Hi and welcome to The Daily Insight.
My name is Hugh Byrne and I'm a meditation teacher here on Insight Timer.
Today's meditation will focus on relieving stress.
This 10 minute meditation will focus on calming the body and mind and working with stressful thoughts and sensations when they arise.
When we're experiencing stress and worry,
We're typically over identified with our thoughts,
Treating them as though they were the truth and often creating dire future scenarios about things that might happen.
Stress and worry are actually habits of thought that have developed through repetition over time.
We keep repeating the thoughts and the more we keep thinking them,
The more we tend to believe them.
Mindfulness helps us to disentangle ourselves from our thoughts and stories by bringing awareness to the thoughts without identifying with them and by coming back to our direct experience here and now.
So find a relaxed,
Comfortable posture on a chair or a cushion or bench.
Feel the contact of your body with the surface beneath you.
Allow your eyes to close or keep them open with a soft,
Unfocused gaze.
Let your chest be open so that you can breathe easily and invite your shoulders to relax.
You might take some full deep breaths,
Inviting your body and mind to relax as you breathe in and breathe out.
Breathing in,
Calming the body.
Breathing out,
Calming the mind.
And invite a smile to your face that sends a message to the brain and nervous system that you can be at ease.
If you're feeling any tension or stress,
You could place your hand on your heart and send yourself a wish of well-being and ease.
May I be at peace.
May I be at ease.
Calm.
Now with an attitude of friendliness and kindness to yourself and your experience,
Bring your awareness to whatever you're noticing,
Whatever is calling for attention right now.
It can be helpful to think of everything we experience as like guests coming to visit,
And to invite ourselves to welcome and accept whatever is here right now.
It might be a very active mind with lots of thoughts coming and going.
See if you can just notice the thoughts and let them go without getting lost in the stories they tell.
It might be a bodily sensation,
An itch or a feeling of warmth or coolness or discomfort or pressure.
Bring your awareness to the sensations and let them come and go with kindness and with acceptance.
Bring awareness to any emotions that may be coming up,
Sadness,
Fear,
Anger,
Impatience,
And allow the energies linked to the emotion to come and go,
To arise and pass.
Observing any thoughts that come up and letting them go.
You might find it helpful to focus your attention on your breathing as a way of grounding your awareness in the here and now.
Simply being aware of the sensations of breathing in and breathing out.
In breath,
Out breath.
And when you notice your attention has moved from your breathing to thoughts about the past or the future,
Plans,
Memories,
Worries,
Daydreams,
Problem solving,
Simply bring your attention back gently and with kindness.
If an anxious thought comes up,
You can name it anxious thought.
If that's helpful and let your awareness come back to your body and your breath.
Seeing that you can let the thought go.
That it's a choice whether you identify with the thought or choose to let it go.
And then you can make that choice to let it go.
If the current of thinking is strong with your mind being pulled back again and again to something that's worrisome or stressful,
It can be helpful to let your attention come back to your body and bring awareness to any noticeable sensations.
There might be tension in the chest or the stomach or tightness in the face or some other sensation.
And allow yourself to feel the sensations,
Letting them come and go.
Often with stress and worry,
The bodily feelings trigger anxious thoughts and the anxious thoughts in turn trigger tightness and tension in the body.
So the more we can experience each of these phenomena just as they are,
Bodily sensations as bodily sensations,
Thoughts as thoughts,
The more we can let them come,
Let them be and let them go.
In this way we can untangle ourselves from our stressful thinking.
Letting them come,
Letting them be,
Letting them go.
