Last year, in an effort to combat my persistent anxiety, I started focusing more on learning about mental and emotional health and healing (as my Death Clock post here explains). This new focus has introduced me to many helpful tools, including meditation, specifically guided meditation, a tool that I recently tried out in a renewed effort with fascinating results.
I’ve dabbled in meditation in the past, using various apps and videos sporadically to dip my toe in the water, and while I’ve always had positive experiences with it and definitely found it beneficial, I’ve never done it long enough to find the motivation to stick to any sort of rhythm or even come close to making a habit of it.
The truth is, for many of us, meditation is not easy to do! In fact, it can be really freaking hard to sit there and focus on only your breathing while constantly fighting off a barrage of thoughts, especially for this Type-A mom who is frequently on the go both mentally and physically. In the past, I found that I would get frustrated with the difficulty level and my lack of consistency, resulting in it falling off my list of priorities too quickly.
Yet I’ve known since my first experience with meditation that the fact that it’s so hard for me shows just how much I NEED to make it a practice. My struggles with anxiety, negativity, and hyper-focusing need to be called out in order to slow down, calm down, and eventually heal. So recently I committed to buckling down and doing a week’s worth of meditations in order to open up the possibility of experiencing some healing through this valuable tool.
I went into this latest attempt with a more positive viewpoint by reminding myself that it’s called “practicing” meditation and not “perfecting” meditation for a reason!
I decided to use guided meditations, where a narrator is walking you through a script, sometimes involving two other awesome healing techniques, affirmations and visualization, to help make it easier to focus, but also to zero in on the specific issues that I am working with and through.
Here’s a quick summary of my daily meditation topic and how it went:
Day 1 - Topic - “Letting Go of Fear, Worry, and Resentment,” 10 minutes
On this first day I chose one that focused on healing the vicious trifecta of fear, worry, and resentment. I was really surprised at how quickly I was able to relax and get into the meditation. Of course I had many moments where my thoughts went flying all over the place, but I was fairly good at letting the thoughts go and then coming back to my breathing and the narrator's words. When I finished I felt really calm and relaxed and not frustrated! I would call it a very successful day 1.
Day 2 - Topic - “Meditation for Anxiety,” 10 minutes
Today I decided to stick with my nemesis, anxiety, for another 10 minute meditation. I found it a lot harder to get into it today, but then after a couple minutes I was happy to have moved into a pretty relaxed state again, despite the continuation of frequent moments of distracted thoughts. Even though the meditation was focusing on a specific area of anxiety and confronting it directly, it still felt very relaxing and calming, and definitely brought me some peace. So in other words, it worked! The 10 minutes ended up flying by. Great line from today’s meditation - “Trust that you have everything you need for today, and that you will have everything you need for tomorrow, next month, next year, also.”
Day 3 - Topic - “Guided Meditation for Anxiety - Letting Go of the Fear of the Unknown,” 13 minutes
This one was lovely - it had me in a meadow, the woods, and walking into a beam of light breathing out the heaviness of my worries and fears. I got into this one much easier than yesterday and noticed my thoughts were a bit less distracted too. I did this after a half hour of unfortunate news doom scrolling, something that I advise against yet still find myself doing sometimes (ugh!), and the meditation really helped me recover from that poor decision.
Day 4 - “Meditation to Ignite Your Healing Power,” 15 minutes
This one was more than just meditating as it included two other tools that I love - visualization and affirmations. Healing visualization, which I'm a big fan of, is where you imagine healing energy slowly making its way through your body. After that, hearing and repeating the empowering healing affirmations was the icing on the cake. I felt my upward palms get warm as the meditation progressed, which to me signals that a healing mind-body connection was happening. I actually felt a bit warm and fuzzy as this one wrapped up, almost like I’d had a glass of wine – or wait…is that just what being truly relaxed feels like?!
