Meditating to communicate with our unconscious
Help calm your nervous system by learning to listen to it
Illnesses like long covid, chronic fatigue, and many other chronic conditions occur because our nervous systems are in fear-driven, chronic-freeze states. In order to heal and regain our lives, we need to calm our nervous systems and get out of that fear state. I believe communicating with our unconscious minds is a critical component of easing that fear state, and today, I want to cover a bit about why that’s the case. I’ve also shared my two favorite meditation practices for getting started with this below.
An Analogy
Imagine that the last time you went for a drive you noticed that your tires were dangerously bald and need to be replaced. Now, imagine that it’s a freezing day and the roads may be icy, and a friend of yours wants you to drive over to their house. You tell them you’d rather not because you’re scared, but you don’t explain why you’re scared. So the friend starts telling you about how there’s nothing to be scared of. They explain that your car’s heater works so it will be warm enough. They tell you about how new your car is so there’s no risk of the engine dying while you’re on the way. They tell you about how safe all of the neighborhoods are between your house and theirs so there’s no risk of someone bothering you if there’s a short walk between your car and the house. They point out that the skies are clear now, so there won’t be a snow storm that impairs your vision.
This goes on. But since the friend never addresses your concerns about your tires, you’re not going to feel safer. Even worse, your friend might get frustrated and suggest that you have an irrational fear or that you’re acting irrationally, because they’ve just provided a lot of reasons why you’re clearly safe.
Now, imagine that you were able to tell you friend why you were scared to drive. Imagine how much better you’d feel if they agreed that you definitely should not drive right now, and then they said that as soon as the weather was better and the roads were safer, they’d help you get new tires. It might still be a little scary to drive on a clear road with bad tires, but you’d know that you were taking extra steps to be safe, and that your friend was supporting you to help you out if something did go wrong.
My Experience
This miscommunication is essentially what was happening in my body. I didn’t understand what was triggering my nervous system. Even though I tried countless techniques to calm it down, and even though I knew various activities were perfectly safe, the techniques and my knowledge could only help so much. For me, most of the symptoms were a side effect of the fear, and not the cause of the fear. So although I could create a sense of safety around my symptoms (and it helped!), it didn’t sufficiently calm my nervous system down. It didn’t address the root issue.
I had to learn to communicate with my body and nervous system so that I could learn what was triggering different fears when they arose.
For me, that process began inadvertently with two specific somatic meditation practices (described below), which I initially practiced just with the goal of relaxation. However, unlike other meditations that create a relaxed, meditative state, these two meditations also included a section in which the listener asks their subconscious a simple question. For example, “what do I need right now?” or “is there something I should know?”
At first, when I did these, from deep within my body would come one-word responses. As I did this more, over the course of a couple of months, I tried asking other questions, and I became better at tapping into my unconscious self and getting longer more useful answers. The questions could be related to my chronic issues, like, “what am I scared of?” or they might be about daily life, like, “do I really want a pandemic puppy?” (My nervous system didn’t think a puppy was a smart decision, but we got one anyway.)
I began practicing these somatic meditations long before I ever learned about mind-body healing or JournalSpeak, and I think they helped prime my nervous system to feel safe with some of the deeper communication that comes from programs like JournalSpeak, inner child work, or IFS Therapy.
To be clear, I needed JournalSpeak and the other practices to truly heal; the meditations can’t be used instead of the other practices. However, these meditations were helpful for:
calming my nervous system when it was in an over-activated state or having a symptom flare-up,
understanding that there really was a distinction between my conscious and unconscious minds,
establishing an initial line of communication between my conscious and unconscious minds, and
allowing me to feel safe with the unconscious thoughts, which were sometimes a little unnerving.
The Meditations
Brody’s program is based off of yoga nidra. Her whole program is technically geared toward women, but my favorite meditation by her is the Phase One: Rest meditation, which is gender neutral. Toward the end of all of her meditations, she invites you to ask your body if it has anything it wants to tell you. The Phase One meditation is less than 20 min, which also helps make it more accessible. Earlier in the meditation, when she’s naming body parts to focus our attention on (a standard yoga nidra practice), I like imagining a tiny stream of energy traveling between each point. You can find all three of her meditations available for free here.
Somatic Descent by Reginald Ray
Ray’s program is based on more traditional Buddhist practices, is much longer, and will take you deeper into your unconscious. The entire practice is designed for tapping into and communicating with your unconscious, and it can also be helpful for asking big life questions when your nervous system is functioning more normally. You can find the full series of meditations for free here.
For Ray’s series, I recommend going through them in order, as you’ll want to have experienced each of the earlier meditations to go deepest into the final meditation. You may find some of his meditations are simply relaxing and helpful in their own right (his Ten-Points practice and Yin breathing practice were go-tos for me for a very long time, especially if I was having symptoms and/or in a freeze state). However, if you struggle with any of the early meditations (especially the Earth Descent meditation, which is #4 on the link above), don’t worry about it and keep moving through the series. Hopefully, it’s obvious when you see the full list of meditations, but you don’t need to—and probably shouldn’t—do the whole series in one sitting. Take your time through the meditations to build up to the last one.
Also keep in mind that just because these particular meditations worked for me, it doesn’t mean these are the right options for you. I am certain there are other meditation practices that are also geared toward communicating with our unconscious, and those might be better for you. Unfortunately, I don’t know of others to recommend. If anyone reading this has similar meditations they like that have that focus on connecting with the subconscious, please link to those in the comments!
My Tips for Meditating When Sick
1) Do it lying down. Both of the meditation series above are lying down meditations, but even for meditations that I liked where the guide says to sit upright, I still laid down. I usually propped myself up a bit so I wasn’t totally flat on the bed, but I was always fully supported, and there was no physical effort.
2) Don’t worry if you fall asleep. If you fall asleep while meditating, that’s what your body needs most. You still gain benefits from listening to the meditation, even if you’re dosing, and you can always play the meditation again.
3) There’s a good chance you’ll fall asleep, so if you need to be awake at some point, you may want to have an alarm set.
4) If you’re stuck in bed anyway because of a symptom flare up or fatigue, consider trying many meditations or very long meditations. I found that it could take 45-60 min to get into a good meditative state (especially if I fell asleep first), and then once I was in the meditative state, it was nice to stay there for a while.
5) If you have two devices: I found it extra relaxing to play something from the MeditativeMind App on one device as background music for the meditations above. It created an extra calming effect for me. If this isn’t an option for you, just the meditations on their own are also good. I loved these meditations on their own for about a year before I discovered the concept of sound healing.