Hello,
It's Dr Bethany Brown and thank you for joining me for this tying off loose ends meditation.
This meditation is particularly useful to use in the evening when you are winding down for the night and looking towards allowing your mind and body to be in as good a place as possible for gaining a good night's sleep.
So for this exercise you can do it seated but equally you can do it lying down in bed.
So I'd invite you to get in a position that feels as comfortable as is possible for you today and just in those first few moments of the exercise allowing yourself to settle into your position to just soften and to gently melt into a place of of deeper comfort if that is possible.
Bringing awareness to your body in this moment noticing any areas of tension or any areas of relaxation and seeing whether you can breathe into them,
Relax them,
Soften them and now bringing your awareness to your breath following each in breath and each out breath perhaps even noticing the exact moment it changes from one to the other.
Bringing a sense of curiosity towards your breath observing its pattern,
Its rhythm,
The parts of body that you can notice your breath in,
How deep it feels and just following it moment by moment using your breath as an anchor to the present moment.
Using your breath as a tool to begin to settle and as ever if the mind wanders which it will do as this is what minds are designed to do,
Kindly noticing and gently bringing your attention back to the breath.
To begin our tying off loose ends I invite you to generally reflect on the day that you have had reflecting on what you have done,
How you have felt,
What has happened,
Things you have achieved,
Emotions that you have felt and just beginning with this really general reflection on your day.
I invite you now to specifically consider what has gone well,
What has gone well today,
What are your successes,
Achievements,
What have you done that is in line with what you value,
That has been authentically you and as you bring these to mind I want you to connect with how it feels to notice success,
To notice achievement,
To give yourself the recognition of what has gone well.
Noticing where you feel that in your body and connecting with that felt sense in this moment now.
I now invite you to reflect on any challenges that you have had today,
Things that perhaps haven't quite gone to plan,
Things that haven't happened,
Challenging interactions,
Challenging emotions and in particular I want you to take a moment to ask yourself the question what can I learn from this challenge,
What has this challenge taught me,
What can I take from this challenge and how would I grow from it,
Develop from it,
Do things differently and as we're looking to tie off loose ends,
To move towards a place of being restful and calm for our sleep,
I want to ask you the question what do you want to let go of from today,
What would not serve you well to keep holding on to,
To keep being fused with,
What would put you in a better place for moving forward if you could loosen up around it,
Soften your grip on it and let go of it.
This may be for example a self-judgment or a fear or a difficult emotion such as anger but seeing whether you can acknowledge and recognize something you would like to let go of and when you've identified something I want you to visualize it in whatever way makes sense to you.
It could be an image or a color or a representative object or simply seeing the word and I'd like you to visualize it.
Take a deep in-breath and as you breathe out I want that visualization to fade and again doing this in whatever way makes sense to you.
It can be that the visualization disappears,
It gets lighter or smaller or perhaps you just change the visualization to a blank slate,
A bright color or a light.
Again breathing in and breathing out and visualizing letting go in whatever way makes sense to you.
And now I invite you to ask yourself what do I want to take forward to tomorrow?
What do I want to take from today and take forward to tomorrow?
This may be a goal or an intention or a perspective or attitude and again I ask you to create a representation of this in whatever form that may be.
It may be a statement,
It may be an image,
A representative object,
A feeling in your body but building that now and connecting with it,
Placing your attention on it and breathing whilst holding the connection to the representation of what you want to take forward.
Slowly breathing in and breathing out and now I invite you to gently let go of that representation too.
And we're going to finally end with a short body scan.
I invite you to mentally scan your body from head to toe slowly and systematically working through each body part and observing whether it is in a place of relaxation or whether it is holding any tension.
And if it is holding tension I invite you to try and soften,
Relax or loosen off this area before moving on.
Systematically working through each body part until you reach your toes.
Observing the body as a whole,
Again softening any areas of tension,
Melting,
Deepening,
Any sense of relaxation you can observe and allowing yourself to just sit for a couple more minutes in this relaxed state before finishing the exercise here.
