Meditation for Healing

If you haven’t learned about meditation for healing, the power of this practice is worth paying attention to. Studies have shown the effectiveness of meditation for stress reduction, anxiety, depression, and symptoms of a number of medical disorders.

It’s been said that it’s not your circumstances that create stress but how you react to them. You can learn through mindfulness meditation how to be less reactive to your circumstances, and this can reduce stress and help you to heal. The benefits of mindfulness meditation for healing are numerous. Practicing mindfulness has been shown to decrease symptoms of stress, anxiety, depression, fatigue, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, gastrointestinal disorders, and autoimmune disease. If you haven’t learned how to be less reactive in your life, you’re likely moving through your days reacting to all kinds of stressful events. When we experience a stress reaction, the brain and body activate the sympathetic nervous system to prepare us to fight or run in order to stay alive.

This system isn’t very discerning, so it reacts to real and perceived threats. As you react to the stress of the kids or the dog being uncooperative in the morning, the stress of being late, the stress of driving behind a slow driver, and the stress of one deadline after another that you fear you won’t make, and then the stress of fearing you may lose your job or the stress of hating your job, your body activates one after another stress response.

If this pattern of stress reactivity continues, you may be at risk for experiencing symptoms of chronic stress and/or stress related illness. Symptoms of chronic stress can include anxiety, irritability, headaches, fatigue, racing thoughts, insomnia, digestive problems, and other symptoms.

A study published in 2018 in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that people with stress related disorders (such as post-traumatic stress disorder, acute stress reaction, adjustment disorder, and other stress reactions, are at increased risk for developing autoimmune disease. Meditation can help you with stress reduction and get you back on the road toward healing and wholeness again. Practicing mindfulness meditation for healing activates the rest and repair branch of your nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system. This helps you to reduce stress, and it creates an optimal state in which mind body healing can occur.

How to Practice Mindfulness Meditation

Have you been wondering about how to practice mindfulness? Mindfulness is about learning how to stay in the present moment. Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment, without clinging to it when it’s pleasant, without turning away when it’s unpleasant, and without wanting it to be other than it is. You can practice mindfulness formally, as in sitting meditation, or informally, by incorporating it into your everyday life. Sitting meditation is like your training ground for bringing mindfulness into your everyday life, so it’s best if you can start there. (See “How to Meditate” below.)

As you engage with your formal meditation practice, you’ll gradually start to see clearly the habitual ways of thinking and reacting that cause suffering. When you see yourself clearly, you have the freedom to change. As you begin to recognize these patterns in your formal practice, start to bring awareness to when and how they arise in your everyday. Because whatever is happening during your formal meditation practice is a direct reflection of what happens in your everyday life. If you struggle with sitting still or boredom in your practice, you likely struggle with these experiences in everyday life.

Mindfulness is about learning to meet whatever arises with an attitude of non-judgment, curiosity, and kindness. The way to bring the practice into your everyday life is to simply practice meeting whatever arises in your everyday experience with this same attitude. It’s easier to get the hang of it in everyday life if you’re practicing this regularly in your formal meditation practice.

You may start to notice how much time you spend in the past or future and not in the present. You get into the shower, and you’re thinking about what you have to do today, having an imaginary conversation with your boss that may or may not ever happen, thinking about how tired you feel, and worrying over what’s for dinner. Does all of this busy mind chatter decrease your stress or increase it? Why not practice being present for as many moments of your life as you can?

So when you’re in the shower, practice being present in the shower. When you notice your mind wandering, bring it back to the experience of showering. Notice the feel of the warm water on your face, the smell of the soap or shampoo, the feel of your hands washing your hair.

Being in the present doesn’t mean you never plan for the future. But it does mean you don’t spend so much time worrying about the future. Planning is a present moment activity when it’s done intentionally. Worry is not.

Start with being present in the shower or while drinking your morning tea or coffee, and notice what happens.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is:

awareness of the present moment

without clinging to it when it’s pleasant

without turning away or trying to escape it when it’s unpleasant

and without wanting it to be other than it is.

Mindfulness is paying a particular kind of attention to what is happening in the moment. It’s a practice of objectively noticing what is happening without judging it as pleasant/unpleasant, good/bad, right/wrong. It involves noticing what is happening in the present moment as an objective witness, watching our experience unfold, and meeting it with nonjudgment and kindness.

