Belly Soothe Meditation for Trying Times

So many of us feel the effects of stress in our gut. The “gut brain connection” has been well-established and is useful to understand. Abdominal pain, stomach aches, digestive problems, diarrhea, constipation — you name it, can be caused or made worse by stress. Relieving stress is the antidote.

Any of our guided meditations can help reduce stress, but this latest podcast episode, Belly Soothe Meditation for Trying Times, goes straight to the belly. It’s designed to direct relaxation and relief to where it’s most needed.

We hope this meditation will serve you well during the stress of the pandemic and beyond. Here are some comments by people who have tried this meditation:

“Thank you, this was very helpful. So accepting and comforting as my stomach and bowels take all my emotions.”

— Jill

“Gentle & easy & has helped my anxious belly this morning.. feeling relaxed & reset.”

— Kate

“My gut feels so much better now. Thank you so much. It worked very well.”

— Marian

“Just wonderful. I had a knot in my stomach prior to this meditation. Felt my anxiety loosen grip and the knot unwind throughout this meditation. Will revisit.”

— Lisa

Self-Soothing for Coronavirus Pandemic

In this time of anxiety and stress, our Self-Soothing for Coronavirus Pandemic guided meditation can help you learn to soothe yourself. In this time of social isolation, it can help you learn to be your own best friend. The meditation gently guides you to hold your feelings and yourself with tenderness and compassion.

Becoming ill with covid-19 is only one possible stress. We are all experiencing a loss of normalcy. Going on a shopping trip can feel like walking through a minefield. Not being able to be with friends and loved ones brings feelings of isolation. For many of us, there’s a loss of work and income. Some are on the front lines, working in risky settings. On top of all of that the stress is simply “in the air”. It’s a time when we all need extra self-care.

This podcast episode is our gift to you from our Meditation RX app. We have made the app free for as long as this pandemic lasts. The app was originally developed in collaboration with a doctor to help support his patients and families with the stress of serious illness. As it turns out, the app makes a perfect companion for this very stressful time.

Now free!

For as long as the pandemic lasts.

The Meditation RX app contains meditations designed for the relief of stress and trauma. A short version of our Learn to Meditate course is also on the app, along with meditations for everyday practice. We are grateful to have this app to offer as one small way we can help.

You can download the app for free, and it will always be free. In fact, none of our apps has a monthly “subscription” charge. You pay one small fee to purchase them and they are yours forever — no more charges.

Meditation RX Apple

Meditation RX Google Play

Self Care with Love

❤️ Valentine’s Day reminds us of the importance of love. After all, it’s all we need and it makes the world go ‘round! On Valentine’s Day we remember to say “I love you”. Hopefully on Valentine’s Day we also can say “I love me”!

❤️ I’ve always made time for self care. Besides daily meditation, I treat myself to massages, hot baths, frequent walks in nature, good, healthy food, plenty of sleep and more. I thought I had the self care thing mastered, but came to realize two things — I wasn’t making self-care the most important thing in my day and, even more importantly, I wasn’t always doing it with love. Today, on Valentine’s Day, I want to focus on the love piece. When we approach our self-care with love, it work wonders.

❤️ If the thought behind eating a delicious, nourishing meal is “I don’t want to get sick”, the meal won’t be received and digested in the same way it would if you eat while experiencing the sense of food as love. A focus on the health giving properties of the food and the pleasure of eating will allow your body to absorb use the nutrition in a different way. If you apply a lovely serum to your skin and the underlying feeling is the fear of aging and a sense of “fighting it off”, you will be cheating yourself of the full benefit of this act of self-care. Even doing your self care routines as just another thing to get done wastes a precious chance to show yourself love. Doing self-care as an expression of self-love is magic. I’d go so far as to say that it is the love itself that is the most important ingredient of your food, your body care products, and all the activities which can benefit the body. Walk in nature with an eye to experiencing the love you find there. As you do laps in the pool, feel the deliciousness of the water flowing over your skin. As you stretch or do yoga, feel the pleasure in your body. Treat yourself well — treat yourself to pleasure, treat yourself to love.

