Lesson 1
To Help You Relax - Resting Your Body So It Can Heal & Recover
Illness can be exhausting as your body copes with the effects of the virus. Finding times to deeply relax and rest can help you heal. When you struggle against the feelings of being unwell, it just makes you more tense and tired. Then, you struggle against the feelings some more. It’s a vicious circle.
Finding a way out of that circle can help you get better. Focusing on your body also helps you be less caught up in your thoughts and feelings. It helps with anxiety and can bring a sense of relief.
The meditation for this session is called a Body Scan. You will guide your attention or awareness very deeply inside your body. It should help you feel more rested and more comfortable.
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Lesson 2
Finding More Peace - Taming Your Monkey Mind
It's normal to have thoughts. On average, people have 30,000–70,000 thoughts a day. And of course, we need to think to function in our lives.
The trouble is, a lot of us don’t feel in control of our thoughts. Our thoughts jump all over the place. You might be noticing this even more than usual when you are ill. Many things you used to take for granted are different. Maybe you’ve had to stop work. Maybe there are activities you can’t manage in the way you used to. That’s a big enough adjustment already. But if your thoughts are all over the place too, then this can make life feel even more difficult.
The good news is you can learn to manage your thoughts and emotions better, through mindfulness. Mindfulness, or awareness, means we can get perspective on our thoughts, rather than having them carry us away. Your usual mind is restless, like a monkey. Fortunately, you can train your mind to be steady, like an elephant.
Monkeys are very active. They jump about in trees, chasing after anything that catches their attention. But an elephant is grounded and calm. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an elephant mind rather than a scatty monkey mind? Mindfulness can help you get there. Mindfulness means that you keep calling your mind back to the present moment when you catch it running off.
For example, maybe you notice you’re worrying about your future. When you are doing mindfulness, you say to yourself: “Ah, I’m worrying again.” Then, you gently and kindly let go of that thought and come back to the here and now. A very good way to do this is by becoming aware of your body. Maybe you become aware of the feelings of your bottom on the chair or your feet on the floor. Not ‘thinking about’ your bottom or feet, but really feeling into them directly.
When you do this a few times, you’ll discover how you can’t be aware of your body, for example, feeling your feet on the floor – really feeling into them – and, at exactly the same moment, be lost in worries about the future. Of course, maybe you’ll bounce back into worry in the next moment. That’s normal.
But the mindfulness training is to notice when your mind gets carried away by thinking or worrying or whatever your mind tends to get carried away by, then to keep on calling it back to body awareness. Gradually, over time, it becomes more natural to keep coming back to the here and now and the stability and calm that comes with that.
When we are anchored or grounded in this way, we will feel more stable and in control while we go through our Long Covid recovery.
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Lesson 3
Getting Better Sleep At Night
Fatigue or tiredness is a common symptom of Long Covid. It makes things difficult and it can disrupt your routines. Perhaps you feel exhausted during the day and sleep a lot, and then, you can’t get good quality sleep at night. It can feel unfair that things are already turned upside down by Covid and now you can’t even get a good night’s sleep.
Lots of people are reporting this kind of tiredness and disrupted sleep. It’s not your fault. It’s just what happens as your body recovers from the virus. But there are things you can do that will help. Deep body awareness and relaxation can help your body get into more normal rhythms and routines. That can help you recover.
This session contains a Body Scan meditation to do at night if you can’t sleep. And of course, feel free to do it during the day if you feel anxious. If you wake at night, lying awake worrying about being awake will just make things worse. This Body Scan meditation gives you another option and will help your brain and nervous system calm down. Even if it doesn’t help you go back to sleep straight away, it will still help you to heal.
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Lesson 4
Building Emotional Strength With Patience & Kindness
Living with Long Covid is often unpredictable. Symptoms are different from person to person. They can come and go, without any pattern that you can see. Sometimes, just as you think you’re getting better, another new and surprising symptom can arrive. It might seem that the only predictable thing is that it is unpredictable.
There are good days, bad days, and often no clear pattern or cause to them. This can be extremely frustrating, even frightening. Some days it might seem that you are stuck in a maze of confusion that goes on and on.
It’s no surprise that many people say that their self-confidence and self-worth can feel a bit less solid. That’s very understandable. It’s not easy to live with this kind of uncertainty or the feeling that your body isn’t behaving as it usually does.
Patience and being kind towards yourself are really important things to develop as you move towards recovery. Imagine if it was a good friend, or someone you love who had your symptoms. How would you respond to them?
You’d probably be naturally kind and encourage them to be patient and hopeful. You’d encourage them to stay in the here and now, rather than worrying about what the future might hold. It is much better to focus on the present moment and find as much kindness and patience as we can. This will help our minds and bodies be in the best state for healing.
You may well find it hard to feel attitudes of kindness and patience towards yourself. This is very common. We tend to be much harder on ourselves than on other people. So in this session’s meditation, we are going to spend time consciously developing these attitudes towards ourselves.
Spending time working on kindness and patience for yourself will strengthen your nervous system and help with your recovery.
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Lesson 5
Daily Life Practice – Beating ‘Boom’ & ‘Bust’ With Balance
Doing more than we can manage and then ‘crashing’, or completely running out of energy, is really common when we’re sick and our energy is limited. If you have a ‘good day’ where your symptoms are a bit better, then of course you’ll want to make the most of it and catch up on things you weren’t able to do on ‘bad days’.
