Transforming Addiction & Compulsion

This meditation focuses on turning towards our discomfort, starting with our bodies, to transform addictive and compulsive instincts. This offering arises from the energy of Pisces, which rules addiction, grief and escapism.

Transcript

Hello and welcome. The following is a guided meditation by René Sills, A somatic movement educator, Energy worker and astrologer. This meditation is intended to help support your embodied meditation practice. If in the recording you are prompted to do something that doesn't feel good for your body, Please adapt and modify to make it work for you. Please also note that the content of these meditations sometimes explores deep and subtle states and memories, And sometimes guided visualizations. You are encouraged to work with discernment as you practice with them. If any of the guidance René offers feels too activating or uncomfortable, Please listen to your body's knowing and pause the recording until a later time if you wish to return to it. These guided meditations range anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes and do not require any supplementary equipment to participate. We hope you enjoy. Let's take the first few minutes and just be wherever you are. And as usual, You can close your eyes and whether your eyes are open or closed, Feel your eyeballs relaxing. And let the energy of your eyes retreat from the space in front of you and move towards the space at the center of your skull. And as you feel the energy of your eyes shift, Notice the sensation that occurs in your forehead bones. Feel your breathing. You don't need to do anything to your breathing. Just feel it. Notice the moment, Just that brief second before the inhale begins. Feel the inhale as it comes in through your nose or through your mouth and notice how it spreads. Notice where your breath moves. Feel whatever contact you have with gravity right now. So any surface of your body that is resting towards the floor or the earth, If you're standing, It's the soles of your feet. If you're sitting, It's your buns. If you're lying down, It's whatever surface of you is on the floor. So in that connection to gravity, Can you feel the space between you and your support? So whatever it is, The floor, The chair, The bed, Something else. So feel whatever that material is and its presence. And invite your body to experience trust in relationship to gravity. So consider that right now it's very unlikely that the floor is going to drop out underneath you. Can you yield into this feeling? Can you relax the internal mechanisms that keep you holding on and holding in and holding up? Can you feel this relationship and can you allow the relationship to come to you and can you receive it? And just as we softened our eyes back away from the space in front of us, Feel the same in your belly and in your chest and in your throat. Feel that there's no need right now to do or to express or to control. Allow your entire body to soften in and feel that you're held in the force of gravity, That you're held in this yield. So all of us have places in our bodies that hold tension. People are different. So for me, Where I hold my tension is in my diaphragm, Which is the space kind of between my upper chest area and my belly. The diaphragm is a very common place to hold tension. It's a very common place to hold fear. Other places kind of very common sites of tension and are like, You know, You can think of it as like the squad force or something. It's like the Army reserves, Where they are in your body and they're just ready to go. You know, At the first threat and whatever comes in, They're going to hold on to it or those cells, That tissue. So other common sites in the body for holding tension are the eyes, Again, The space between the eyes and the eyebrows, The eyelids and the eyeballs. So as I say these places, I just want you to check in with your body, Notice if there's tension that's there. And it's as easy as just relaxing. You can take a deep breath, Send your breath into that space and then soften. The mouth, The area around the lips, The jaw. As you soften and relax your jaw, Feel that the joint between your jaw and your skull is also a place where tension is commonly held. And as you soften that joint, Feel that the root of the tongue and the base of the skull can also soften. Other common sites, Throat and the neck. The heart center or the heart space is a place where many of us hold a lot, A lot, A lot, A lot. And just being in this place, Just bringing your attention there can be so informative. There's nothing to do here. Just be there and invite yield, Invite release. Again, The diaphragm is the sheet of muscle that separates your lungs and heart from the organs in your belly. So it's kind of that midsection passes through the body from the front to the back and attaches around the sides of the ribs. You feel it in your inhale that maybe there's tension in the inhale. Can you let your breath seep into you like water moves through sand, Not inflating anything but just allowing your breath to drip in. The belly is a big one, A big place for, It's a big storage site for all kinds of stuff. Along with storing our fear and worry and anxiety and anger, The belly is also a place where many of us have learned to suck in or to hold in. So can you really relax your belly right now? And notice what happens in your low back and notice what happens in your pelvic floor. So the pelvic