Any of our guided meditations can help reduce stress, but this latest podcast episode, Belly Soothe Meditation for Trying Times, goes straight to the belly. It’s designed to direct relaxation and relief to where it’s most needed.

We hope this meditation will serve you well during the stress of the pandemic and beyond. Here are some comments by people who have tried this meditation:

Becoming ill with covid-19 is only one possible stress. We are all experiencing a loss of normalcy. Going on a shopping trip can feel like walking through a minefield. Not being able to be with friends and loved ones brings feelings of isolation. For many of us, there’s a loss of work and income. Some are on the front lines, working in risky settings. On top of all of that the stress is simply “in the air”. It’s a time when we all need extra self-care.

This podcast episode is our gift to you from our Meditation RX app. We have made the app free for as long as this pandemic lasts. The app was originally developed in collaboration with a doctor to help support his patients and families with the stress of serious illness. As it turns out, the app makes a perfect companion for this very stressful time.

The Meditation RX app contains meditations designed for the relief of stress and trauma. A short version of our Learn to Meditate course is also on the app, along with meditations for everyday practice. We are grateful to have this app to offer as one small way we can help.

You can download the app for free, and it will always be free. In fact, none of our apps has a monthly “subscription” charge. You pay one small fee to purchase them and they are yours forever — no more charges.

Meditation RX Apple

Meditation RX Google Play

❤️ I’ve always made time for self care. Besides daily meditation, I treat myself to massages, hot baths, frequent walks in nature, good, healthy food, plenty of sleep and more. I thought I had the self care thing mastered, but came to realize two things — I wasn’t making self-care the most important thing in my day and, even more importantly, I wasn’t always doing it with love. Today, on Valentine’s Day, I want to focus on the love piece. When we approach our self-care with love, it work wonders.

❤️ If the thought behind eating a delicious, nourishing meal is “I don’t want to get sick”, the meal won’t be received and digested in the same way it would if you eat while experiencing the sense of food as love. A focus on the health giving properties of the food and the pleasure of eating will allow your body to absorb use the nutrition in a different way. If you apply a lovely serum to your skin and the underlying feeling is the fear of aging and a sense of “fighting it off”, you will be cheating yourself of the full benefit of this act of self-care. Even doing your self care routines as just another thing to get done wastes a precious chance to show yourself love. Doing self-care as an expression of self-love is magic. I’d go so far as to say that it is the love itself that is the most important ingredient of your food, your body care products, and all the activities which can benefit the body. Walk in nature with an eye to experiencing the love you find there. As you do laps in the pool, feel the deliciousness of the water flowing over your skin. As you stretch or do yoga, feel the pleasure in your body. Treat yourself well — treat yourself to pleasure, treat yourself to love.

❤️ Hopefully you have already discovered many ways to care for yourself already, but we can always find more. I recently contributed to an article on self-care in Redfin, Expert Tips for Practicing Self-Care at Home that has lots of great ideas and advice.

❤️ May you take good, and loving, care of yourself this Valentine’s Day, and every day!❤️

It’s entirely possible for meditation to be effortless, because it is a natural state of mind. When we learn to meditate, we are learning to experience a basic human ability, just as when we learn to walk we are “learning” to do something that is innate, something that is in our basic wiring.

We may tend to think of meditation as the technique or practice we learn and then focus on the details of the instructions. The instructions are simply ways to guide mind into a meditative state, and yet that state can come about completely spontaneously. You may have experienced it when you suddenly saw a sight of great beauty. A hummingbird suddenly hovers before you or you see an exquisite sunset. This can be enough to stop the mind and allow it to rest in its essential nature — a state of harmony, stillness and peace. Meditation instructions can help the mind to shift into a meditative state, but the instructions are secondary. They actually need to be forgotten for the mind to drop into its essence.

I find the most effective way to learn is to be guided in the experience. The guide is like a friend who simply points a finger at the beautiful sunset without saying too much about it. That way you can get caught up in the experience of the sunset and forget the pointing finger.

Embrace Effortlessness & Ease Part 3, is longer and has more silence throughout, giving you the opportunity to sink even deeper into the meditative state. It will further develop the habit of ease in meditation, as you let go of the obstacles to easy meditation described in the previous post.

May you find deep fulfillment on your meditation journey!

