Healing Technique: Meditation Techniques

Taken from here.

Meditation kind of gets a bad rap in my opinion mostly because people don't understand how diverse the field of meditation is. Meditation is most commonly thought of as sitting around trying to be devoid of thought, but besides being boring as fuck, it is only one way to meditate. Meditative methods are as diverse as the genres of music in the world, gotta find what speaks to you.

I'm going to go over every meditative practice that I commonly use to help people heal and how to do them on your own. Keep in mind that basically all of my preferred healing techniques use meditation in some form including joy theory, mind-body release, RAT, peace theory, and past life regression. Here's a list of what will be covered:

1. Progressive Body Relaxation

2. Calm/ Safe Place

3. Higher Self/ Ideal Self

4. Container

5. Leaf and Stream

6. Theater Stage

Taken from here.

1# Progressive Body Relaxation

Progressive body relaxation is exactly what it sounds like, you progressively relax your body either starting from your head and working your way down or starting with your feet and working your way up. In the process you name specific body parts and relax them in the chosen direction. There are three ways to go about doing this:

1. Conscious Recognition - You consciously recognize tension or stress in the named body parts and then allow those body parts to relax, allow the tension to be released, consciously relax those body parts, etc.

2. Light/ Dark Visualization - Imagine the body in terms of light and dark where light represents calm and relaxation and dark represents tension or stress. Increase the light in the chosen body parts until the darkness is pushed out and only light remains.

3. Tensing Muscles - Tense the chosen muscles as tight as possible for a couple seconds and release.

After you walk through the entire body and relax it you do what is called a body scan, scan your body for any residual tension or stress. Actively release any remaining stress/ tension with your chosen method. Repeat as needed.

This exercise is beneficial for the following reasons:

1. Increases Body Awareness - You can recognize where you were holding tension or stress that you weren't aware of. This is especially helpful for people who are disconnected from their body and don't recognize their body's physiological reactions to emotions.

2. Focused Awareness - People tend to hold their tension or stress in one or a couple different body spots more than others. Becoming aware of where you hold tension or stress gives you a quick way to reference your physiological state.

3. Calm Down - This exercise is great to calm down. If you don't know how to calm down naturally, this is a really good place to start. It's also really good for falling asleep which is how a lot of people tend to use it.

4. Healing - Changing your body's physiological responses can lead to mental and emotional healing without any additional interventions.

There are lots of guided meditations online if you google "progressive body relaxation" should you prefer that.

My calm/ safe place is very similar to this picture of an Austrian mountain valley. Taken from here.

2# Calm/ Safe Place

Calm/ safe place is where you imagine yourself in an environment that makes you feel calm and safe. This place can be real or imagined but if it's real it cannot have anything but positive memories attached to it.

You really can get creative. If you like the beach or the mountains, create your own ideal version. If you want isolation I've had people be on asteroids, in bunkers in the middle of a mountain, or under the sea. If your environment doesn't feel safe enough, do something to make it feel safer. Create force fields, body guards, or whatever else you want there. You can also have people in your space but you have to once again be sure that they are a solely positive influence.

Once your space is safe, focus on heightening everything related to the senses. Focusing on the senses makes the experience feel more real, something that matters considering the fact that the brain has a difficult time distinguishing reality from imagination. What can you see, smell, hear, feel, or taste? Feel as much as possible sensory wise.

To make yourself feel even more calm and safe in this meditation, do bilateral stimulation, stimulating the left and right sides of the brain in an alternating and repetitive pattern. I usually just tap my thighs (left, right, left, right) but you can do it other ways as well such as with sound which you can find by googling "bilateral sounds" or "emdr sounds". Keep doing this until you feel completely calm/ safe.

3# Higher Self/ Ideal Self

The higher self/ best self meditation is where you visualize your ideal self, a technique that can be used in various ways. Here are a couple ways to use it although you can really do whatever you want with it:

1. Character Development - Imagine how your ideal self would act or respond to something you currently struggle with. What would that version of yourself do? How would they react to, or deal with, the same situation?

2. Life Direction and Goal Setting - If you have a blueprint for how you would like to be, then you can make goals for how to get there. If you have no conceptualization of who you want to be or how you want to be, then that might be a good thing to start thinking about and this meditation can help!

3. Advice - You can ask your ideal self for advice, wisdom, or comfort which it may give you.

4# Container

This meditation is used to create a mental container to purposefully compartmentalize something for short-term purposes. It is not supposed to be used to avoid things long-term as that will only negatively impact your mental health. The video above takes you through the meditation.

The short points to do it are:

1. Think of some type of container that you can "store" whatever is causing you distress. Make this container strong enough to handle whatever you choose to put in it. Add elements, even magical ones, as necessary to increase its strength.

2. Visualize your stressor and imagine physically putting it into the container. Your problems can take any form such as gas in a vial, an action figure, a picture, or whatever else you come up with.

3. Come back at a later/ safe time to fully process whatever you had locked away.

Taken from here.

5# Leaf and Stream

This meditation is to help move past stuck emotions or thoughts. Its purpose is to give space for the emotion or thought to exist for a limited to before it's let go. Repression and avoidance don't work, but neither does holding on to something indefinitely. This is helpful for people to either make space for uncomfortable emotions or thoughts or to let them go.

To do this imagine a stream in your mind. Pick up a leaf from the ground, place whatever emotion or thought you're having a hard time letting go of on to the leaf, and place the leaf in the water. Watch the leaf slowly go downstream until it disappears from view. Repeat as necessary.

Taken from here.

6# Theater Stage

This meditation has the same purpose as the previous meditation except you visualize a stage instead of a stream. Each emotion or thought occupies the stage one at a time and plays it out through theater. Once their act is done they leave the stage and the next emotion or thought performs. Continue until all emotions or thoughts are processed.

These are the ones I commonly use there are infinite ways to use meditation. One that is becoming more popular is imagining your body healing itself, which I've both read about and heard from people I've met that it works. It's free so might as well give it a try although it does typically take some time to create noticeable change.