floor is the last place I'm going to talk about as a site of tension. The tailbone or the coccyx is the tip or the base of your spine and it's in different places, It's kind of different lengths for different people. So you might even want to find it but feel for it. But the tip of your tailbone is just behind your anal opening. So relax your butthole. The anal sphincter is a place where many people hold a lot of fear. And if you think, You know, We're animals and what do animals do when they tuck their tails or what are they feeling there, That humans are that kind of instinctual as well. So many of us feel fear and that fear is locked up right at the root of the spine. So the invitation is to really relax your pelvic floor and also to relax the genitals. It's a site of kind of mass confusion for many of us. All kinds of things, Desire and shame and who knows, All mixed up into one weird place. So can you relax? Can you relax your lower belly and kind of the top of your pelvic floor as well? So there might be other places in your body that you know you hold tension, Maybe your hands or your knees. And I want you just to do a quick body scan right now and notice if there are other places that need just a moment of your attention, Just a moment of permission to release whatever they're holding. So find a point or choose a point that felt like it had more potency than the others. Like I bet there was one place that I mentioned or that you found and you were like, Oh, This place feels different. This is a holding place. You go there with your attention and it's like, How do I let go of that? Or oh my God, There's a lot in there. And I don't even know where to start. So this is how we practice turning towards discomfort is when we find the places in our bodies and I kind of think of them as black holes a little bit. You know, It's like this gravitational sucking force that pulls things towards it. But then as things come in, They get like more and more heavy and more and more dense and compact and you can just stuff stuff in there. So like all the insults, All the shame, All the embarrassment, All the fear, You know, Just stuff it in there and that's where you can keep it. Like you know where that storage site is in your body. That's where you want to go. And when you bring your attention there, You might also want to bring your hands or a hot water bottle. If you're someone that has one of those lying around, I find that warmth and heat can be a really nice way to hold whatever the space is, You know, Whatever the space is that is the storage facility. Because basically what we want to do is provide a loving presence. So when we find our discomfort and this goes for any kind of discomfort, It can be physical, Mental, Emotional, In someone else. If we go in and we try and change it or if we try and make it better, A couple of things usually happen. One thing that happens is shut down. So we're like, I can help this and then whatever it is goes numb and we don't know how to feel it anymore. We can't access it. Something else that happens is backlash or reactivity. I can help this. And then the other thing is like, I don't want to get helped. You know, I don't want your help. And there's kind of a reinforcement or like fortifying of the troops. So turning towards our discomfort is turning towards the places that are really potent are working hard and basically just holding space. So right now in your body, Can you bring your attention and your awareness to whatever place in you is holding that you want to hold space for? Excuse me. So whatever place in you that feels kind of like it has a little bit more charge, A little bit of baggage or memory. And you can work with your breath. You can kind of direct your breath towards that place and remember that breath can move anywhere in the body. So through kind of a transfer of cellular movement of fluid movement, As you inhale, You can think about the directionality of your breath. You can imagine all of the tissues and all of the cells around this place receiving your breath, Softening. And as you exhale, Just settling and once again, Yielding, Just resting in support. So there's a truth about our bodies and I believe that this is true in our systems and relational habits as well. That if we want something to change, It is going to be easier to change if we develop a different kind of support before we ask for change. So if we're really used to just standing on the right leg and you know, The right leg is really developed and it's the place that holds all of our energy and effort and then we don't want to stand on the right leg anymore, We better know where the left leg is or where the cane is or you know, The wall. We need something else to support us if we're asking what has previously supported us to change. Now most of these places that are full of discomfort are places that are working really hard. They're working hard on something and I don't know what that thing is at all. Again you might have stories, The stories are probably meaningless on some level. It's the effort and the energy, Again kind of like a black hole, They're just working so hard. At some point probably that was needed and useful. At this point not needed, Not useful and causing dis-ease. So as we bring our attention to these places, We've got our breath, We've got yield, We also have permission and permission just to feel. So as we turn towards that discomfort, There is no need to change it and this