Do you have big emotions these days? Big thoughts and feelings that keep you awake at night, tossing and turning?
You are not alone.
That’s why we’re excited to share the following two meditations that help process great emotions from Courtney E. Ackermann’s latest book, Midnight meditations.
In her book, she shares 150 challenging Zen but simple self-directed meditations that will help you calm your racing thoughts, stop chasing sleep, and start getting a restful night’s rest so you can make the most of your days.
Two of our favorite meditations from her book focus on processing emotions – both by accepting and understanding exactly how you feel and why. And these are the ones we share with you today.
Now, let’s move on to the two meditations that will help you better accept and understand your emotions from this beautiful new book …
By Courtney E. Ackerman
Acceptance can help you give up what you don’t need and relax completely, allowing you to fall asleep peacefully. Follow this meditation to practice accepting your emotions:
- First, identify and mark your emotions. Find out how you feel.
- Take a few minutes to sit down with one of your main feelings. Let it wash you, sink into you, soak into your heart. Accept with him.
- Visualize the emotion. How it looks? Does he look like a human? An animal? Just an abstract mix of shapes? Whatever it looks like, keep it in your eyes.
- Focus on this visualization of your emotion and turn to it. Raise your hands up with your palms open and say, “I accept you.” You can say it out loud if it helps. You can also imagine embracing emotion.
- Allow the visualization to melt away, accepting it as part of your current experience.
Sometimes you may have to fight your demons to stay calm. At other times, you may simply need to embrace them and accept them as they are to allow yourself to relax.
By Courtney E. Ackerman
If you have a good idea of how you are feeling but don’t understand why, this confusion can keep your brain too busy to sleep. Use this meditation to find out where your feelings come from:
- Close your eyes and sit with your emotions for a moment. Find out which emotion is the main one at the moment. Make sure you handle the strongest emotion you are experiencing.
- Imagine a thread attached to the emotion you are experiencing. You can see where the string is attached to the feel, but you still can’t see where the rest of the string goes. Take the thread.
- See how you pull this thread, using one hand after the other to find more and more of its length. Stay with your emotions as you do so.
- Follow it long enough and you will begin to see things popping up on this thread that feed your emotion; for example, you may see a battle you recently had with your husband, or an incident with a friend. Let these things come up, acknowledge them and keep pulling the strings. Go all the way until you reach the source: the root of your current emotion.
Sometimes all we need to do is figure out where our feelings are coming from in order to let go and allow ourselves to rest.
Taken from Midnight meditations by Courtney E. Ackerman. Copyright © 2021 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Used with permission of the publisher, Adams Media, imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.