BUILDING SELF-ESTEEM USING GUIDED MEDITATION

Everyone suffers from low self-esteem at some point in their lives - I know that I certainly have! Whether it’s because of problems at work, a relationship break up, conflicts in the family, putting on weight, getting older or just times when you’re feeling run down. We can all do with a boost to our self-esteem from time to time.

Guided Meditation provides a way of experiencing self-esteem from the ‘inside-out’. It allows us to find immediate empowerment by putting us in touch with a place within ourselves that contains inner wisdom and self-belief and already knows what we need to do to transform our lives.

What is Guided Meditation?

In our busy day-to-day lives, we spend much of our time in our ‘left’ brain hemisphere, the part that is responsible for logic, reasoning and language. We attack problems by ‘thinking’ about them and often spend hours going round and round in circles, building anxiety and getting nowhere fast. Guided Meditation, on the other hand, take us into our ‘right’ brain hemisphere, where imagination, creativity and intuition are activated. We do not spend enough time in this part of our brains! In the right-brain, we can discover answers, inner guidance and support that we cannot access with the left-brain. In short, the left-brain tends to consolidate what we already know, whereas the right-brain leads us towards new perspectives, new insights and new possibilities.

Try this simple exercise. Read this paragraph and then close your eyes as you follow the instructions. In your mind’s eye, imagine a lemon. Sense the colour of this lemon, the dimples in the skin, the feel of the waxy coating. Cut the lemon in half and hold it up to your nose, squeeze a little juice onto your tongue - feel how your tongue responds...

That’s the basis of Guided Meditation! It is about leading you through an experience in your mind. The only difference is that meditations for self-esteem involve specifically designed ‘inner journeys’, where you take a stroll in your imagination and find messages popping up from your subconscious self, to enlighten and guide you.

Guided Meditation is also known as ‘guided-imagery’ and ‘visualisation’. It differs from more traditional meditation, in that instead of trying to clear the mind and keep it ‘empty’, guided meditation uses the mind dynamically to actively draw on our (much under-used) natural abilities to free-associate and capture images and symbols that contain clues and messages for moving forward.

Preparing for Guided Meditation

Relaxation is an essential part of the process. Before embarking on an inner journey, we need to calm down, slow down our brain-waves, switch off our busy left-brain and move over into our right-brain. We can do this lying down, sitting cross-legged or sitting in a straight-backed chair - any position is fine, as long as the spine is straight and we are not likely to get pin-and-needles.

For people who have not tried Guided Meditation before, it might feel a little strange at first. Everyone will have their own unique personal response. Some people ‘see’ something like a film running before them in Technicolor, others sense feelings or hear words, sense colours, shapes, symbols and so on. There is no ‘right’ way to do it. The only essential guidelines are to prevent ‘thinking’ from getting in the way, to stick with the first image (it is there for a reason and we need to learn to trust our intuition) and to try not to analyse or ‘make’ things happen. Essentially, going on an inner journey is rather like quietly watching as a dream unfolds.

Drawing the inner journey, afterwards, is a powerful way of anchoring the experience and finding out even more. By drawing, you stay in the right-brain, but investigate further by finding colours, shapes and spatial arrangements to replicate the experience. You do not need to be at all artistic to do this - blobs, stick-people and doodles will all capture something of the meaning for you, in your own way.

Once you have put your images from the journey on paper, you can then notice any themes and patterns that may emerge. In one of my recent groups, Ruth had not realised that all her drawings had ‘barriers’ of some kind - fences, walls, blocks, hurdles. She laughed and knew exactly what that meant for her, once it was brought to her attention. Richard had drawn a range of buildings over several sessions - a cottage, a block of flats and other dwelling places. He had not known on a conscious level that he needed to move out of his own flat, but as soon as he saw it so clearly in front of him, it instantly made sense.

The Benefits of Guided Meditation

As well as being able to tap into your right-brain and subconscious to discover new inner resources for coping better with everything life has in store for you - there are further, far-reaching benefits of Guided Meditation. By stopping to tune into your inner world, you can ‘get off the treadmill’ to take stock of who you are and where you are heading. You can learn more about yourself, your needs and what you most want out of life. You will also develop skills for relaxation and dealing with stress. By giving yourself this personal time-out for yourself, you can also re-charge your batteries (people with low self-esteem often put themselves last on the list).

The enduring beauty of Guided Meditation is that the same inner journeys can be revisited over and over again. If you do one in three months time, you will find something different. Inner journeys are always up to date and reflect what is going on for you in the here and now. It is not a case that once you have completed one, it loses its value.

I have been astonished by the results of using Guided Meditation in groups for building self-esteem. People who have never done any form of meditation before are able to discover inner strength and inner resources, and make sense of their lives, get a new perspective and find answers. I have been trusting this process myself for ten years and it has never let me down.

Alison Waines runs Meditation for Self-Esteem courses in Southampton, UK.

Books by Alison Waines

The Self-Esteem Journal: using a Journal to Build Self-Esteem - Sheldon Press, £7.99.

Making Relationships Work: How to love others and yourself - Sheldon Press, due October 2005

To preserve confidentiality, names in this article have been changed.

© Alison Waines, 2005

www.awaines.fsnet.co.uk