Season 1, Episode 16: Sending Love To Yourself

This is the last episode in Season One, a capstone to celebrate the journey.

This is a bookend practice to Episode 1, “Love and Light,” a metta meditation designed for a table of one. It incorporates the Himalayan body scan and light-based lovingkindness meditation for that practice, as well as the open focus technique of opening to space. It also brings in the practice from hypnosis of visualizing yourself and time travel. Like many self-hypnosis techniques, it’s a bit of magical thinking.

For me, writing this practice was very emotional. It’s difficult to imagine yourself at different times in your life when you were experiencing moments of sadness or other difficult emotions that were bigger than yourself at the time. But I didn’t want to assume that other people would choose sad moments from their past to focus in on, and I left that choice unspoken in the meditation. I had considered bringing in language from Episode 9, “The Cave of the Ancestors,” to explicitly mention the different kinds of moments listeners could see themselves in, but in the end, I left it more like Episode 14, “The Amulet of Light,” to let the listener decide their own intention for the practice, intuitively and in the moment. As my teachers at Total Yoga Nidra would say, this is a nirvikalpa, letting the heart choose the intention rather than imposing your own will on the practice.

I’ve structured this season as the classic circular hero’s journey, and I hope those who have listened to it episode by episode have felt growth in their own practices. But I also recognize there are many ways to go on a journey, and many paths to choose, and I also hope those who have dipped in for one episode or listened to them out of order have found something to help them on their travels.

Writing these practices has been a journey of love for me, and I will return to them again and again, as they feel a little different every time, bringing me what I need in the moment, and not always what I was seeking.

As always, thank you for listening.