Day 5 - Topic - “Guided Meditation for Inner Peace and Calm,” 10 minutes
This one was less topic specific and more focused on a general practice of what I think of “real” (a.k.a. unguided) meditation as - bringing your mind to the present and keeping it there on your own without outside prompts. This was definitely more challenging since no visualization was involved, but it was certainly a good taste of “real” meditation as it had me working more on my own to stay present. My bedroom window was open during this meditation and there was a chatterbox talking loudly down on the street for a lot of this one, which of course made it extra hard to focus, but that just meant extra practice! Great lines from today’s meditation - “How glorious it is to be breathing,” and, “You are allowed to relax.”
Day 6 - Topic - “Health Anxiety Meditation,” 12 minutes
This one was specific to health anxiety (the condition formerly known as hypochondria) and was very effective. It was less of a meditation and more spoken affirmations, but that certainly still had the effect of helping me focus on the present. As someone who has struggled with health anxiety ever since almost dying from Ulcerative Colitis twelve years ago, I found this one to be like a breath of fresh air. So often with my anxiety, I expend tons of energy just trying to ignore triggers, or trying to reason with myself, but this meditation had me confront my fears directly and reminded me that my body can take care of itself, and that all is well. Sometimes one simply needs to be reminded of that in order to just let anxious thoughts come in and then travel through, without getting stuck. This meditation didn't really get me into a meditative state but it kept my attention and focus on my body in the present, especially while repeating the affirmations. I learned some great reminders to give myself on a daily basis too! Great line from one of the affirmations - “I forgive myself for the time I’ve spent worrying about my health.”
Day 7 - Topic - Guided Meditation for Reducing Anxiety and Stress: Clear the Clutter to Calm Down,” 20 minutes
I decided to end my 8 days with the longest meditation yet, but it actually went really quickly and really didn't feel any longer than the others. This one used one of my favorite topics of the physical world, simplifying/decluttering junk, in guiding me through a mental decluttering of the junk in my mind - fears, anxieties, guilt, distractions, etc. It used affirmations and visualization to reinforce that, just like cleaning up physical clutter removes the physical burden, by cleaning up the clutter in “the basement of the mind” we can remove the emotional burden of them in our thoughts, feelings and life. Awesome.
My observations and conclusions:
Put this on the “it seems too good to be true but hopefully it’s really true” list, but after only a couple days I started noticing that my long term memory was a little clearer. I had several moments of remembering random things I had totally forgotten about or hadn’t recalled in years. Could it be that just a few days of meditation was helping my brain chill out enough to start “working better”?!
Another thing I noticed numerous times was that the calm of the meditation stayed with me throughout the day. There were several times when a frustrating moment popped up even hours after meditating, and I found it easy to remind myself to stay calm and focus on the present, which was undeniably helpful each time.
I also noticed myself taking a few extra seconds before reacting to things, and being a little more conscious of staying in the present moment when my anxiety started ramping up. I found it more on the forefront of my mind to make attempts to act with love and kindness above all else.
So basically…after only 7 days of practice, I was experiencing some pretty HUGE benefits. To put it simply, I see my latest experiment with meditation as a smashing success.
In 7 days I experienced more than enough to convince me to make guided meditation a regularly used tool in my healing practice.
Given the fact that most of the meditations I did were only around 10 minutes long, I really have no excuse for not inserting this into my day. Like everything else, I just need to make it a priority, and then make it a habit.
If you are interested in trying out guided meditation for yourself, there are some really good meditation apps out there, but there are also a bazillion guided meditations on YouTube, and that’s a good place to start. You can pretty much search for any guided meditation topic that you’d like to try, i.e. grief, guilt, negative thinking, food cravings, forgiveness, self confidence, restful sleep, etc., and you will surely find something. I like to read the comments on ones I choose to make sure they have gotten positive feedback, but otherwise I pretty much just wing it when it comes to choosing which one to do, and most of the time, I haven't been disappointed.
I look forward to continuing my journey with this wonderful tool and will plan to give an update on my progress in the future. I’d love to hear about your experience as well!
May we be healthy, feel calm, and experience some true peace today.
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