Chronic, complex medical conditions rarely have easy answers—but as meditation teacher Juliana Sloane reminds us in this soothing practice, we can always meet our suffering with creativity, gentleness, and compassion.
Learning to live with pain and illness is challenging, arduous work. Often, people can go for months or even years without sufficient answers. Life gets turned completely 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 Sloane offers an imaginative meditation that invites softness and self-compassion in the midst of discomfort.
A Meditation to Bring Comfort and Kindness to Pain and Illness
Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.
- In this meditation, we’ll be using some imaginative and mindfulness-based practices to work with discomfort or illness or pain in the body. These practices have been shown to be very supportive for symptom management, as well as finding ways to meet challenging health situations with more patience, more kindness, and more space.
- Begin by getting comfortable, allowing yourself to find a place seated or lying down where you can really relax. Close your eyes if that feels comfortable, or soften your gaze.
- Imagine that right now, any place in your body where you rest your attention could begin to soften and relax and get more comfortable. Begin by resting your attention on the muscles around your mouth. Invite those muscles around your mouth to move into relaxation, ease, comfort, letting those muscles just let go.
- Now notice the space inside your mouth. The surface area of the roof of your mouth, the sides of your cheek. Rest your attention on the back of 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 allow it to just soften or loosen or come into resting.
- Bring your awareness to the cheeks and jaw and just let that jaw, those cheeks loosen and soften. You might feel the mouth open slightly as you do, or you might feel those cheeks just get heavier and looser.
- 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, letting those muscles in the forehead 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 could even allow the scalp to relax.
- Now slide your attention down the back of your head, almost like that relaxation could just flow down the back of your head. Down your neck and shoulders, letting those shoulders loosen and soften and relax.
- Notice the space between your shoulder blades, and breathe that sense of softening and relaxation into that space. Let your attention flow down to your arms and hands, inviting every muscle in those arms and hands to begin to relax and soften, as if those arms and hands could just get heavy, as if they’re saturated with that comfort, that ease, that relaxation.
- Let that same softness flow down into your chest and belly. Down into your legs and your feet.
- Now, choose a sensation that doesn’t feel too overwhelming. It might be a specific symptom or a place where there’s pain in the body. Rest your attention there on that place where the symptom has been, or the place where you’re 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 color would it be? You might notice the specific color, whether it’s dark or light. Notice how big that color is, how much space it takes up. Imagine what qualities, what resources this color might need—for example, maybe it needs kindness. Maybe it needs patience. Maybe it needs more understanding.
- Sense into what might support this color here in the body. When you land on that, allow yourself to imagine if that resource, if that supportive quality had a color, what color would that be? Once you have that supportive, beautiful quality in its colo, imagine that you could take this resource, this support, this other helpful color, and you could wrap it around that first color. And as you do, you can imagine that now this supportive color is moving into that space and changing the color of the entire area, filling it with that supportive, resourcing energy of that color. You might imagine this almost like you were wrapping that area with color and that color had a healing balm or a medicinal quality to it as you infuse the space with that color, bringing that kindness or that patience or that understanding.
- Imagine that that supportive, beautiful color could begin to move outward. It could fill the body so that you could rest in this color.
- Spend some quiet time with this image. Notice what’s different. Know that right now, you can send that color that’s so supportive, so soothing into any place it’s needed. Let’s rest in that color for one more moment. Then, gently come back into the room, stretching and opening your eyes.
