Self-Compassion Meditation For Chronic Illness

This meditation was created by request, with care for those living with chronic illness. Whether your condition is common or rare, chronic illness often brings unique challenges—feelings of isolation, grief, or being misunderstood, as well as unexpected moments of gratitude.

In this session, you’ll be gently guided through several stages: shifting perspectives (including a contemplation of our finitude), entering a space for mourning, and opening a dialogue with your body and mind. Drawing on the wisdom of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, we’ll also explore how to loosen identification with the body and invite acceptance.

May this practice support you in meeting your experience with compassion, presence, and gratitude.

image: fadi-xd
music: Vishal Bhojane

Reviews

This wisdom could not possibly have arrived at a more ideal time. At least, that is what I may tell myself for the time being. And these times? are beyond trying, incidentally.

The body has been suffering for days now the most wretched and brutal of all Covid attacks ever experienced…unrelenting discomfort and recurring widespread pain, with a double-eye infection starting yesterday so severe that most of the body’s vision was lost.

This already-addled, much degraded mind was then briefed today that another body—belonging to my closest, dearest, most supportive friend of 36 years—was suddenly, tragically found dead. By his little girl.

I’m not sure how the forces of all-that-is brought this teaching to my willing ears and still-cracked-open-a-bit heart tonight. For now, this mind can simply leave that ineffable development to the realm of mostly unknowable mysteries, as it attends to other pressing and requisite things.

Just to hear, and to begin to acknowledge, that ‘I’ am not the beleaguered body, and that ‘I-am’ is not the overwhelmed mind, but that which experiences both of those suffering things, is likely the most important and illuminating message that the soul could hope to receive in profoundly darkened days.
Thank you, teacher;
Your lesson today lands squarely and mightily.
🙏🏼

Thank you for this Hans, I'm very grateful for your responsiveness to my request 🙏

Thank you for welcoming grief and mourning (different, as you say, to indulging self pity). Thank you for permission for all emotions. Thank you for recognising the limitations on one's life... and the reminder that from a spiritual perspective, we are more than this life and its limitations.

Also thank you for minimal background music. As I have 2 forms of neuro-diversity (autism and ADHD) which create difficulty for me with auditory processing, meaning that music makes it hard for me to understand the words.

However Hans, there seems to be a small glitch in the recording, because in the first 2 or 3 minutes, it sounds like it switches to quite a different recording - just for a minute or less - with much louder music. It sounds like 2 different tracks might have somehow got mixed up briefly? 🤔

Thank you again so much for your work.