I created the Immune Response Meditation for two related reasons. First, I wanted it to be of help to others during this unprecedented, and sometimes frightening, time. Second, I wanted to provide people with an uncomplicated way to have their own experience using a sound-assisted meditation (SAM) exercise so that they, too, can see how easy it is to feel the very positive benefits of meditation.
Why an Immune Response Meditation?
Ongoing research continues to show connections between meditation and the body’s immune system, especially how it relates to disease, inflammation and viruses. There is even a growing field called “psychoneuroimmunology” which is dedicated to studying this phenomenon.
As we are currently experiencing an unprecedented time due to the pandemic, we are also likely undergoing extraordinary levels of stress, greatly affecting our bodies. Whether it’s working from home, dealing with unemployment, managing your children’s home schooling or care, or being anxious about catching and/or spreading the coronavirus, the stress in your life has likely increased significantly. Unless we all take positive measures to manage our stress, our overall health will suffer, and our immune system will be negatively impacted. Meditation is one of the best ways to manage your day-to-day stress and you should be able to combat that stress and experience a very relaxed state by using the Immune Response Meditation. That alone should help your immune system.
But why stop there? While research shows that meditation alone has a positive influence on the performance of your immune system, my experience has shown you can take it a step further. When you are in a deeply relaxed state, like the one you will experience using the Immune Response Meditation, you will achieve a clarity of mind that can work with your body to bring about enhanced results even faster. I modeled the Immune Response Meditation off of practices I had been doing on my own for the past ten years or so and that I felt have worked well for me in enhancing my mind-body connection. I wanted to share my practice with others in the hope that they would see similar positive benefits for themselves, as well as experience how easy sound-assisted meditation technology helps get you into a very relaxed state where you can visualize optimizing the performance of your own immune system.
What Can I Expect From the Immune Response Meditation?
Before listening to the meditation itself, you should watch the short introductory video on the Legally Mindful YouTube channel that goes along with the meditation. This video explains the thinking behind the exercises, as well as clarifying the results you may achieve.
Start with an Open Mindset
So, let me talk a little about how and why I put the exercise together as I did. In all of the guided Legally Mindful exercises, I ask you to enter the experience with an open mind. I think that is critically important, because just like anything else, if you go into something “knowing” it’s not going to be successful, it won’t be. If you are open to the experience, you might be surprised how that experience goes and the benefits you receive from it. I then lead you into a short conscious breath practice and then a body scan where you notice how your body feels from your head to your toes. The purpose of following your breath and the body scan is to bring your attention inside your body and away from the distractions of the outside world. While you are doing this, the sound technology “behind” the relaxing music and my guidance should assist you in getting more and more relaxed.
Once you are in this very relaxed state, I ask you to place your hands over your heart and notice the energy in the area around your heart and then to concentrate on its beat. This focus on your heart space has been shown to greatly improve the coherence between your heart and your brain, which some researchers say leads to better emotional self-regulation, improved performance, and better overall wellbeing. Once you focus on your heartbeat, I ask you to “imagine and then feel” your heart energy radiating out to other parts of your body “like ripples on a pond.” This imagery is important as it helps you to visualize that you can actively direct your powerful heart energy to various places in your body, including those areas that control your immune response. I ask you to just allow this to happen, without putting any effort into doing so.
You are then given several minutes to experience this expansion of your “love-filled heart energy” throughout your body. Please use this time in any way that makes sense for your own experience. I typically imagine my heart energy as a glittering gold-colored energy that I allow to move through my body. I mentioned in a recent webinar that I could see people imagining sitting in a bathtub and having their heart energy fill up the tub, or even a swimming pool they could then dive into for a full-body immersion. It’s your experience, so take it in whatever direction makes you feel best. Just enjoy the experience of sending out, and immersing yourself in, your love-filled heart energy to positively impact your immune system and protect your body from infection.
Following this free time, I ask you to again “imagine and then feel” that your immune system is beginning to operate at its optimal level for your overall health and wellbeing. I think it is important that we visualize our immune system operating at its “optimal” level rather than trying to make our immune system the strongest it can be. There is medical evidence that in some cases too strong of an immune system response has led to adverse, and sometimes deadly, consequences for Covid-19 patients. I then remind you that “The more you do this, the easier it will be to allow your immune system to naturally build up its defenses to an optimal level.”
As the exercise winds down, I ask you to send gratitude out to your entire body and to thank it for working in a positive way with you. I feel giving thanks for the positive interaction between our mind and our body is very beneficial to promoting our overall health and wellbeing and having our bodily systems work together to, among other things, help us ward off disease and infections.
You can use this exercise at any time during your day – whenever you might feel overwhelmed and need to exert some control over a situation or simply to gain some stress relief. If you use this exercise before going to bed, like I often do, you are already very relaxed, and your brain waves are calm and coherent. Just what you need to go off into a nice peaceful sleep.
Many people think starting a meditation practice is too difficult and that it takes too long to see the benefits from such a practice. That doesn’t have to be the case any longer. By using guided meditations with SAM technology “behind” the exercise, such as those found on the Legally Mindful app, you should be able to get into a deeper, relaxed state more quickly and reliably than by using the more traditional meditation techniques. I’ve experienced that for myself and seen others do it as well. Hopefully, you’ll experience it for yourself when you listen to the Immune Response Meditation a few times. The SAM technology facilitates you getting into very relaxed state and the guidance helps assure you that “you’re doing it right.”
If you want to read more, please follow this link to the Legally Mindful website and a blog called, “Changing Your Mind About Meditation.”
I hope you enjoy using the Immune Response Meditation. Please feel free to share this meditation with others. Also check out the Legally Mindful website for further information.
Remember: This new video is FREE, you can experience it here: Immune Response Meditation Video