Meditation and relaxation are absolutely key to calming your nervous system and recovering your health and energy. If you cringe at the thought of meditation, don’t worry. The types of the practices I recommend are closer to taking naps than the breath and mindfulness meditation practices that may be more familiar to you.

In particular, I recommend somatic meditations, which draw your attention to your body, rather than your head.

For most of us, we’ve spent too much time in our heads, and we don’t know how to connect with our bodies. A big component of an overactivated nervous system is that we stopped listening to our bodies and instead listened to what external advice told us was right. As a result, we didn’t stop or rest or address other physical needs when our bodies tried to warn us that something was going wrong internally. We may also shut off our connection to our bodies because trauma can get trapped inside of the body, and we don’t want to acknowledge or feel the emotional pain associated with the trauma(s). However, it’s this disconnection that has made us sick. Healing requires reconnecting, and somatic meditations are a critical component of reconnecting, relaxing, and finally learning to feel safe with what’s happening inside of us.

Plus, somatic meditations can take you deeper into your unconscious and help your body relax at a deeper level, which is lovely, but which can also help you begin to develop better communication with your body so you can be more aware of the signals and messages it’s trying to share with you. By becoming more in touch with your body and what it needs, you can develop a greater sense of safety when tackling harder emotional issues or pushing yourself physically because your body knows that you can now recognize and respond to these signals (usually by pausing or stepping back from the activity).

For well over a decade, I’d tried to do meditation off and on, occasionally being able to sit for up to 30 min at a time, and occasionally finding benefit from sitting. But most of the time, I either spent the entire session stressing out about my posture as my back hurt more and more while sitting, or I counted my breath and tried to ignore the intense pain spots popping up on my back. 

I also tried all manner of mindfulness techniques and yoga to try to be a better, more productive person. Unfortunately, all that did was teach me to hate myself more for failing to be properly mindful. It was just another example of me not being good enough and not able to do what I thought were simple things to make myself better.

Then I got sick. Since I had nothing to do but lie in bed, I decided to use that time to finally learn to meditate. It turned out that learning to meditate “right,” for me, meant learning to listen to what my body needed and not pay as much attention to the “rules” of meditation. I hope the tips below can help you figure out some techniques that make meditation more accessible and doable for you.

Meditation vs relaxation

When I was too sick and tired to leave the bed, meditation and relaxation became one and the same for me. There was a lot of overlap between the meditations that I found helpful and the relaxations that I found helpful. Today I do my best to have a sitting practice, but I also still do relaxation meditations where I’m lying down because they help keep me and my nervous system sane. I’ll often use the terms meditation and relaxation interchangeably in this section, but I’ll clarify if the distinction is important.

Guided meditations versus meditating without the guide

For years, I preferred meditation without any guidance. I found that almost all of the people leading guided meditations talked too much and I couldn’t ever just experience silence. So instead I would do breath counting meditations. These were nice and increased my ability to focus, but it was difficult to maintain a consistent practice because usually, if I could get my mind to calm down, my body would scream at me. I’ve since learned that my nervous system had previously been screaming at me during meditations, and so either I had physical symptoms that screamed at me, or I had thoughts that couldn’t be silenced.
When I started doing relaxation meditations during my illness, I found that I needed the person talking as much as possible. With my body in a comfortable, lying-down position, I didn’t have the physical pain screaming at me, and so I couldn’t get the voices in my head to stop. With the guided relaxations, the person talking would replace the voice in my head, and I could finally focus on what was happening in my body. During my illness and recovery, I needed to have guided meditations or my own versions of relaxing while listening to audio books (LINK).

Somatic meditations are key

I was too much in my head, and somatic meditations and relaxations helped me relearn how to focus my body. I had to relax my body and nervous system, and anything that put my attention around my head or on noting my thoughts did nothing to help. I quickly gave up on meditations that focus on breathing in and out of the nose, and instead turned to meditations that induced relaxed states.
Relaxation meditations, , and other somatic meditations helped me learn to feel into and reconnect with my body. You may find that you also need to avoid meditations that focus on body parts, such as body scans, because it can be activating for your nervous system to draw your attention to real body parts that may be experiencing symptoms. I found success with somatic meditations that focused on relaxation or “energetic” sections of my body, such as yoga nidra, lower dantian meditations (from Taoist and Zen practices), and chakra meditations. These practices helped draw my attention into my body while allowing me to avoid focusing on scary, physical symptoms. (Later, I learned how to be with the symptoms too, but it’s not what I started with.)

It’s okay to lie down

There’s lots of advice out there not to meditate lying down because you’ll fall asleep. My own experience was that if I fell asleep while meditating, it’s because I needed sleep. If I’m awake enough, then I stay awake throughout the entire meditation, even if I’m lying down. Especially if you’re sick, I would argue that anytime you can sleep, it’s a good thing. Moreover, if I fell asleep while doing a guided, relaxing meditation, I always woke up feeling better than if I’d just taken a nap.

Getting through a symptom flare

Lying down for deep relaxations and meditations were the only thing that helped once I was in the middle of a flare up of any symptom, and I usually had to stay lying down and relaxing until it started to ease. This changed once I got better at feeling and processing emotions, but that’s a discussion for another page.

Tips for a seated practice

By the time I was healthy enough to start a sitting practice again, I’d been doing JournalSpeak and somatic meditations long enough that I’d learned to tap into my body more directly. I’d also learned to stop listening to all the rules for meditation, specifically with respect to posture or what it means to quiet the mind.
For me, that meant that I try to sit squarely on my sits bones, but then I listen to what my body is telling me with regard to my mind and my posture. If my mind is already fairly clear, then my posture is fairly good, and I can just focus on breathing into my lower belly. If my posture is bad, then it means there are some things I haven’t tapped into yet, and I spend the time meditating on what my body is trying to tell me with the poor posture. More on this later, but the important point is that I no longer try to use my meditation time to control my mind and body as I used to, and it’s now a time to tap deeper into what’s happening internally. This may or may not be what traditional meditation is, but it’s what I find most effective.

Find what works for you

There are so many guided meditations and meditation apps out there. I had to be very particular with the meditations I chose. The majority of guided meditations I tried did not work for me. I had to keep searching to find the right ones. Also, for all of the guided meditations I found that I did like and repeated often, I would still spend at least half of the meditation ignoring the guidance of the speaker, and instead focus on whatever body part or symptom seemed to need my attention. Some of my favorites can be found below, but they won’t work for everyone. Be patient and find the meditations that you like and that work for you. It’s worth the time and hassle of experimenting with different guided meditations to find the ones that are the best fit.