❤️ Hopefully you have already discovered many ways to care for yourself already, but we can always find more. I recently contributed to an article on self-care in Redfin, Expert Tips for Practicing Self-Care at Home that has lots of great ideas and advice.

❤️ May you take good, and loving, care of yourself this Valentine’s Day, and every day!❤️

Embrace Effortlessness & Ease Part 3 -- Guided Meditation

How is it possible for meditation to be effortless? Isn’t it something we have to work at or “do right”?

It’s entirely possible for meditation to be effortless, because it is a natural state of mind. When we learn to meditate, we are learning to experience a basic human ability, just as when we learn to walk we are “learning” to do something that is innate, something that is in our basic wiring.

We may tend to think of meditation as the technique or practice we learn and then focus on the details of the instructions. The instructions are simply ways to guide mind into a meditative state, and yet that state can come about completely spontaneously. You may have experienced it when you suddenly saw a sight of great beauty. A hummingbird suddenly hovers before you or you see an exquisite sunset. This can be enough to stop the mind and allow it to rest in its essential nature — a state of harmony, stillness and peace. Meditation instructions can help the mind to shift into a meditative state, but the instructions are secondary. They actually need to be forgotten for the mind to drop into its essence.

I find the most effective way to learn is to be guided in the experience. The guide is like a friend who simply points a finger at the beautiful sunset without saying too much about it. That way you can get caught up in the experience of the sunset and forget the pointing finger.

Embrace Effortlessness & Ease Part 3, is longer and has more silence throughout, giving you the opportunity to sink even deeper into the meditative state. It will further develop the habit of ease in meditation, as you let go of the obstacles to easy meditation described in the previous post.

May you find deep fulfillment on your meditation journey!

Embrace Effortlessness & Ease Part 2 -- Guided Meditation

The essence of meditation is effortlessness. Meditation is a natural state of mind, so why do we sometimes struggle with meditation and find it difficult?

There are 3 main obstacles to ease in meditation.

The first is trying to do meditation “right”. The fear that we are doing something wrong can make us tense as we try too hard to “do it right”. There are no mistakes in meditation. There are no wrong experiences. Everything in meditation is part of the process. Think of meditation as a journey of discovery — self-discovery — learning about how our minds work, how feelings come and go, how to flow easily with ourselves and life. It’s not about following a set of rules or instructions, it’s about learning from our own unique experience.

The second obstacle is resisting our experiences in meditation. We may try to resist thoughts, with the mistaken idea that meditation means not having thoughts, or having a quiet mind. Thoughts are a part of meditation. What we learn is to allow them to come and go freely, not pushing them out and not getting involved in the meaning of thoughts. What we discover is a quietness and stillness in the mind even when thoughts are present.

We may also try to resist certain kinds of thoughts, or feelings, or sensations in the body. What we learn in meditation is to allow everything that comes up without resistance, or letting go of the resistance when we notice it. Everything experience is an expression of life energy expressing as thoughts, feelings and sensations. We don’t need to know why they are there. We learn to trust how life naturally expresses through us. Allowed to flow without resistance, thoughts, feelings and sensations come and go. Life is constant change — nothing lasts forever, even the painful feelings we tend to push out.

Finally, we might try to make ourselves be or feel a particular way. We may think that meditation is about being peaceful, and feel bad if we don’t feel at peace. We may try to manipulate our feelings somehow — trying to make ourselves calm and peaceful — but calm and peace come from simply being with “what is”. When we notice that we are trying to make ourselves feel differently, we can let that go, and in that letting go, peace is naturally found.

Part 2 of the Embrace Effortlessness & Ease meditation is a longer version of last month’s meditation. This will allow you to go deeper into the experience of effortlessness. Practicing this regularly will allow the principles of effortlessness to become clearer and help you form a habit of letting go of effort when it comes up.