We experience the present moment through sensations in the body, feelings, and thoughts. So when we say we’re noticing present moment experience, we’re paying attention to whatever sensations, feelings, and thoughts arise in the present moment. And we’re meeting them with a nonreactive attitude, just objectively observing them from the perspective of our internal witness that observes our experience.

In practicing mindfulness, we become less reactive to our experience. We see our habitual patterns more clearly, and when we see ourselves more clearly, we have the freedom to change.

Mindfulness is being fully present in whatever is happening in the moment. So if we’re noticing the breath, we’re noticing the breath. If we’re washing dishes, we’re noticing the feel of the warm water and soap on our hands and any other sensations. If we’re doing laundry, we’re focusing on the sensations and movements in our body as we’re doing laundry.

Our experience of life happens through sensations, feelings, and thoughts. The tendency of the mind is to judge our experience as pleasant or unpleasant. If we judge it as unpleasant, our habitual pattern is to turn away from it, distract ourselves. Unfortunately, the things we do to try to distract often create more suffering—drinking alcohol, overeating, taking more medication than prescribed, using recreational drugs, over sleeping, smoking, watching too much TV, spending too much time on the internet, etc. If we judge our experience as pleasant, we become preoccupied with how we can get more, which also creates suffering. With mindfulness, we attempt to practice non-judgment so that we simply notice our experience without labeling it as pleasant and unpleasant.

When noticing our experience of sensations, feelings, and thoughts, with mindfulness we attempt to notice the experience with an attitude of interest, curiosity, and kindness/compassion.

How to Meditate

Having a regular meditation practice has helped me to experience a great deal more peace, happiness, and wellbeing, so I love teaching it to other people. I’ve been teaching meditation for 30+ years, and one of the most frequent questions that I am asked is about how to meditate. Hopefully this instruction will help you to get started with creating a regular meditation practice or to restart a regular practice if you’re an experienced meditator.

When we meditate, we’re cultivating two qualities of mind: concentration and mindfulness / awareness. Let’s start with exploring concentration practice.

Awareness of breathing meditation

I’d like to invite you to begin the practice by finding a place to meditate where you won’t be interrupted. Consider finding a comfortable posture that allows you to be alert but relaxed. If you feel comfortable, I’ll invite you to close your eyes, and if you prefer to leave your eyes open, consider choosing a spot two to three feet in front of you on which to focus, and relax your eyes into a soft gaze.

I’d like to invite you now to turn the attention to the breath, noticing the coming and going of the breath in and out of the body, the rise of the chest and the belly with the inhale and the lowering of the chest and belly with the exhale. If you have a difficult time getting a sense of this, it may help to place one hand on the chest and the other on the belly so that you can really feel this up and down movement of the chest and belly with the breath. When the attention wanders (and it will, because that’s what everybody’s mind does), as soon as you notice that it has wandered, I’d like to invite you to objectively notice that and then bring the attention back to the breath. This is the practice, over and over again.

I encourage you to start small, perhaps beginning with about two minutes. Any length of time that you practice is better than none, so if two minutes is all that you feel you have to give to it, keep that up. If you’d like to expand the practice, I’d encourage you to gradually increase the length of the practice to 24 minutes and see how that feels.

Awareness of sound meditation

If you feel undue anxiety with the awareness of breathing practice, I’d invite you to try awareness of sound meditation. This is the same as awareness of breathing practice, except that you rest the attention on sounds, noticing how some sounds come and go and others are steady. When the attention wanders, I’d invite you to notice that objectively, and then return the attention to sounds. This is the practice, over and over again.

Meditation Practice

Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment, without clinging to it when it feels good, without turning away or trying to escape it when it feels uncomfortable, and without wanting it to be otherwise. We can practice mindfulness formally, with sitting meditation, mindful eating, walking meditation, or mindful yoga, or informally, by applying the principles and practices of mindfulness to activities in our everyday life.

If you’d like to try sitting meditation, find a location where you won’t be interrupted. I’d invite you to begin by turning the attention to either sounds or the breath for a few moments to focus the attention. When the attention wanders, I’d like to invite you to notice that with non-judgmental awareness, and then bring the attention back to sounds or the breath.

