Relax Your Body with Gratitude with a 12-Minute Meditation

Take some restorative time to release tension and feel deeply grateful for your hard-working body.

Taking a moment to pause with the intention of simply allowing our bodies to rest in awareness can bring a great sense of restoration and rejuvenation. Our bodies are very active and often neglected. This guided awareness practice will allow us to feel a sense of gratitude for our body, in all its beauty and mystery.

A 12-Minute Meditation to Relax Your Body in Gratitude

Read and practice the guided meditation text below, pausing after each passage. Or listen to the audio practice.

1. To begin, find a position that feels comfortable for you at this time. There are many different postures that we can choose from. Enter with your body to feel it which posture is right for me right now?
2. Once you get that set up, just start noticing and feeling your body here and present in this moment, not trying to fix anything or change anything with the body. Most of the time, the body can be used just for the purpose of working, striving, and achieving, but in this moment, we invite our body to rest naturally.
3. Take a moment to feel what it means to be alive in your body right now. By paying attention to rest a little in the body, just notice: How does my body express its life at this time? Maybe that is caused by a lot of sensitivity, maybe the body feels free and relaxed, or maybe there is energy moving in some of our bodies. Whatever is true about your body right now, let this life be what you feel in this moment. This is my body and I appreciate my body.
4. Now, allow your attention to rest a little on the emotions associated with touching the body or whatever supports it. Maybe it’s the floor or a pillow, or a bed or a couch. Allowing your attention to rest for a moment, feel the life of the body touching and being supported by whatever is beneath you. This is the rest of my body, supported by what is under me ​​now and I am grateful for this body and this support and this time of rest. Resting like a newborn baby resting in the arms of a parent or caregiver. Allow your body to relax, allow the support, stability, and comfort of having something to hold you really engage your body and your awareness. In this moment, I am held and supported and this support is stable, and unconditional, and I am grateful. Continue to feel the connection and support of whatever is holding you in this moment, stay connected to what is happening.
5. We will begin to invite our bodies to rest in the sense of space around the body. So, we actually allow our attention to rest on the skin of the body. And with each exhalation, let your attention begin to relax and expand beyond the skin, just a few inches beyond the skin, resting in this space. Rather than focusing entirely on the physical body, we now invite the energies in the body – the flow, the emotions – to actually relax into the environment around us. You may use your imagination a little to imagine that, with every breath you take, you begin to feel your body being held by the vastness of the space around the body.
6. It may be helpful to start on your back, inviting your back to relax. Just go into the space behind you. And switching to one side of the body, feeling that side, feeling the skin, and inviting that side of the body to just let go. To relax in the space around that side of the body. Then go to the front of the body: feeling the skin, the sensations of the body, and life, and just allowing the front of the body to be held and rest in the front position. And lastly, come to the other side of the body, feel the skin of the body, and let your attention rest in the area around that side of the body.
7. For a few seconds, as you breathe in and out naturallylet your attention rest as the body rests, in the space around the body. The body can let go now. Breathing, feeling the body is held in our awareness. When we breathe, we thank the space around the body. It allows the body to relax.
8. As we end this practicethe invitation is for you to place your hand on your heart, feel a sense of gratitude and appreciation for the body, the environment around the body, and this time of rest. And remember that being grateful for the body is how we can always connect with this sense of rest, presence, and ease.