There are 3 main obstacles to ease in meditation.

The first is trying to do meditation “right”. The fear that we are doing something wrong can make us tense as we try too hard to “do it right”. There are no mistakes in meditation. There are no wrong experiences. Everything in meditation is part of the process. Think of meditation as a journey of discovery — self-discovery — learning about how our minds work, how feelings come and go, how to flow easily with ourselves and life. It’s not about following a set of rules or instructions, it’s about learning from our own unique experience.

The second obstacle is resisting our experiences in meditation. We may try to resist thoughts, with the mistaken idea that meditation means not having thoughts, or having a quiet mind. Thoughts are a part of meditation. What we learn is to allow them to come and go freely, not pushing them out and not getting involved in the meaning of thoughts. What we discover is a quietness and stillness in the mind even when thoughts are present.

We may also try to resist certain kinds of thoughts, or feelings, or sensations in the body. What we learn in meditation is to allow everything that comes up without resistance, or letting go of the resistance when we notice it. Everything experience is an expression of life energy expressing as thoughts, feelings and sensations. We don’t need to know why they are there. We learn to trust how life naturally expresses through us. Allowed to flow without resistance, thoughts, feelings and sensations come and go. Life is constant change — nothing lasts forever, even the painful feelings we tend to push out.

Finally, we might try to make ourselves be or feel a particular way. We may think that meditation is about being peaceful, and feel bad if we don’t feel at peace. We may try to manipulate our feelings somehow — trying to make ourselves calm and peaceful — but calm and peace come from simply being with “what is”. When we notice that we are trying to make ourselves feel differently, we can let that go, and in that letting go, peace is naturally found.

Part 2 of the Embrace Effortlessness & Ease meditation is a longer version of last month’s meditation. This will allow you to go deeper into the experience of effortlessness. Practicing this regularly will allow the principles of effortlessness to become clearer and help you form a habit of letting go of effort when it comes up.

This Embrace Effortlessness & Ease guided meditation is designed to help you experience greater ease in meditation. You will learn to let go of effort when it comes up so that you can flow easily with whatever you experience. All of our meditations are based on this approach, but this meditation will help you to embody the principle of letting go more deeply.

Our podcast was born in November of 2006, and this anniversary it seems like a good time to get back to basics. We are celebrating our 13th anniversary with the publication of 3 versions of this meditation, a 5, 10 and 20 minute version. The 5 minute meditation will give you a taste of ease and the longer versions will help you go deeper with the experience. The 20 minute meditation has more silence throughout. Today we are publishing the first of the 3, and this will be followed by the 10 minute in December, and the 20 minute meditation in January 2020.

What you resist persists. A key to managing anxiety is to let go of resistance. Let it be there. Trying to push anxiety out or make it go away doesn’t work. What does work is to focus on something else, like the breath. Simply allow the anxiety to be present.

Sensations and emotions come and go. Anxiety comes and goes. Just knowing that no state of mind or body lasts forever can help. All feeling states are temporary. If we don’t fuel it with our attention and worry thoughts, the anxiety will eventually subside on its own.

The soothing nature of belly breathing is enhanced if we pay attention to what it feels like to breathe in this way. Notice the soothing feeling. The body feels good with this breathing — when in the grip of anxiety the chest muscles are constricted, the breath is constricted, perhaps shallow and rapid. Belly breathing encourages relaxation and slower, deeper breaths. Notice how your body feels with this breathing. Both anxiety and the soothing breath may be experienced at the same time. You can choose to “favor” the breath and the pleasant feeling.

Once you’ve done belly breathing with the meditation a number of times, you will have developed a new habit. You’ll feel less threatened by anxiety, more comfortable with it, and you can do belly breathing anywhere, anytime you need to.

This meditation is our gift to you from our At Ease — Anxiety & Worry Relief app. Worry and anxiety usually go hand in hand. Learning how to deal with worry is a key to having less anxiety. The app has this and two other breathing meditations for anxiety, but it also provides a program to help you understand and break the “anxiety worry spiral”.

We hope you enjoy this meditation and would love to hear your comments and questions. Wishing you calm days ahead!