Now I’d like to invite you to move the attention on sounds or the breath to the background of your awareness as you make room in the foreground of your awareness for any dominant sensation, feeling, or thought that arises. I’d invite you to try to meet whatever arises with an attitude of non-judgment and kindness, without clinging to it, trying to turn away or escape it, and without wanting it to be otherwise.

See if you can practice allowing whatever has arisen in your awareness to be as it is in this moment and just observe it. It’s like we’re taking a step back from our experience and practicing being aware of our experience from the perspective of our internal objective witness consciousness. When you notice that the attention has wandered, I’d invite you to observe this, too, with non-judgement and kindness, and then bring the attention back to sounds or the breath or back to whatever dominant sensation, feeling, and thought has arisen. This is the practice, over and over again.

Any length of time that you practice is better than none, so if two minutes is all that you feel you have to give to it, keep that up. If you’d like to expand the practice, I’d encourage you to gradually increase the length of the practice to 24 minutes and see how that feels.
 

Meditation for Healing is Simple, But Not Always Easy

As they say, meditation practice is simple, but it’s not always easy. If it feels right, I hope you’ll give it a try. There’s no right or wrong way to practice. What matters most is the sincerity with which you approach your practice. With a regular practice, you’ll begin to reap the rewards of this practice, which may include an increased sense of peace, happiness, and wellbeing as well as decreased anxiety and depression, decreased pain.

Connect with me on Facebook @EverydayMindful or Instagram @MeditateCreate and let me know how it goes!

Meditation for Anxiety

Mindfulness meditation for anxiety is a powerful approach to reducing anxiety. Pranayama, or mindful breath control practices, can be useful for calming the energy when you’re feeling anxious. Contrary to what your mind would have you believe, there are things you can do to impact your energy and mood. You can practice meditation, yoga, and pranayama to cultivate more positive mental and emotional states and to bring the body, heart, and mind back into a state of balance.

Following is one of my favorite breathing practices for anxiety practices, 3-Part Breath. 3-Part Breath is a yoga pranayama practice that you can easily do on your own.

Three-Part Breath Meditation

1. Adopt a comfortable seated posture that allows you to be alert but relaxed. If taking a deep breath feels difficult, the practice can be done lying down.
2. Inhale the first third of the breath through the nose into the bottom of the lungs, allowing the belly to naturally expand.
3. Inhale the second third of the breath through the nose into the middle section of the lungs, allowing the ribcage to naturally expand
4. Inhale the final third of the breath through the nose into the top of the lungs, expanding the upper chest.
5. Exhale slowly and feel the upper chest, then middle of the chest, then lower chest lowering.
6. Extend the exhale by adopting a ratio of 1:2 for inhale:exhale. Inhale to a count of five, then exhale to a count of ten.
7. Repeat this breathing sequence for three to five minutes.

I hope this serves as a start toward helping you to reduce anxiety with mindfulness meditation. There’s still so much more you can learn about mindfulness meditation for anxiety that may help you to feel better. Follow my blog or connect with me on Facebook @EverydayMindfulfor more teachings on mindfulness meditation.

The Healing Benefits of Meditation

There are so many healing benefits of mindfulness meditation. As a mindfulness coach and therapist, I value evidence-based practice, and there a large body of research that supports the benefits of this practice. Much of the research about the benefits of mindfulness meditation has been done on the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction 8-week program, which teaches mindfulness meditation and gentle stretching for increased awareness and stress reduction.

What the Research Shows about Meditation for Healing

The research is overwhelmingly positive about the benefits of mindfulness. People who practice mindfulness report and increased sense of peace, ease, happiness and wellbeing. I like to say that whatever we rest our attention on grows, and when you practice mindfulness meditation, you learn how to direct your attention. As a result, you spend more time dwelling in present moment experience and cultivating relaxation and more positive mental and emotional states and less time ruminating about the past or worrying about the future.

