Help Yourself Using Meditation

I’ve worked with many people who were surprised at how tired they were after a surgery or during an illness. When you have a definite illness or are recovering from an injury or surgery, your energy feels low because your body is putting a lot of its energy into recovering and healing. In those circumstances your body is forcing you to give energy over to its healing process.

What if you don’t have any obvious or overwhelming circumstances that force you to take time to heal? It becomes easy to push yourself until your body does force you to stop by shutting down in some way. It might occur as a nervous breakdown or collapsing from exhaustion or getting terribly sick. These states are hard to ignore; your body is demanding change.

But you don’t have to wait to take action until your body is pounding on the wall yelling for help! You don’t want to wait that long.

Meditation can be useful in aiding your body’s own recovery and healing process. Meditation becomes a process of recovery and healing by devoting time to yourself and to your own body. You’re not doing anything else. You’re allowing your body to spend time and energy on healing. And you’re specifically training your mind to let go of other distractions. If you’re meditating in a way that’s full of worry and stress and thinking how you shouldn’t be sitting there but should be doing something else, and you’re sitting tensely, that’s hard because you’re using a lot of energy to makeyourself sit. This is often the challenge of meditation: feeling like your mind and body are so scattered that you can’t possibly be quiet and still.

Instead of waiting until you’re forced to take action, start meditating now. Do you have signals coming to you loud and clear telling you to make a change? Don’t ignore them. Give your body the space and time to work on its own healing.

That’s exactly why meditation can be so valuable to you. Through meditation as a healing-focused practice you’ll learn to allow your mind to let go of that worry, strain and stress and let it flow out. Meditation doesn’t heal you; it allows your system to work on its own healing. You’ll have more peace so that your body isn’t tensely trying to fight your internal voice’s arguments: “Get up! Get back to work! You’re wasting time!” When you learn to set these thoughts aside and focus your mind, you allowyour body to direct energy toward its own process of healing. It’s spring cleaning for your body and mind. Even if you’re feeling like things seem ok it’s still useful to devote that time to clean things up, because it’s nice, it feels good.

You are an amazingly sophisticated and complex organism; many things are happening that are not under your direct conscious control. When you meditate you’re devoting time and space to allow your body to heal itself in a way that it understands. Your conscious job in meditation as a healing practice is to get out of the way. Get out of the way of the healing your body already knows how to do. Then it gets easier to meditate. The great thing is that it feels good too.

Want some help getting started? You can listen to a body-oriented meditation I created here. Or join me this Saturday, May 12 at Move. Pilates in Bloomington, Illinois for a two-hour workshop on meditation and mindfulness. Find out more here.