Although Autogenic Training can be used without guidance through self-suggestion, it can also be used with guidance in which case you mentally repeat relaxing phrases after the guide. Although you can use this anytime for relaxation, I created this guided version specifically for relaxation before sleep. For this reason, there are no words to guide you out of the meditation. If you aren’t asleep by the time the voice guidance ends, you can simply enjoying resting in a relaxed state until sleep comes.

We just celebrated the 12th anniversary of the start of our podcast in 2006. This Autogenic Relaxation for Sleep meditation from our iSleep Easy app is our celebration gift to you. We hope it serves you well!

When we wake up in the middle of the night, our thoughts and emotions can start running wild and keep us from falling back to sleep. Perhaps we've awakened from a dream that has left us feeling vulnerable or full of anxiety or sadness. We find ourselves worrying about things and our half dreaming mind can imagine all kinds of worst case scenarios. Our daytime logic seems to escape us. Our defenses are down and our emotions are more intense. Like a child whose awakened from a bad dream, all we may need is reassurance that the dream wasn't, after real, and everything is OK.

Our Wee Hours Rescue meditation has helped many people who use it on our iSleep Easy app, so we're sharing it with our podcast listeners in hopes that it will bring more peace to your nights and help you get more sleep. Just 4 minutes of voice guidance can help you reset and slip back into sleep. This guided meditation has music in the background which continues for 14 minutes after the meditation stops.

We hope you'll find this useful and would love to hear from you. Happy ZZZZZs!

Relaxation is not something you can do. It is a letting go of doing, a letting go of effort. The body and mind know how to relax, we just need to give them a chance to do what's natural.

Ideally a muscle contracts to perform an action and then when the action is finished, goes back into its relaxed state. That's the natural cycle -- relaxed - tensed - relaxed. Our dog can be lying completely relaxed on the sofa and then, with a sudden loud noise, she snaps to attention. Looking around and seeing that nothing is threatening or amiss, she's immediately back to relaxation mode. We humans, however,  are often chronically "at attention". Whether it's trying to keep up with the frenzied pace of modern life, or remaining in "flight or fight" mode after a major stress, we can find it difficult to get back into the relaxation mode.

Our Whole Body Relaxation meditation gently guides you into a relaxed state through a process of noticing tension and letting it go. Remember, your body knows how to relax. Given the chance it will happen on its own. Using this meditation repeatedly creates a new habit so that you can relax more easily anytime.

Let us know how it works for you, and feel free to ask questions!

(This meditation is a gift to you from our Relax & Rest app.)

It began with a soft whimper, then a bit of whining and then heart-wrenching howls — loud, long howls — mixed with barks. Leia scampered to the door and back, as if going there would bring her foster mom back. She was clearly panicked and grieving inconsolably all at once. All we could do was offer soft reassurances. We didn’t try to stop her or quiet her. We understood. We bore witness to her pain.

After about an hour of this, we remembered people telling us their dogs calmed and relaxed when our guided meditations and music were playing. We started to play our Meditation Oasis podcast. She ran over to the iPad when she first heard it. Then back to her howling, and then gradually, very gradually she calmed. Her cries got softer with more and longer times of silence. Gradually, gradually she calmed.

Much to our surprise and delight, she’s become more and more relaxed ever since. There was even some tail wagging, turning belly up for belly rubs and snuggling as the evening went on. We made it through a quiet night of sleep. Maybe she would have calmed anyway, but we suspect the doggy meditation sessions helped. In any case, we love sharing this photo of our darling new relaxed doggy with you.

Have you had any experience with dogs listening to guided meditations or meditation music?

Do you have a hard time sitting to meditate? Would you like to explore moving meditation? If so, we invite you to try the Guided Walking Meditation from our Walking Meditations app. You can find it on our latest podcast episode.

Walking meditation can be just as profound as sitting, and has the advantage of bringing the meditative state into our daily activity. Perfect for those who find it difficult to sit and meditate, it also brings a new dimension to meditation for those who do enjoy sitting meditations. 

Our approach to walking meditation is easy and informal. The Guided Walking Meditation gently encourages you to experience your body and your surroundings fully as you walk. You will be guided to let go of the mind’s preoccupation with naming, evaluating and analyzing what is going on. Letting go of thoughts about the past and future allow you to experience the present moment more fully.

The meditation is created for walking outdoors. To help you get the most out of the meditation, we have included part of the introduction to walking meditation from the Walking Meditations app. After the brief introduction finishes, the meditation will begin. Hope you enjoy it!