Benefits of Meditation

• Increased peace, ease, happiness, and wellbeing
• Decreased stress and worry
• Decreased anxiety and depression
• Decreased inflammation
• Increased attention and memory
• Improved sleep
• Increased creativity
• Decreased blood pressure
• Decreased pain and increased ability to cope with residual pain
• Increased emotional regulation
• Decreased symptoms of gastrointestinal disorders
• Decreased symptoms of cardiovascular disorders
• Decreased symptoms of autoimmune disease

Sound too good to be true? If I hadn’t been practicing and teaching mindfulness meditation for over thirty years, I’d probably think the same thing, but my commitment to my practice tells me otherwise. Like any new habit, it takes effort to begin and stick with a mindfulness meditation practice, but once you have a few months of practice experience, the rewards you experience from it serve to motivate you to keep going!

How to Experience the Benefits of Mindfulness

1. Start small. Pick one meditation to get you started.
2. Listen to a guided meditation, as it’s easier to learn than doing it on your own. You may enjoy my 15-minute Body Scan Meditation YouTube.
3. Set clear goals for your practice—how many times per week, which days and times, etc.
4. Set clear intentions for your practice—what do you hope to gain from your practice?

Meditation for Healing from Stress Related Illnesses

 Are you suffering from stress related illnesses? The Congressional Prevention Coalition estimated that 90% of disease is caused or complicated by stress. Please take a moment, and let that sink in.

Some of the most prevalent health conditions – autoimmune illnesses, heart disease, stroke, cancer, depression—are related to stress. The Congressional Prevention Coalition cites research that shows that “cardiac patients who learn to manage stress reduce their risk of having another heart attack or heart problem by 74%, which suggests that stress management is more effective than even exercise in preventing heart disease.”

It’s simply in the best interest of your health to reduce stress.

What is Stress?

Stress is a normal physiological response to a situation that is perceived as threatening. The stress response is activated when the brain perceives that there’s a threat. The challenge is that the part of the brain that activates the stress response isn’t very discerning between real threats and perceived threats, so it can sound the alarm when there’s no real threat of danger. Think about the things that lead to you getting bent out of shape during a day. Many of them likely aren’t real threats, but the brain perceives them as threats and activates a stress response in an attempt to protect you.

If you’re experiencing a real threat to your safety, stress response can often help you to survive. You respond to the danger, and then your nervous system rebalances. But if you’re repeatedly reacting to perceived threats, you may develop imbalance in your nervous system and experience symptoms of chronic stress.

Symptoms of Chronic Stress:

• racing thoughts
• feeling anxious or overwhelmed
• sleep difficulties
• gastrointestinal symptoms
• headaches
• tightness in your chest
• chest pain
• inflammation
• muscular pain
• depression
• anger
• irritability

Chronic stress can increase symptoms of stress related illnesses, and it can worsen some health conditions. A 2018 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed a link between autoimmune disease and stress. It showed that stress related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, acute stress disorder, or adjustment disorder increases a person’s risk for developing autoimmune disease. That’s why I encourage all of my clients to practice meditation and mindfulness to reduce stress.

Take Charge of Your Wellbeing

You don’t have to be a victim of your stress related illnesses. There are things you can do to reduce stress, decrease a number of symptoms if you have a stress related illness, and reduce your risk for developing additional illnesses.

Studies have repeatedly shown that meditation is effective for reducing stress. It’s a practice that you can begin right now, and there are numerous ways to learn more about the practice. Keep reading to learn more about this practice of meditation for healing.

Meditation for Healing Sleep

If you struggle with insomnia, you may find it useful to practice meditation for healing sleep. Mindfulness meditation is about releasing resistance and accepting what is, and when we practice this, we often experience release. You may have noticed that when you’re lying in bed unable to sleep, your tendency is to try harder to sleep and feel frustrated when you can’t get to sleep. The harder you try to get to sleep, the more elusive sleep becomes.

When you practice meditation for sleep, rather than striving to sleep, you let go of the striving, and often this letting go creates an ease in the mind, the body relaxes, and this leads to sleep. It’s similar to having your hands in Chinese handcuffs. The harder you try to get out, the tighter they become, but when you stop trying, they release.

How to Practice Meditation for Healing Sleep

When we practice mindfulness meditation, we practice being aware of our present moment experience as it unfolds through sensations, feelings, and thoughts. This practice works most effectively if you have a regular mindfulness meditation practice. When you have a regular practice, you gradually become more skillful at recognizing when you’re getting hung up in old habitual patterns of thinking and behaving (like striving to get to sleep) that are creating suffering. When you see yourself clearly, you have the freedom to change those patterns.

