A Powerful Exercise for Releasing Stress

I can honestly say that I hold a lot of stress in my neck and shoulders. This is partly because I work at a computer all day and also partly because I’m pretty bad at managing my stress overall. I hold onto it much more often instead of healthily releasing it. I know that’s not good, especially since I’m supposed to be well-versed in meditation. I do meditate regularly, but especially this year, stress just has a way of grabbing onto me and not letting go. That may be why I surprised myself with a new and exciting stress release technique I stumbled into during my last meditation session. It was such a powerful tool in releasing stress that I felt the need to share it with everyone.

I started my meditation with the intention to release the stress I’ve been holding onto, specifically at my neck and shoulders. Generally, when I do this, I’ll focus on each area of my body, one small section at a time. I’ll first notice all the stress and pains that I may have and slowly feel them all release as I exhale them out, fully and completely, draining all the stress out. This time, however, was different.

I started at my neck after I settled into my meditation exercise. As I began to focus on just my isolated neck and really feel the tension that is currently stuck there, through complete mindfulness and attention, I instead visualized all the stress that was in my neck freezing like ice. I could visualize it all solidifying in and around my neck, into one great big crystal of ice, freezing up into a giant shard. And from there, as I exhaled to release the stress and tension, I visualized it breaking apart and falling off me, stress and all. I released it all in one big exhale. The experience was as if my inhale collected and froze the stress in the area I had isolated while the exhale broke it up and released it.

It was a fascinating experience, for sure. I’ll say that it surprised me; I didn’t expect to do that with my exercise as I never had done that before. From there, I continued this exercise down through my shoulders, then onto my arms, down to my wrists, to my hands and all the way down my body to my toes. I took a full meditation session to just isolate each part of my body, focus on it, feel the stress within it, and ‘freeze’ that stress prior to breathing it out. After the full body focused healing, I felt like a new woman. I could physically feel the stress release from my body, and I felt lighter and more relaxed.

What stood out to me the most about this experience was that it wasn’t the first time I had conducted a healing meditation around the idea of water healing me. Before, I had visualized a light rain cleansing me of any pain and tension, and now, I had done the same by visualizing the stress freezing. Perhaps, since I see the stress that I hold onto as a fluid form of matter that comes and goes from my body, my mind can more easily heal it by perceiving it in a realistically fluid form—in the form of water in its various states of matter.

This gave me ideas of other healing meditations to try, and it’s just another example of why I love creating my own meditation exercises. The freedom to visualize and conduct your own meditation practices, to play without limitations through ‘freeflow’ exercises, allows for incredible discoveries. The more I get to play and build my own meditations through my creativity, the more I learn about myself as well. All in all, the discoveries I continue to make through meditation truly inspire me, and I hope that my freezing stress meditation has given you some ideas for your next healing meditation exercise.