The "Turning Toward" Meditations
for Difficult Emotions and/or Physical Pain
The complex interaction between physical, emotional, and mental realms makes it inaccurate to say a discomfort is "just mental/emotional" or "just physical". Significant physical pain is emotionally difficult and significant emotional pain has physical consequences and correlates. Even so, for the "Turning Toward..." meditation there are two different recordings, one for difficult emotions (e.g., loss, hurt, anger), and one for physical pain (e.g., chronic pain, fibromyalgia, serious injury or physical disability).
If you are wanting to work on an issue that is not primarily physical, do the Meditation for Difficult Emotions otherwise, do the Meditation for Physical Pain. They follow the same sequence and they both address emotional and physical realms, but the guidance is slightly different. [ A special thanks to Vidyamala Burch who inspired these meditations with her “Five-Step” model. ]
By the end, you are likely to feel better than when you started, but if every time you try this meditation, you come out of it feeling overwhelmed with emotion and/or frightened or out of control, you may want to substitute another practice for this one (see If You React Strongly and the "NOTE" below).
After doing one of these meditations once or twice, you are ready to try the "Turning Toward" informal practices, which can be done virtually anytime and in any setting. Be sure to review Turning Toward Difficult Emotions or Turning Toward Physical Pain to guide you through the corresponding informal practices.
If you are deaf or hard-of-hearing, or English is not your first language, you may want to try the video versions with closed captioning (Turning Toward Emotional Difficulty video and Turning Toward Physical Difficulty video). For transcripts of these two meditations, see Transcript of Turning Toward Difficult Emotions and Transcript of Turning Toward Physical Pain.
In addition to accessing these meditations through this web page on a smartphone or iPad, they can also be accessed by the Insight Timer app. Once you have the Insight Timer app installed on your phone or tablet, search for "Palouse" to find these and the other MBSR meditations.
NOTE: In previous versions of Palouse Mindfulness, other meditations for dealing with difficult emotions were used. They are available as alternatives to "Turning Toward..." and can still be found through the following links: Soften, Soothe, Allow and RAIN.
© 2015 Palouse Mindfulness Inc.