As you’re lying in bed feeling restless about not being able to get to sleep, as soon as you notice this pattern, try taking a step back from your experience and objectively observing what you’re doing from a non-judgmental and kind perspective. Then rather than continuing to feel frustrated about not sleeping, try shifting your attention to the breath to practice awareness of breathing meditation. Notice how the chest and belly rise with the inhale and fall with the exhale. Continue to rest your attention on the coming and going of the breath in and out of the body. Your mind will want to go back to anxious thoughts about not getting enough sleep, so when you see this happening, just be aware of it, and then bring your attention back to noticing the breath moving in and out of the body, the rise and fall of the chest and belly with the inhale and exhale.

You might also try shifting your perspective so that you view this nighttime wakefulness as an opportunity to relax and engage the rest and repair mode of your nervous system rather than becoming anxious, frustrated, or angry in response to not being able to sleep. If you try awareness of breathing meditation and are still struggling, then you can try 3-Part Breath to encourage a state of relaxation. Remember that relaxing and resting during periods of wakefulness is more healing and restorative than getting entangled in frustration about not being able to sleep. Getting entangled in frustration is a pretty sure path to staying awake.

Mindfulness Stress Management Techniques for Healing

Whether you’re healing from illness or difficult times, you’ll find these mindfulness stress reduction techniques for healing useful. The Congressional Prevention Coalition estimated that 90% of disease is caused or complicated by stress. Therefore, reducing stress makes good sense for health from both a prevention and disease management standpoint.

5 Things You can do to reduce stress:

1. Practice extreme self-care. Eat well. Make effort to try to improve sleep. (read my post on Meditation for Healing Sleep). Try to be mindful about what you feed your mind when you’re consuming information in news and online, and feed it things that cultivate wholesome mental and emotional states. Do things that feed your spirit. If you constantly feel too busy, practice saying, “No” more often.
   
2. Practice mindfulness meditation for stress reduction. Studies show that practicing mindfulness can increase feelings of peace and wellbeing and decrease symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. Practicing meditation activates the parasympathetic, or rest and repair, branch of the nervous system, which creates the optimal state in which healing can occur—body, heart, and mind. See my post on How to Meditate.
   
3. Engage in creative expression. Studies have shown that being creative also activates the parasympathetic nervous system. When this part of the nervous system is activated, it creates an optimal state in which healing can occur. Try making photographs with your cell phone, writing in a journal, practicing writing meditation. , baking, knitting, hand-building clay, coloring, drawing, painting, woodworking, or any other creative adventure that you may like to explore. Let go of trying to do things perfectly, and just enjoy being creative.
   
4. Savor simple pleasures. Seek out and savor simple experiences that feel pleasurable. The brain has a negativity bias, which means your mind pays more attention to negative experiences than positive ones. Savoring good experiences can help you to incline your mind toward focusing more attention on the positive ones.
   
5. Try to focus more attention on what’s right with you than what’s wrong with you.When you wake up, name 3 things that are right with you and your life. As you move through the day, try to pause and reflect on what’s beautiful, what’s right, and what feels good. Ruminating about what’s wrong will likely cause you to feel worse. If you’re struggling with illness, spend time in the present moment to plan for your medical care and treatment, and then try to stop worrying about it. When your mind goes to worry, remind yourself that you’re spending time planning, and then bring your attention back to the present moment.
   
6. Connect with nature.Yes, this, too, has been shown to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and calm you down, which creates an optimal state in which healing can occur. Notice the brilliant blue sky, sit in the shade of trees, spend time sitting by water if you have a body of water nearby, listen to the birds, savor the beauty of flowers, feel the wind on your face.

Quick stress management techniques to calm you down in a stressful moment:

1. 3-Part Breath. Breathe in to the lower third of the lungs, then the middle third of the lungs, then the upper third of the lungs. Exhale. Repeat several times.
   
2. Incorporate these relaxing breathing practices into your everyday– when you wake up, when you sit down at your desk to work, before you go to lunch, before you leave work, and when you lie down to go to sleep.
   
