Our fast paced, high stress life style is leading many people to adrenal burnout.

The adrenal glands have several important functions related to our energy level and our immune system. They are also the first responders when it comes to stress. The hormone adrenaline gets its name from the adrenal glands, which secrete it. They also secrete cortisol, another hormone related to stress.

We experience stress far more often and for longer periods of time than our adrenals were designed for. Eventually they get overworked, and start to shut down, leading to chronic fatigue and lowered immunity.

Meditation in general, and particularly healing meditations, are good for lowering our stress levels and helping the adrenals to recuperate.

The following visualization is a great pick-me-up for the adrenals. Do it for a few minutes, several times a day.

Relax using the five breath relaxation cycle. Then imagine becoming very small and entering your body. Find your way down to the kidneys, and see one adrenal gland sitting on top of each kidney like a pair of pyramids.

Give some loving attention to your adrenals in what ever way you feel comfortable. Let them know that you want to take care of them, and mean it. Consider what you can do to lower their stress.

See the adrenal glands as four sided pyramids and run up one side of one of the adrenal glands and down another, then up the third side and down the fourth. Feel, as you run, that you are stimulating the gland, pumping it full of energy. Then go to the other adrenal gland and do the same thing. Finally, step back and watch your adrenals functioning optimally. See the hormones streaming out of them like a rainbow, flowing to your whole body.

Open your eyes with a smile, and you are done.

This is a meditation I like to use. I first learned it from John Blofeld’s book, Gateway To Wisdom, which is out of print.

This meditation can be used for physical or psychological problems. It is especially effective for stress related symptoms such as a headache or anxiety and with much practice you can get relief from even more chronic issues.

Start by getting into a meditative state, using your favorite technique. You can use the technique I describe in my post about preparing to meditate.

Once your mind is fairly still, contemplate the subtle nature of the body. The ancient Chinese saw the body as primarily chi or energy. The physical aspect of the body is merely a somewhat more dense form of energy. Actually, modern science tells us the same thing. When you get down to the atomic level, you find that there is far more empty space than there is solid matter. And as you get down to the subatomic level, even the solid matter seems to disappear. Sometimes it looks solid, but sometimes it looks like a wave of energy. So contemplate your body as flowing energy and very permeable. Anything could move through it, unimpeded. Continue with the contemplation until you sense your body feeling lighter or tingly. Feel your body as energy.

Next, visualize your problem as a dark cloud. If it is a psychological problem, see the dark cloud in your head, just behind the space between your eyebrows. If it is a physical problem, see it where it is. Then move it to the nearest of three energy centers: The space between the eyebrows, the center of the chest, or half way between the navel and the spine.

Now imagine currents of chi blowing through the cloud, like a soft, fresh breeze. Slowly the cloud begins to dissipate, until it vanishes entirely.

Next, just sit and enjoy the experience, and slowly return to normal waking consciousness.

The more you practice it, the more powerful it becomes. So start with little things and practice it regularly. That way, when you need it for something significant, you will find it very helpful.

I recently heard someone say, “All healing is making friends with the universe.”

That makes complete sense to me. We experience unwellness when we are resisting something in our lives. It’s not always conscious resistance, in fact it rarely is. But it is the resistance that leads to problems in the body.

Take allergies for instance. I often use the metaphor of fearful aggression, when talking to clients about allergies. The body thinks it perceives a dangerous particle and it attacks. if our immune systems could see a benign particle as safe, there would be no allergic reaction.

It is also obvious with stress induced symptoms like headaches. We experience stress when we are not accepting life as it is. We fight our experience, and then our muscles get tense and our blood pressure rises.

I heard a story about a woman who smoked for forty years. Every time she had a cigarette, she said I’m going to have a holy smoke. After forty years her family were worried about the health impact of smoking for so long. They convinced her to have her doctor check her lungs. To everyone’s surprise ( except the woman), her lungs were perfectly healthy.

By changing our attitude we change our experience.

People with chronic pain can have dramatic improvements in their condition by practicing gratitude or forgiveness.

