Hello all,
I am proud to announce that I have taken a step forward and have started therapy. I have worked on my first session with my therapist. She suggested a very helpful meditation in order to keep calm and to hopefully gain some insight into some of the problems I am facing.
The meditation is to start with you tapping your hands on your knees from a relaxed, sitting position. Then, bring up images in your mind of certain life situations. The object of the exercise Is to focus on connecting the physical sensations with the feeling in your mind. Making this connection is extremely important because very often, even if we do not know how we are feeling in our heads, our bodies will know how we are feeling. We experience headaches, body aches, feelings of anxiety in our body, tenseness, etc. If we can learn to recognize the way our bodies are feeling physically and connect that to how we are feeling mentally, we can form a bod-mind connection that will help us to better understand soem of our issues, as well as find better ways to recognize the triggers/warning sign of an upcoming episode, as well as how to cope with it.
Visualization is key here!! Relax, keep an open mind and allow your thoughts to come naturally to you, do not force them. Think of a particular event in your life that has truly mad you sad or brought feelings of hopelessness or devastation into your life. For every action, there is a reaction, so try and think of a time when you remember something triggering your mood or a time when your negative mood was strongest. Then, keep going from memory to memory with no judgments, simply observation of your thought and mind. Once you feel you have sufficiently pictured an event, try to see how your body reacts to the emotions of that memory. Continue this for several memories. Then, picture someone in your life or a symbol in the world that represents what makes you feel protected. Connect those feeling with what you are physically feeling. Then think of a nurturer in your life and go with that. Again, connect with the physical sensations. The, think o a place in your mind, whether in reality or in your imagination that makes you feel calm and at peace. Now, take that feeling in and notice how your body feels. Now, visualize your future and where you would like to be. Then, visualize taking all your past memories, and thoughts of your future and place it in a container where you can store them and then reopen them at a later time. All the while, breathe deeply.
Hope this helps,
Fallabe12