-- Read more about walking meditation

The key ingredients to dealing with anxiety are allowing it to be present, letting go of the worry thoughts that fuel it, and re-directing your attention. All of these elements play a part in this latest podcast meditation, SOS Meditation for Anxiety. It gently encourages you to let go of the thoughts that are fanning the flames of anxiety, and use the breath to guide the mind and body to a relaxed, calm place.

Allowing -- What we resist persists, when it comes to anxiety or any other emotion. You can think of emotions as a movement of energy, or even a chain of chemical reactions, in the body. Trying to push anxiety out or run away from it is like putting a dam in a river. It stops the flow. The water can't go anywhere. By allowing the anxiety to be there, it is allowed to run its course. 

Letting go of worry thoughts -- Fear is a signal that there is danger. When we feel anxious, even when there isn't a true threat present, the mind gets busy trying to understand what is happening and what to do. Without any obvious basis for the fear, the mind can go wild with worry thoughts and these thoughts make the fear even stronger. Letting go of these thoughts is essential to allowing the anxiety to pass.

Re-directing attention -- At the same time that anxiety is allowed to be present, we can direct our attention elsewhere. This is a subtle point: we are not resisting anxiety but rather "favoring" something else. In the case of this meditation, that something else is the breath. The meditation encourages you to pay attention to the breath. The pleasant, soothing rhythm of the breath and awareness of how the body feels as you breathe provides a calming focus for the mind.

Although this meditation can be used anytime you are anxious, it was especially designed for our new Meditation Rx Relief for Patients & Families app. Although the app has guided meditations specifically for use with medical situations and settings, most of the meditations can be used in other situations as well. 

As a lover of light and warmth, I had always felt a bit of sadness with the coming of the Autumn Equinox. It seemed to signal the descent into winter -- short days, long nights, colder weather. More recently, thanks to meditation and perhaps also aging, which has brought me through so many seasonal cycles and ups and downs of life, my perspective has broadened. I have at long last given up the illusion that I can find a "sweet spot" in life and stay there forever. Perhaps more important is the recognition that you can't have sweet without sour, and whatever my current situation may be, "good" or "bad", it will change.

I am grateful to meditation for helping me to experience that which doesn't change and find a place of balance to carry me through the good times and the bad. As I sat with my guided meditation group, these recognitions and musings lead to this new podcast episode -- Equinox Guided Meditation.

These days when I create a meditation for the podcast, I know there are people on the other side of the world who will listen. Whether you are in the northern hemisphere transitioning from summer to autumn as we are, or in the southern hemisphere going from winter to spring, this equinox meditation will speak to you. We are all experiencing a turning point in the seasons. Actually, we are experiencing a turning point in every moment. I invite you to explore the nature of this change with us in this meditation, and would love to hear what you discover.

At last -- we have compiled the best of Richard's music in our latest app -- Music Oasis for Meditation, Relaxation, Yoga. If you enjoy the music in the background of our guided meditations, then you will love this app. It gives you the ability to listen to a piece for any length of time with a Timer feature. A Playlist feature allows you to create your own playlist, as well as including some preset playlists. You can also choose from 5 nature sounds to mix with the music if you like. Enjoy this uplifting instrumental music whenever you need calming, relaxation or soothing.

Needless to say, I am a great fan of Richard's music. As a long time practitioner and teacher of meditation, his music is imbued the very essence of the meditative experience and helps others to experience it. We have already received some inspiring feedback: "This is a beautiful app with wonderful music!" 

The app is available in the Apple app store.

"We’ve experienced the sense of aliveness. We’ve been reminded of renewal. We’ve given thanks and taken into our hearts the many gifts life has given us and we’ve planted a seed for the time to come. And we can carry that aliveness and sense of life and miracle of life with us now."

Although this meditation can have special meaning on your birthday, it's something that you can use on any day to renew your sense of gratitude and wonder. I hope you enjoy this meditation as much as the group did and would love to hear your experiences with it.

I am a devotee of sleep. Sleep is so high on my list of priorities that I'll often forego a "fun" night out because I'd rather enjoy the simple pleasures of the next day rather than a couple hours of excitement. This may seem extreme, but there it is. I so love going about my day fresh, simply feeling good to be alive, enjoying a clear mind, stable emotions and a happy body. It's not that I'm a total stick in the mud who doesn't ever do something that will compromise my sleep, but this gives you some sense of how much I value it. (And if I miss a few nights of good sleep, I am sure to make it up.)

