This week to attain, maintain, or regain your sense of wellbeing...
...practice using mindfulness and visualisation to self-soothe with an exercise in observing your emotions and comforting them with calming colours. This week, schedule a regular time to practice the exercise and as it starts to feel familiar, begin testing out how to use it during moments of stress and distress.
Mindfulness simply means paying attention to the present moment, one thing at a time, on purpose and without making judgements about what is good or bad. We all make judgements all the time, so we won't be able to stop doing it completely. But when we are being mindful, we pay attention to the judgements we notice ourselves making, name them for what they are (e.g. 'I notice myself judging xyz to be something I don't like') and bring our minds back to the present moment, rather than being hooked into the judgements we have made. Paying attention to the present moment means we notice or observe what is outside and inside us and we describe it to ourselves in words. Once we are mindfully aware of what is happening inside and outside us, we are able to decide how we want to participate in the moment and what we need to do that - like maybe a bit of comfort.
This week, spend 5-10 minutes each day, practicing how to use mindfulness and a colour visualisation to comfort the places you feel distress. This is an exercise in four-parts.
1. Body Scan: Sit still, in a comfortable position, breathing in your natural rhythm. Closing your eyes (or staring softly at a fixed point in front of you), sit in silence and observe what is happening in your body. Starting at your feet and moving up to the top of your head, tune your attention into each part of your body and describe to yourself in words what sensations you notice - how hot or cold is your skin? Is there pain or discomfort? As you notice other thoughts entering your mind, observe and describe these to yourself too, and come back to scanning the sensations in your body.
2. Mood Scan: Once you have scanned your body, turn your mind to the emotions you are feeling in this moment - observing and describing to yourself each of the thoughts, images, memories and urges you notice and bringing yourself back to what you feel. What is the strongest emotion? Where do you feel it in your body? How does it sit in your body? What temperature and colour is this feeling or mix of feelings? If you struggle to picture one, just pick one you associate with the feeling. With each question you ask yourself, observe and describe the thoughts and other emotions that arise in response or that pull you away from paying attention to this feeling fully, without judgement and without judging your judgements.
3. Choose a Comfort Colour: Once you have tuned into the strongest emotion in this moment and found a colour that matches it, bring to mind a colour that you find soothing. This could be a colour you find peaceful, relaxing, happy, exciting, energising, calming, loving, gentle, supportive. What comes to mind when you think of this colour? What sensations, images, sounds, tastes and memories belong with this colour?
4. Recolour the Mood: Then turn your mind back to the strongest emotion you identified in the mood scan, find where it sits in your body and visualise the colour that goes with it. Next imagine you have filled a cup with your comfort-colour and drink it down, into the part of your body where your strongest emotion lies. In your mind,imagine re-colouring that strongest emotion with your comfort-colour, seeing it settle more and more, seeing it cool down or warm up as needed, seeing space and tension free up, as you pour more and more of your comfort-colour into that part of your body.
To finish, open your eyes slowly and bring yourself back to the room and the next task in your day. When you notice your mood shift throughout the day, practice observing it, noticing where it sits in your body, giving it a colour, finding a comfort-colour and re-colouring that space in your body.
Once you are familiar with using this mindful visualisation, add 'Re-colour the Mood' to your Personal Coping Kete as a way to self-soothe and create space inside yourself, during moments of stress and distress. Instead of trying to stay away from what you think or feel, and being pushed around by it, you will be able to observe what is happening inside you, where you feel it, and create some comforting sensations inside yourself. With each wave of sadness, anxiety, anger, frustration, fear or any other kind of stress, distress or upset, tune in, observe the feeling and re-colour it with something comforting.