It’s a completely understandable thing to do. But it often just leads to more exhaustion and fatigue, and it’s very frustrating. We can feel trapped in a never-ending cycle of ups and downs. Sometimes, this is called being trapped in the ‘boom and bust’ cycle.
A good way to stop this from happening during our recovery, when energy is limited, is to be more balanced in daily life. We don’t have to always push ourselves to our physical limits when we feel a bit better. Instead, we can learn to keep a little bit of energy in the tank and to take some rest before we get completely exhausted. Then, we can go back to the activity when we feel ready. Over time, you’ll find you can get a lot more done this way, rather than always pushing till you’re exhausted.
A good slogan for this is: “take a break before you need it.” Doing something for a shorter period of time, and taking regular breaks, can really help you manage. Something that can help you to take those breaks is doing a short mindfulness practice at regular intervals throughout your day. You could decide to do it every hour, for example, or whatever timing works for you.
This will act as a ‘re-set’ where you can settle your nervous system down, come into the present moment, and find a few moments of greater calm.
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Lesson 6
Letting In The Good
Many of us will naturally focus on difficult things in life and this is especially true when we’re feeling unwell. The way we have evolved as humans means it’s important that we are alert to danger in order to survive. But this can become a habit where we focus too much on what might go wrong in our lives. And we don’t spend as much time as we could noticing things that are going well or things that we like.
You might think about that and say, “Actually, nothing is going well” given the ways Long Covid has affected your life. That’s very understandable. There are probably lots of things that are very difficult right now. But there will probably be things around you right now that can give you a little pleasure. Even if you don’t feel well enough to get out of bed, maybe the bed is comfortable or there’s something nice in the room. Let’s take the time to notice some little things now.
Wherever you are and however you feel, maybe there’s some light in the room that has a nice glow. Maybe when you look out the window you notice that the sky is blue. Or maybe there’s something else that’s nice to look at, or touch, or hear, in your environment. It doesn’t have to be a big experience. Just something ordinary that, when you take a moment to notice, you realize gives you some pleasure.
Practicing letting in ordinary moments of goodness like this can have a good effect on our brains and nervous systems. Noticing the things that please you can help the soothing, calming part of the nervous system. That will help you feel better.
Coming into our senses like this also helps make us less likely to be caught up in anxiety and worry. When we worry, we can lose touch with the present moment and with what our body’s senses are telling us. We can be swept away by thoughts about the past or future.
But each time we focus on our senses, we immediately cut through this and come back to this present moment, now. Because this moment is when we actually get to feel or smell or touch things directly. This provides a simple and effective way to break away from worry.
Our senses are always there to help us. We simply remember to pay attention to what we see, hear, taste, smell, and touch with as much focus as possible. And remember to pay attention in particular to the things our senses give us that we find enjoyable.
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Lesson 7
Help With Stressful Breathing: The ‘4 B’s Of The Breath’ & Living With Gravity
One of the common symptoms of Long Covid is breathlessness. Of course, this can also make you feel stressed or panicky. It can make your life feel like an uphill struggle.
All parts of our body are connected. One part can’t work so well if other parts aren’t also doing their jobs. When we breathe, many parts of the body are involved, not just the chest. It can help to become more aware of what is happening with those different parts of the body when we breathe. That can help with feeling less tense or tight in the chest.
A good way to do this is by relaxing around what we call the ‘4 B’s of the breath’. That’s the buttocks, the belly, the back of the body, and the base of the skull. These are areas that are affected by breathing. If we can relax around them as best we can, this can calm the feelings of stress and panic that can come with feeling breathless.
Relaxing into gravity as we settle into the 4 B’s of the breath will also help us feel calmer. Gravity is the natural force that keeps you on the ground and lets things fall to the floor if you let go of them. When we are panicky or stressed, we usually tense up—our muscles go hard and tight, including the muscles we use for breathing. But resting into gravity, allowing your body to settle onto the bed, chair, or floor and be supported, accepting the support beneath you. That will help to reduce this tension or tightness and make your breathing easier.
The 4 B’s of the breath are:
Buttocks – Relax your bottom as best you can. When you do this the muscles in the lower part of your body that are affected by breathing will also relax and soften a bit. Settle into gravity and feel the contact between your bottom and the chair or bed.
Belly – By letting your belly, your stomach, be soft, your breathing can become a little lighter. Without forcing your breathing, see if you can allow your stomach to gently grow outwards on the in-breath and come back down on the out-breath.
Back – We often think of breathing only happening in the front of the chest, because that’s what we can see. But there is also movement in the back of the body as well. The back of the ribs and lungs also move, as well as small, natural movements of the spine including in the lower back. Feeling into ‘back breathing’ can be naturally calming when we feel panicky. Dropping our attention into the lower back can be especially helpful.
Base of the skull– When we breathe, the air flows in through the nose and back of the mouth on the way into the body, then out again as it leaves the body. We often have a lot of tension in this area, along with a tight jaw and face. If we relax around the base of the skull, where the neck joins the head, this will naturally cause the jaw and mouth to soften. This will help make breathing feel a little easier. It’s also helpful to rest your tongue gently on the floor of your mouth.
Whenever you feel breathless, or anxious, become aware of the 4 B’s of the breath and relax and soften these areas. Let gravity help you settle down. This will help to make you feel calmer and more in control.
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