From what I've been reading of late, I'm lucky to have had this priority in terms of its impact on my health and well-being over the years. It hasn't just enhanced my quality of life, it's contributed to my health and productivity in numerous ways. Since I hope the same for you, I encourage you to read Arianna Huffington's new book, The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time. The book, released today, came to my attention because our iSleep Easy app is recommended in it. That was good news for us, of course, but it's even better news that this book has the potential to bring the importance of sleep to everyone's attention and vastly improve many lives as a result.

Trouble sleeping? Many of us find a good night of sleep elusive. My devotion to sleep partly grew out of many years of insomnia earlier in life. I tried many things and found many ways to fall asleep more quickly and sleep more deeply. Much of the inspiration for our iSleep Easy app grew out of my own experience.

If you aren't already, I hope you will be inspired to give sleep the priority in your life it deserves. You deserve it.  I hope you'll join the "Sleep Revolution"!

You can hear the interview with Lois if you register for the summit, including a special guided meditation done for summit participants. While speaking with Lois, I shared two important tasks anyone must accomplish to move ahead after a loss, and how meditation helps.

Task 1 - Mourn the loss completely. Grieving a loss takes time and energy, and unless you've done it thoroughly your energy will be bound up and it will be hard to move ahead. The only way through grief is straight into the heart of it, and that means feeling the painful feelings all the way. In doing so you cooperate with the body and mind's natural healing process, and when you've done this enough, you will naturally start to have more energy to move ahead.

How Meditation Helps - Meditation will help you to relax into the feelings of loss, letting them flow through and resolve. It will help you to stay centered, giving you an anchor so that you are not lost in the sea of grief. For Task 1, you might want to listen to our Guided Meditation for Grief.

Task 2 - Find the Spark of your Passion and Let it Grow. You may already be involved in fulfilling work and activities, but you may have lost your enthusiasm for them. Now is the time to reconnect. Or perhaps you are challenged to find a new direction, new interests that engage and fulfill you. In either case, you need to connect with your passion. Time to find what sparks your interest, your joy in life, and when you sense that spark, nourish it with your time and attention.

How Meditation Helps - Meditation helps us to settle down and experience ourselves more clearly and deeply. In meditation, you can connect with even the faintest spark of a passion you didn't even know was there. It can help you to recognize feelings you may not have been aware of. For Task 2, you might try the Enhance Your Creativity Guided Meditation or Guided Meditation for Intuition.

The guided meditations mentioned are all available on our Meditation Oasis podcast. You can register for the free online Unstuck & Unstoppable Summit here -- http://bit.ly/206iUH3

Stillness is at the very core of your being. In this new podcast meditation, you will be able to discover stillness in your own awareness.

As you listen to the Rest in Stillness meditation, you will be guided first to notice what is being perceived in the present moment -- sounds, thoughts, feelings, sensations. Then you will become aware of the stillness in the background of these experiences. Everything is experienced in awareness, but usually we are lost in our perceptions -- sights, sounds, thoughts, emotions -- without noticing the awareness at the basis of our experience.

With repeated practice, you will start to notice quietness in the midst of noise, stillness in the midst of activity, as you go through your day. Let us know how the meditation goes for you. We love to hear your experiences and are happy to answer any questions.
 

Creating something new fills me with a happy, fresh energy. There's a joy in the process of something new emerging. But bringing in the new also means letting go of the old. It reminds me of when get got our latest car. We really needed a newer car and it was so much nicer than our old one. But there were some sentimental pangs - the old car had taken us on so many memorable journeys and served us well. The old website was, well, old. It didn't represent us well anymore. But it was built with love. And the hardest thing was that in the transition we lost thousands of comments left by our visitors. Each comment was meaningful and special to us. Chances are you won't notice that your comment is missing, but if you do, know that we loved hearing from you and hearing your thoughts. Do feel free to comment again!

Last but not least, we built our old website ourselves. You might even miss that "homemade" look, but it was high time we had a logo and a more "professional" face for the world. So here's a shout out to Yesh & Tash for our beautiful logo and new website.