Meditation
Meditation brings multiple benefits to those who practice it, among which the increased ability to manage stress.
These days you can find plenty of free meditation recourses online.
We would particularly recommend SVITLO – a free app for practicing meditation in Ukrainian language. It offers a great variety of meditation scrips, and its daily use can help you to become calmer, more focused, stress resilient and productive. The app is available for IOS and Android.
PRACTICE:
Safe Place
Next to meditations visualisations can be powerful way to connect to your inner resources. We want to offer you here a visualisation exercise focused on your own safe space, that is always with you. It can provide a refuge and a source of resilience in hard times.
Please assume a comfortable sitting position.
Feet on the floor.
Feel the support under you and your own breathing.
Notice your body and your position.
Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a safe place.
A place where no one can enter without your knowledge and permission.
This can be a real or imaginary place.
Maybe you've been there already or just would like to get there.
What place appears in your imagination, in front of your mind's eye?
What is there? To the right and left, above and below.
Notice the details of that space, the objects that are in it, the colours, the light or darkness.
If you want to add some objects, things that make you feel comfortable and safe, please do this.
What are you doing in this space? Are you standing, sitting, lying down?
What do you look like in this place? Maybe you are wearing something special?
No one can enter this place without your knowledge and permission.
If your space has its own boundary, notice it. What is it?
What is the distance from you to that boundary?
How much territory do you have in your space?
How do you experience yourself in this space?
Maybe at some point you would like to change something.
What bodily sensations do you feel when you are there?
How do you breathe?
How relaxed are you there?
How tense and how stable?
Notice again what you are doing there: sitting or lying down, in what posture.
If you are moving, connect with that movement internally, feel it in your body as if you were actually moving.
Being in this place, in this state, notice what emotions you are experiencing?
How does it feel to be in this place?
Do you have any thoughts about this place? What are those thoughts?
Allow yourself to be filled with this state.
Please notice what is the most valuable thing for you in this experience.
Where can this state be useful to you in your life?
Where do you want to take it with you?
How exactly could you return to it?
Try to return to this space regularly.