Lots of people have latent viruses in their bodies. Herpes is a great example. The virus is there, why don’t you have herpes right now? Because the body is strong and balanced. Being at odds with your own life is one of the main reasons why our body and mind gets out of balance.

One of my favorite practices for making friends with the universe is inner smile meditation. We practice smiling at ourselves and the world around us. When we smile at the world we bring ourselves into harmony with it, and increase our vitality and well being.

I will be releasing an Inner Smile Meditation Series, shortly. Keep coming back to find out when it’s available. Or subscribe to the newsletter, and you get it at a discounted price.

In the meantime, any meditation practice you choose can help you go with the flow and make friends with the universe.

We hate pain. We do everything we can to avoid it, to numb it, to just get rid of it.

Pain Hurts. It makes us tense up.

The mindfulness approach to pain is different. We learn to be with our pain. We learn to transform our relationship with it, and somehow, it doesn’t bother us so much.

In mindfulness meditation we notice our sensations, moment by moment, without labeling them good or bad. We become curious about the details of our sensations. When we do that, we become detached from them. They don’t impinge on us they use to. We are able to relax.

With mindfulness meditation we may not stop the pain, but we will stop the suffering. And to the extent the pain is stress induced, we will reduce the pain, as we relax and allow it to be there.

Often, as we begin mindfulness meditation, the pain seems to get worse. That is because, perhaps for the first time, we are not running from it. We allow ourselves to experience it fully. Soon, though our experience gets better, and it keeps getting better.

My two favorite teachers of the mindfulness approach to pain are Jon Kabat-Zinn and Shinzen Young.

Shinzen Young has a great article on his site, called Break Through Pain.

One powerful tool I’ve found in doing imagery exercises, is the healing sanctuary. It is an imaginary place you can go for relaxation, rejuvenation and healing.

One reason I think it is so powerful is because every time you go there for healing it becomes more real. And every time you leave there feeling better, you increase the likelihood of feeling better the next time you are there. It is a positive feedback loop.

I encourage people to create a space that feels right for them. However, I do have certain recommendations that are useful for specific imagery exercises I use.

I like to have a warm sunny place to go and relax. Water, which  has great healing powers, is important. My sanctuary has a gentle stream, with one deep clear pool that I can immerse my whole body in. Sometimes I go swimming there.

A sacred place and a place to receive healings from imaginary helpers are also important. I have a temple. In the temple is a room for meeting others, a healing room with a massage table, and my private room for prayer and meditation.

If you would like a free mp3 introduction to your healing sanctuary, sign up for my newsletter on the right of this page. You will also receive regular mailings with various instructions for using your sanctuary for healing yourself.

I had a tai chi instructor who always said energy is feeling. He didn’t think much of visualization as a way of developing internal power. In martial arts it’s true, if you can’t feel it, it won’t have any power. In healing it is less true, but being able to feel energy does give your self-healing ability a huge boost.

image credit: I’m Daleth

When you learn to feel and direct energy in your body, you can do “acupuncture” from the inside. You can do it just like acupuncture, by stimulating the points and meridians, if you know them well, or you can send energy to areas in need.

You want to know what you are doing, though, because you can make things worse, by sending extra energy into an area that is already blocked, for instance, or by sending too much energy to your heart or head.

Here’s a way to begin to feel energy in your body:

Close your eyes and take a moment to relax. Then feel a thin slice of the very top of your arm. Feel the skin, the muscles, even the bone, if you can. Feel it as intently as you can, noticing the various sensations at the different levels. Then move down the arm to the next slice. Each slice can be about an inch thick. Keep moving all the way down the arm, feeling it with as much focus and precision as you can. Go all the way to your palm then start at the shoulder again and go a little more quickly. Do that three or four times, until you can smoothly flow down your arm with your awareness. Soon you will feel a flow of sensation down your arm to your hand.

Now put your palm on another part of your body, your foot or knee or belly work well. Flow down the arm with you awareness again. When you get to your palm send the sensation out the palm, into the area it is touching. Can you feel it there?

The energy transfer is not necessary, but it is a good way to prove that what you are feeling is “real”.

