eyes. Let those muscles around the eyes relax.
- Move your attention up to the forehead, allowing those muscles in the forehead to soften and relax. Notice the top of your head and imagine that as you rest your attention there on the top of the head, you can even allow the scalp to relax.
- Now slide your attention down to the back of your head, almost as if that relaxation could flow to the back of your head. Down the neck and shoulders, let those shoulders relax and soften and relax.
- Notice the space between your shoulders, and breathe that feeling of softening and relaxation into that space. Let your attention go down to your arms and hands, invite all the muscles in those arms and hands to begin to relax and soften, as if those arms and hands might be heavy, as if they are filled with that ease, that ease, that relaxation.
- Let that same softness flow through your chest and belly. Down your legs and feet.
- Now, choose a feeling that doesn’t feel overwhelming. It may be a specific mark or place where there is pain in the body. Place your attention on that place where the mark was, or the place where you felt bad. Approach it with a sense of curiosity and creativity and creativity.
- Now think: if this feeling had a color, what color would it be? You may notice a certain color, whether it is dark or light. Notice how big that color is, how much space it takes up. Think about what qualities, what resources you need this color – for example, maybe you need kindness. Maybe it needs patience. Maybe it needs more understanding.
- Find out what can support this color here in the body. When you come to that, let yourself think if that resource, if that supporting quality 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 useful color, and you can wrap it in that original color. And as you do, you can imagine that now this supporting color is moving into that space and changing the color of the whole space, filling it with that supporting energy, the source of that color. You can think of this almost as if you were wrapping that area with color and that color had a healing balm or a healing quality to it as you filled the space with that color, bringing that grace or that patience or that understanding.
- Think that supportive, beautiful color may start to come out. It can fill the body so you can relax in this color.
- Spend some quiet time with this picture. Notice what is different. Know that right now, you can send that very supportive, cool color to any place you need it. Let’s rest on that color for one more moment. Then, gently return to the room, stretch and open your eyes.