is really crucial. There is sadness, There's fear, There's hatred, There's anger. Can you turn towards whatever sensation it is without the need to change it at all? Doesn't mean you're going to act on it, Doesn't mean you're going to react with it, But you don't need to change it. All you need to do is be there, Feel it, Keep breathing, Keep softening, Keep yielding. The laws of science tell us that whenever something is observed it changes. So you might find that as you turn towards the discomfort, Just the acknowledgement is going to change something. You might find that as you turn towards it, Suddenly there is a feeling that you haven't felt in years or an image or memory or smell, Some kind of sensation that comes up. So again, These sites in our body are holding sites, They're storage facilities. So whatever has been put in there is something that simply can be felt and resolved and that's why we're turning towards it. So we don't want to keep stuffing stuff in there, We do want to start unpacking a little bit of it and you might have thoughts or articulations that come up, Stories that come up, Maybe after you finish this meditation journaling is something you want to do. But on the other hand, The storage facility is storing things that have happened in the past and it's storing anxiety of the future. But what is right now is just this, Breathing the constant practice of yield. So as your attention is with this, Is with your place. Also simultaneously just feeling where else in the body might be coming in to compensate and hold. And in the quality of your breath, Can you invite a feeling of like your best friend or you know, The trusted older sibling. Can you invite the feeling of a presence that is saying like, Hey, I've got you. Whoever you are, Whatever you're doing, It's okay, I totally love you. You don't need to be perfect. Infuse your breath with that and send it into this place in your body. You don't need to change. You're okay. I've got you. I'm here. I see you. I feel you. It's all right. Just be there. And you can be there for as long as you need. And you can continue to come back and chances are that every time you check in, There will be some things that feel very similar or the same and other things that feel different. And over time, There will be more familiarity. And over time, And you probably won't notice it as it happens, But there will be less and less charge. This is a practice. And this is a practice to do when reactivity comes up and when the urge to turn away and to reach for whatever it is that feels easier than just being. And you know what it is. You know for you. You know those times when you're like, Ah, I got to get out of here. I'm going to do blah, Blah, Blah, Whatever it is. So it's in those times that this is our practice, Just checking in, Yielding, Breathing, Checking in, Yielding, Breathing, Accepting, Yielding, Breathing, Accepting, Checking in. I'm here for you. I see you. I feel you. There's nothing to do. This is important. There's nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. So if you're in a space where you want to keep practicing with this, I'm going to say pause the recording now and take as much time as you need. Now to come out of this kind of space where we're just doing deep check-in, I find that it's helpful to leave with awareness. So whatever part of your body or maybe it's some part of your emotional body or your psychic body that you've been attending to, Wherever that is, Thank it. Just thank you. Thank you for doing all of that hard work that you're doing. Oh my God, Thank you for managing all of my fear or whatever it is. Thank you. And then tell yourself, I'm available for this. Tell that part of you, I'm available for this. If you need me, I'm here and I'm going to keep checking in with you. And make that commitment and do it. And then slowly start to move out and move towards the kind of container of your body or the container of your field, Your aura, Your personal space. Feel the periphery, The qualities of your skin. I often like to imagine kind of a bubble around me. And it's protective. It's permeable but protective. And if your eyes are closed, You're going to just open your eyelids like a tiny little bit, A little fraction of an opening. And whatever it is that you're seeing, Can you continue to keep your eyes soft as you let the eyelids lift more? And then bring your hands together, Press your palms together and rub your hands together really fast until you create some warmth and some heat. And then when your hands are warm, I want you just to bring your palms over your eyes. And then use your palms to touch your face. Just kind of feel the container of your face. And then your skull. And we're just going to end by brushing our hands down our arms. And again, Just feeling our bodies. Feeling our bodies in the space that they're in right now. And noticing how you feel as opposed to some 30 minutes ago. So I really encourage you to be gentle and loving and accepting of yourself. I think that that is some of the most radical political work that we can do, Is to accept ourselves and to be loving and to do that to one another.

Reviews

Worth the oxygen

Felt my shoulders relax for the first time. Thank you.

That was one of the most helpful meditations I’ve ever done! Thank you.

Kind and compassionate guidance towards self love and acceptance. Thank you 🙏

so incredibly powerful to sit with ourselves this way. thank you.