A guided meditation that walks you through noticing a difficult feeling, catching your habitual reaction to it, and replacing self-rejection with compassionate self-talk. The practice uses repeated caring phrases like "may I be aware" to build a new habit of turning toward yourself instead of away.
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Guided meditation is for so many people, the best way to truly gain benefit in your response to personal challenges. As you invest and bring your own experience to the guided meditations, you'll give yourself the best chance to change long standing patterns from suffering toward a state of well being, peace and healing. It's important to put yourself in a comfortable body position in a private space where you're not disturbed. Turn off your phone and be ready to really be alert.
Start by just feeling your body sensations and let yourself move to where you're more and more comfortable and keep giving yourself permission to move around and just find comfort. See if you can enjoy just being with your body sensations. Maybe it's in your stomach or your heart or your neck, your shoulders, and you're just stretching and just letting yourself care about being present enough and you can move to be more comfortable. And then ask yourself, what is the feeling that is the most difficult that you've faced either in your life or right now? See what your normal reaction is toward this feeling and keep looking if it isn't clear or if there's more than one feeling and see if you can say, oh good, I can see my challenging feeling and I can even see how I reject myself or I run away from it and I disassociate. Plant the seed. Oh, I want to remember this. I want to remember that I can see it and it's good that I can see it. It's not something that I need to reject or and I can recognize that I actually want to care for it because I'm suffering. Notice what you normally say to yourself or feel about yourself when you have this challenging feeling. It might be something like, I hate this, not this again. I can't believe I'm still feeling this at my age. Or maybe you just notice how fast you disassociate and you leave it. Allow yourself to say, yes, I can see it and I am doing my best right now to tolerate it. And by saying that, you're bringing your wisdom and seeing what normally is in its place. We could call it a wisdom substitute or a way of piling on. See if right now you can see what you could say to yourself and maybe even with a tone that's going to nurture you or strengthen you or soften you, whatever is needed, that you can have caring thoughts and a caring response to that challenging feeling while you still see the tendency to say, oh, I hate this, I don't like this, I normally don't like this. Ah, but at this moment I can See? Oh, it's going to really help me. If I say it's okay that I feel inadequate, it's okay that I feel insecure, it's okay that I feel helpless or depressed, then I can see that's going to give me a chance to deal with it. Ask yourself, is it true that you might have thought something like this feeling the challenging emotion isn't going to do me any good. If you don't have a way to deal with the challenging emotion like fear or anxiety, then it's going to feel like a bottomless pit. We've been conditioned to avoid or judge because we haven't been guided to care or to be wise with ourselves. So now, as you stay with the feeling, ask yourself, how can I care for my original feeling? What thoughts would I like to generate right now to help empower myself, soothe myself, soften myself? It might be something like, I want to be kinder. I'm not doing this on purpose. Ouch. The this hurts. And I want to find a way to be more okay with it. I want to be more sensitive to myself. I want to gather courage, kindness, self compassion. I love my hunger to grow. Can you think those thoughts? How much can you think those thoughts and keep giving yourself a reminder. Remember, whenever I feel a challenging feeling, boom. Yes, I want to see it clearly and I want to see the normal self rejection or self withdrawal. Does this make sense to you right now? Does it make sense to you that it's hard and let yourself do it now? This is my challenging feeling. These are my normal feelings of rejection or abandonment. And I'm coming back and I'm saying yes, I want to care for myself and you need to innovate your own thoughts of caring because every challenging feeling and everything you feel is unique to you. And then just gently say if you can. I want to keep practicing because I recognize that I want to be more of a friend to myself. Practice, practice, practice. Because I haven't been taught this before and I need to keep developing perseverance to give myself a chance to not be owned by by this feeling. This is a mini miracle when you pull it off or even just get a good grasp that you are wanting to. It's like being pregnant with self love and replacing self rejection and self abandonment with your gradually increasing, increasing heart. Feel the desire to care for yourself and see if you can appreciate the honesty of seeing and being yourself as you are really see it. Do you have any appreciation, even a little bit, even the thoughts? See if you can plant the seed and say to yourself. I want it to be like a Pavlovian response where it's like a 1, 2, 3 I want to see the challenging feeling. I want to see the tendency toward self rejection for self abandonment and I want to find the desire to care that will lead me to my friendly mind and my friendly heart that's going to care for the self rejection and then bring me back to ask how can I care for the original challenging feeling? See if you can really appreciate how deep this work is and how evolutionary it is for you a new way of caring that will affect both you and those around you and let yourself have this brief wish or prayer. May I be aware of what's challenging? Notice my reactions and support myself to steer in the direction of bringing my heart and wisdom to guide me with the thoughts and feelings that will inspire caring for what I'm going through and my reaction to what I'm going through. May I appreciate this as much as possible and as soon as possible when I'm aware of any challenging feeling.
