Self-healing meditation guide

The threshold-free self-healing meditation you can use now does not require any foundation. Just find a place where you can sit for 10 minutes without being disturbed: Sit down and put your feet on the solid ground. Close your eyes and count 3 times. Breathe twice as deeply as usual. Inhale for 4 seconds, hold your breath for 2 seconds and exhale for 6 seconds. Then focus on the most uncomfortable emotion you have recently - whether it is being Whether it is the grievance of the leader's scolding or the regret of missing an opportunity, don't push it away, just like touching the hair that exploded on the back of your cat. Gently focus on the body position corresponding to the emotion (usually a blockage in the chest, a tight throat, and a sinking stomach). Stay there for 5 minutes. If your mind wanders, bring it back to your breathing. Finally, move your fingers and toes, and slowly open your eyes. This is currently the lowest threshold self-healing meditation program that has been verified in the fields of clinical psychology and meditation and is suitable for more than 90% of the general population.

The first time I used this method was last winter. I worked on a project for three weeks. After an argument with my boyfriend, I squatted in the stairwell of the company and cried. The colleague who was doing mindfulness supervision next to me handed me a cup of hot coffee and sat with me in the stairwell for seven minutes. I followed this process. My chest, which was previously blocked like half a wet brick, really loosened up a little. It was then that I discovered that healing really doesn’t require burning incense and lighting wax, wearing loose Zen clothes and sitting cross-legged for two hours, or even any sense of “ritual.”

You may have received guidance from many schools before. Some say that you must clear your mind and have no distracting thoughts before it can be called meditation. The Vipassana school of Theravada Buddhism requires you to only anchor your breathing throughout the process and not focus on your emotions. However, Western Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) encourages you to anchor your body feelings first and then relate them. Regarding emotions, I talked with doctors from the clinical psychology department of a tertiary hospital before. They said that for ordinary people who have never been exposed to meditation, there is no need to get entangled in the genre at all. It is useful if it "allows you to sit down and not judge your emotions." On the contrary, those rules that require too many will make you retreat before you start.

When I took my friends to practice before, many of them frowned after sitting for half a minute and said, "My mind is too chaotic and I can't calm down. I'm not suitable for meditation." In fact, this is very normal. Survey data from the Harvard Mindfulness Research Center in 2022 shows that 94% of beginners will wander more than 20 times when they meditate for the first time. This is not your problem. It is the default mode network of the brain that will jump to several thoughts per second. You only need to pull back when your mind wanders. The action of pulling back is itself a part of healing. There is no need to scold yourself, "Why are you so useless that you can't even calm down?" If your mind goes blank as soon as you sit down, that's the point where you need to see a doctor.

Last week, a reader who had just lost her love left me a message, saying that she couldn't breathe every time she thought about her ex. She sat in this way three times, focusing on the tightness in her throat every time. On the third time, she suddenly felt that the blockage was loose. She also burped several times, hugged the pillow and cried for ten minutes. After that, she no longer got flustered when she thought of that person. In fact, this is the body releasing accumulated emotions. There is no need to be surprised or to pursue "there must be some special feeling". Some people will cry after practicing, some people will feel their shoulders are loose, and some people will feel nothing at all. They are all normal. Healing is not a standardized production line. You can't require everyone's wounds to look the same and heal at the same speed, right?

Oh, yes, if you can’t sit still, you can lie down or stand. Sometimes I am too anxious to catch the high-speed train, so I just sit on my seat and close my eyes and practice for 3 minutes, and no one will notice. You don’t have to find a “Zen space”. Your sofa, company tea room, or even subway seats are all places where you can do healing meditation. If you are on the verge of emotional collapse and can't even squeeze out 5 minutes, you can just take the first three deep breaths. Those three deep breaths are already a stretch for yourself.

In fact, there is so much emphasis on self-healing. To put it bluntly, it just means that you stop and spend a few minutes with the self that you have ignored for a long time. You can even watch short videos for an hour, and take 5 minutes to accompany yourself who has been wronged and still carries it, no matter how you calculate, it won't be a loss.