Today's meditation is all about releasing those stress bubbles.
When I envision emotion in the body,
And you'll have your own way to envision emotion,
I envision little bubbles of trapped anger,
Frustration,
Sadness,
And these little bubbles get stuck in different areas of our body.
And the way you know where it's stuck is your own physical sensations.
There's no right,
There's no wrong,
There's no one place that an emotion can live.
So today I want to share with you one of the practices that I will be sharing in my upcoming How to Deal with Quarantine Burnout workshop.
It's one of the practices that we can use to start to soothe our nervous system and to activate the parasympathetic nervous system,
The one that brings you healing,
Alignment,
Presence,
And that sense of relaxation that you can only access when you've allowed the stress to leave your body.
In this time that we're in right now,
We are all experiencing some level of chronic stress.
Even if you're a positive person,
Like I am,
There's still this looming sense of unknown,
This sense of possible danger,
This sense of needing to protect yourself and your family.
And this type of prolonged stress creates symptoms in our body.
And today I want to help you release some of those stress bubbles and get a sensation of relaxation and give your nervous system a bit of a pause in that stress that's been bombarding us over the last weeks and for some even now a few months.
So whenever you're ready,
Go ahead and close your eyes and start focusing on your breath.
There's no need to control your breath,
Just notice it.
And if it feels right to do so,
Go ahead and invite your breath a little bit deeper.
And sometimes when you're feeling stress,
It actually can become difficult to take a deep breath because you're so contracted in your body.
And that's okay.
It's totally normal.
Just breathe in a way that feels good to you,
Slow and deep.
Just beginning to breathe in a slower way and beginning to notice your breath starts to activate the parasympathetic nervous system.
However,
When you're under chronic stress,
It takes a little bit longer to access because your mind is so used to having that cortisol stress hormone.
So just continue breathing.
Even if your mind is telling you that there's something to do,
There's somewhere to go,
You have something else to get done,
Give yourself the gift of these next few minutes to give your nervous system a little bit of healing.
Continue breathing in and hold for a moment and then exhale,
Letting your shoulders relax,
Letting the muscles behind your eyes relax even just a little bit more than they were before.
And as I say each body part,
It automatically softens just a little bit more,
Relaxing your jaws,
Your tongue,
Your lips,
Continuing to breathe in and out at your own pace,
Relaxing your neck,
Your arms,
Your hands and fingers,
Letting everything soften.
And if a mind thought comes through,
Just let it go.
Maybe imagine it melting like an ice cube in hot tea.
Continuing to breathe at your own pace,
Bringing relaxation to your chest,
Your back,
Your solar plexus,
Your belly,
Your hips,
Your thighs,
Your calves,
Your shins,
Your feet,
And your toes.
Continuing to breathe in,
Holding for a moment and breathing out.
I want you to take a moment and scan your body and just notice,
Notice any stress bubbles.
Sometimes they're really big,
Like the size of a grapefruit and they might be sitting in your belly,
Making you feel you have butterflies in your tummy,
But not the kind when you're excited,
The kind when you're really nervous,
Like it's a knot.
Imagine a bubble.
Sometimes they're smaller,
Maybe there's many of them and sometimes they sit at the back of your neck and upper shoulders making everything seem tight and tense.
Sometimes they're just scattered all over.
Just notice there's no right or wrong way to imagine or envision the stress bubbles,
Whether they're small and scattered or a few large ones bringing tension to your body.
Just get a sense of where they are.
Notice the color,
The size,
How many there are.
Again there's no right,
There's no wrong.
Maybe you just have a few,
Perhaps your body is filled with stress bubbles.
Then you get a sense of how many,
Where they are,
Just a general area is fine.
Their texture and color could be luminescent or opal or they could be filled with dark colors,
Gray colors,
Brown colors.
Only you know the correct division here.
Now I want you to imagine at the top of your head,
Just about an inch above your hair or your scalp,
Imagine there's like a little door,
It's like a little round door above your head.
You start to see that this door,
This little round door is actually creating a container around your body.
It's holding in some of those bubbles and pressurizing them to stay down.
Kind of like when you look at a bubble in a bottle of water,
You can see them in there,
Especially when shaken,
Just like we're being shaken right now.
It adds more bubbles.
And in a moment when I tell you it's time,
You're going to open this door.
You could envision it like a corkscrew or a cap or an actual door where you open it that has a handle that goes up.
However you envision it is absolutely perfect.
And as soon as I do that,
It's going to release the pressure and all the bubbles are going to start bubbling up,
Up,
Up,
Up.
Go ahead and do that now.
Open that door however you see it,
Pop.
Now you can see that the pressure is released.
All those little bubbles and big bubbles,
All the different colors are going up,
Even if they were all the way at the bottom of your feet and your toes,
They're just going up like a champagne glass,
Up,
Up,
Up,
Up,
Up.
Continue rising up into the sky above you to alchemize into the clouds.
Sometimes it takes a while for the ones all the way at the bottom,
The ones that felt really stuck.
Just imagine that the pressure is being relieved from all over your body and every little bubble is being released right now.
Just like on a champagne glass when you see all the bubbles come up or when you open a bottle of sparkly water and all the bubbles rush to the surface,
Up,
Up,
Up,
Up,
Up.
Take a nice deep breath in and a nice sigh on the exhale.
Just notice if there's any leftover residual bubbles that are still there that have been created over time and are ready to be released.
Sometimes those last little ones take a little bit of time to make their way all the way up.
Now allow yourself to feel the sensation of releasing those stress bubbles that you may not have even been aware of.
Over these last few moments,
You've allowed yourself to get present,
To get relaxed,
To breathe slowly.
This is a powerful self-care tool,
Ritual or practice to help you tap into,
Get present for and release emotions that need to move and sometimes simply get stuck.
Do a nice quick last body scan to see if there's any final little bubbles that need to be released.
When you're complete,
Just go ahead and remove that door altogether and let it dissolve.
Let the entire container around you dissolve,
Clearing your energy,
Allowing you to move forward with your day,
Your evening and be fully present for the next while and feel a difference between releasing stress and holding onto it.
This as many self-care practices are ongoing.
Doing it once is wonderful and doing it on a regular basis is a beautiful wellness practice.
If you like this meditation and you want to experience more inner self-care tools,
Especially in this time to release this chronic stress that we are all experiencing,
I invite you to join me for my next workshop coming up on May 1st at 12 noon Pacific Standard Time.
You'll find the link in the show notes.
Have a beautiful,
Beautiful day.
Go take care of yourself and as always,
I'll see you on the next episode of The Meditations and Musings Podcast.