Once you are good at feeling the flow of energy, you can do a full body flow. Many people find it is helpful to this with the breath, but it is not important.

As you breathe in, feel the energy flow from your toes, up the inside and front of your legs, up the front of your body to your chest. As you breathe out, feel the energy flow from your chest, down the inside of your arms, into your palms, to your finger tips. As you breathe in, feel the energy flow up the backs of your hands, the backs of your arms, across the top of your shoulders, up your throat, to your face. As you breathe out, feel the energy flow over the top of your head, down your back, down the backs of your legs, to your toes.

Do that two or three times and you will definitely feel more alive.

When doing guided imagery for healing the body, it is often helpful to actually visualize the internal organs that need healing. Since not everyone knows where all the internal organs are, I’ve created a video showing the main ones.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCrPbDr_SOU

Here are some pictures, as well.

A very simple imagery exercise is to imagine pure light flowing into the problem area, and cloudy light coming out of it. If you want, you can use your breath. Breathe in the pure light to the problem area, and breathe out the cloudy light.

“Don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire”

When my friend Frankie asked me about calming a particularly busy mind, the opening lines of The Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer came into my head.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pCZ5E5tn4I

I know what it’s like to have a mind that refuses to quiet down, and I’ve learned a few tricks over the years.

First, I think exercise is very important. If  we don’t wear our bodies out  occasionally, our minds get over busy. Dog trainers like to say, “A tired dog is a good dog.” The same goes for humans. The exercise also helps you get out of your brain and into your body.

Dance is excellent for getting us out of our brains. The rhythm, the music, and the exercise combined, work wonders for bringing us into our bodies and into the present moment.

Sometimes it takes words to overcome words. Affirmations and prayer can be very beneficial. When my mom lived on the beach in Santa Cruz, she used to take an hour walk in the evening. Going out she would repeat the Lord’s Prayer. Coming back, she would repeat the 23rd psalm.

Most religions combine prayer with music in some form of chanting. This is my favorite way to calm an impossible mind. My preference is for Hindu kirtan. Kirtan uses mantras, words that don’t have any particular meaning for me. That way my mind is not distracted by what I’m singing. Also kirtan is fast and rhythmic, very danceable.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MENb60ooWrU

When you have finished doing one of my suggestions, just sit for five minutes and notice how you feel. How is you mind? Follow the breath. Don’t try to meditate, just be with yourself. With practice you can shorten the preparation activity and lengthen the time you just sit.

Do you have asthma or other breathing difficulties? Guided imagery is an excellent way to calm a difficult breath episode. Many people find stress aggravates their breathing, so just the de-stressing aspect of guided imagery goes a long way toward helping. However, it seems to go beyond that. In a study done at Lennox Hill Hospital in New York, more patients in the group doing imagery were able to decrease their medication, than in the control group.

The free audio imagery exercise I am offering is about 12 minutes long. I suggest you listen to it once a day. Then three or four times a day, do a short 2 – 3 minute version, on your own. If you are having a difficult attack, listen to the guided imagery if you can. You should notice a significant difference in your breathing within a week.

Do not replace your medication with guided imagery, or change your dosage, without consulting your doctor about it.

Before listening to the guided imagery, check out the post on preparing to meditate.

Breathe freely mp3 Right click and choose save as to download it to your computer.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_pMfANPr-s

In this video I give instructions on preparing for meditation. Part of it includes the five breath relaxation cycle. Practice this regularly and you will learn to quickly go into a state of deep relaxation.

The five breath relaxation cycle involves breathing out at half the speed you breathe in. Focusing on the out-breath in this way is very relaxing. At first, it may seem uncomfortable, especially with the longer breaths, but as you get used to it, you will enjoy the results.

Breathe in to a count of three, then out to  a count of six. Then in to a count of four and out to a count of eight. Then in to a count of five and out to a count of ten. Then you reverse it: In four, out eight, in three, out six. Then you let the breath return to a natural rhythm and enjoy the benefits.

Learning to relax quickly is invaluable for doing short guided imagery sessions. For many problems, you want to do three to six two minute sessions a day, so you want to relax quickly. Check out my post on short and long imagery sessions.