3. Practice smiling.Studies have shown that smiling can reduce stress and may support heart health.

Here’s to peace and healing.

Meditation for Healing Thyroid and Anxiety

If you have a thyroid disorder, particularly Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism, you’re likely familiar with the connection between thyroid and anxiety. Autoimmune thyroid takes anxiety to a whole new level. If you were a car, it might feel like you wake up in the morning going 90 miles an hour stuck in 1^stgear. People who struggle with anxiety disorder are often troubled by their thoughts that lead to anxious feelings, whereas people with autoimmune thyroid anxiety often feel revved up for no apparent reason.

If you have thyroid and anxiety concerns, I encourage you to talk it over with your doctor, because sometimes an adjustment in medication, diet, or lifestyle can help you to reduce the anxiety. You may also find mindfulness meditation helpful for reducing the anxiety and for coping better with it. There’s the pain of thyroid anxiety, and then there’s the suffering of our reactivity to it. Mindfulness meditation can help you to be less reactive to and focused on the anxiety and therefore more able to effectively cope with it

First, let me just say that thyroid related anxiety is not all in your head, and you’re not crazy. It’s a real thing that I often see in my clients with thyroid disorders. Physicians often refer their patients to me for mindfulness meditation training, because they understand how powerful this practice can be to reduce anxiety and help patients to feel more empowered in managing their health and wellbeing.

5 Ways Meditation Can Help Thyroid Anxiety

1. Mindfulness meditation is effective in reducing stress and anxiety.
   
2. Mindfulness meditation can help you to learn how to spend less time focusing your attention on what’s wrong with your body and more time focusing on what’s right with you. Just for today, try it. Try noticing when your mind goes to what’s wrong with you, and every time you become aware of this habit, try naming five things that are right with you and/or five things that are going well in your life.
   
3. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to increase feelings of peace, happiness, and wellbeing. Practicing meditation helps you to spend more time in the present moment and less time ruminating about the past or worrying about the future. It can also help you to be less reactive to difficult sensations, feelings, and thoughts.
   
4. Research on happiness shows that it’s possible to increase your happiness set point, even if you have a chronic illness. Research shows you can increase your happiness set point with intentional activity, including mindfulness meditation. Yes, it’s possible to feel happy, even though you struggle with thyroid and anxiety.
   
5. Mindfulness meditation can help you to sleep better, reduce pain, and cope better with residual pain.

Mindfulness Meditation, Autoimmune Disease and Stress

There appears to be a clear connection between autoimmune disease and stress, and this is why I’m teaching meditation to all of my clients with autoimmune disorders. A 2018 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that people who have been diagnosed with a stress disorder, including acute stress disorder, adjustment disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, are at an increased risk for developing autoimmune disease.

Of significant note is that this study did show that use of SSRI medication during the first year of PTSD diagnosis was associated with attenuated relative risk of autoimmune disease. This finding was significant only in reference to PTSD and not the other stress related disorders.

Studies have shown for decades that meditation is an effective approach to stress reduction. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that people who participate in an 8-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course have been shown to have decreased symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression, and an increased sense of peace, ease, happiness, creativity, and wellbeing. The MBSR program teaches mindfulness meditation and gentle yoga for stress reduction.

Meditation for Healing Autonomic Nervous System Regulation

Practicing meditation has been shown to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is known as the rest and repair branch of the nervous system. When you’re feeling stressed, often the sympathetic branch of the nervous system is overly activated, resulting in increased heart rate, respiration rate, and blood pressure and feeling wired and tired. Practicing meditation can activate the parasympathetic system, result in a decrease in heart rate, respiration rate, and blood pressure, and restore a sense of balance to the nervous system if you’ve been in a state of chronic stress. When this balance is restored, you should feel calmer, more peaceful, and enjoy a state of increased wellbeing.

You may respond fairly quickly to the meditation, and you may not. I find that many of my clients who have Hashimoto’s begin to experience good results with meditation after practicing it consistently for a few weeks. Try to be patient, because it takes some people longer than others to begin to feel calmer, more peaceful, and less stressed.

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction for Healing

 Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teaches meditation and gentle yoga to cultivate awareness and reduce stress. MBSR was developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and is taught worldwide.

MBSR was created on the foundation of the ancient practice of mindfulness, which encourages being fully present in our lives with greater peace and ease. Research indicates that people who participate in an MBSR course experience:

• increased sense of peace, happiness, and wellbeing
• improved immune functioning
• greater energy and enthusiasm for life
• Decreased symptoms of stress, anxiety, depression, and PTSD
• Decreased blood pressure
• Improved sleep
• improved ability to cope more effectively with stressful situations
• reduced pain levels and/or improved ability to cope with pain that may not go away
• decreased symptoms of autoimmune disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, cardiovascular disorders, arthritis, fibromyalgia, and tinnitus.
  

MBSR is an 8-week course offered in person or online. The course involves a class meeting each week with a focused lesson on different aspects of mindfulness, guided meditation and yoga practices, and discussion and/or writing exercises. It involves 30-45 minutes of meditation and yoga practice on the other six days of the week for the duration of course, and guided audio recordings of the practices are provided for home use.

MBSR is an intensive course, but the overwhelming majority of people who participate fully in my course say that it changes their lives in significant ways. If what you’ve been trying isn’t working, then maybe it’s time to try something different. Learn more about my MBSR online course here.

Body Scan Meditation for Healing

The Body Scan meditation is one of my favorite meditations. It’s one of the foundational meditation practices in the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) 8-week program, with good reason. The body scan meditation is designed to induce a state of deep relaxation and reduce stress. Most people who try it love it for these reasons as well.

The Body Scan

The Body Scan begins with lying down comfortably on your back, or in another position if this position causes discomfort. It starts with turning the attention toward the breath for a few moments and pausing to notice the coming and going of the breath in and out of the body, the rise and fall of the chest and belly with the inhale and exhale. Then it invites you to expand the awareness to include the entire body and notice for a moment what it feels like to be in this body in this moment. It then invites you to narrow your focus one part of the body at a time, beginning with the head and face, then the eyes, nose, ears, jaw, mouth, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, back, chest, stomach, hips, buttocks, legs, and feet. As you rest the attention on each part of the body, one part at a time, notice any sensations in that part of the body. Try to take a step back from your experience to observe it from the perspective of an inner objective witness, and try to meet whatever you notice with an attitude of interest, curiosity, and friendliness.

Links to Jen Johnson’s Guided Body Scan Meditation

Listen to the Body Scan Meditation on YouTube 

My hope is that you’re feeling inspired to develop a regular meditation for healing practice. I have a lot of resources to support you.

1. Sign up for Jen Johnson’s email list. You’ll receive more free resources to support you in developing and sustaining a regular meditation for healing practice. And you’ll receive first notice when I offer online courses, workshops, and retreats.
2. Schedule a FREE 15-minute consultation to see if we’re a good fit for mindfulness coaching.

References

Brown KW, Ryan RM. “The benefits of being present: mindfulness and its role in psychological wellbeing.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2003. Apr; 84(4):822-48.

Grossman P, Niemann L, Schmidt S, Walach H. “Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefits. A meta-analysis.” Journal of psychosomatic Research. 2004 Jul; 57(1):35-43.

Praissman S. “Mindfulness-based stress reduction: A literature review and clinician’s guide.” Journal of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners. 2008. Apr; 20(4): 212-6.

Scott-Sheldon LAJ, Gathright EC, Donahue ML, Balbetto B, Feulner NM, DeCosta J, Curess DG, Wing RR, Carey MP, Salmoirago-Blotcher E. “Mindfulness-based interventions for adults with cardiovascular disease: A systemic review and meta-analysis.” Annals of Behavioral Medicine. 2019 June 5.

Song H, Fang F, Tomasson, G, Amberg FK, Mataix-Cols D, Fernandez de la Cruz L, Almqvist C, Fall K, Valdimarsdottir UA. “Association of stress-related disorders with subsequent autoimmune disease. “ Journal of the American Medical Association. 2018. Jun 19; 319(23): 2388-2400.

Tomfohr LM, Pung MA, Mills PJ, Edwards K. “Trait mindfulness is associated with blood pressure and interleukin-6: exploring interactions among subscales of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire to better understand relationships between mindfulness and health.”Journal of Behavioral Medicine. 2015 Feb: 38 (1): 28-38.