Do The Water Monkey Meditation: To Conquer any Pain in Your Life
I recommend everyone, everyone do the Water Monkey Meditation. I’m about to describe (or at least experiment with it). The Water Monkey Meditation helps you effectively deal with any emotional pain, and even most physical pain. It significantly reduces the impact of negative feelings, and equips you with the courage to handle anything in life, no matter how stressful or troubling.
Meditation is one of, if not the most important skill you can ever learn. Saying you can be mentally healthy without meditation is like saying you can be physically healthy without exercise, unlikely. There are thousands of meditation techniques available, so if this doesn’t work for you, find another.
The Water Monkey meditation was developed by combining and cutting out steps from meditations from Tara Brach’s excellent book ‘True Refuge’. The core principle: We reduce pain not by resisting pain, but by accepting it.
Steps for Water Monkey Meditation:
You can do the meditation in any position: sitting, standing, lying down, it doesn't matter. Eyes closed or open, it doesn't matter (I usually do it lying down, eyes closed). First, recall any negative event, thought or experience you had (maybe someone said something that upset you, you're stressed out about work or a family member, you're addictively craving something, you're overthinking problems constantly). Don't go into problem solving mode trying to think through or fix the issue, just recall the event enough to trigger the strong emotions associated with it.
After the emotion is brought up, you notice that every emotion leads to a sensation in your body, whether that be tightness in your chest, headaches, blocked nose, itchiness... Note that sensation in your body, and this is most important: treat that sensation with full acceptance, without any resistance. Openly feel those feelings in your body.. If those feelings are overwhelming, you can take a break or recall a different event that's less emotionally triggering. But if you can handle them, open yourself to those feelings as long as you want, or until the feelings subside. Then you can either stop meditating, or recall another negative event and repeat the process. Basically, the more pain you open yourself up to, the faster you recover.
The steps mentioned work for about 80% of any pain you've experienced. The other 20% are more deep-rooted mental issues like depression, anxiety, bipolar, caused from traumatic experiences like constant verbal or physical abuse, being in war or being raped. You will know if that mental issue is very deep if you do the above mentioned steps but it doesn't seem like the pain is going away. In that case, you need to use the power of love.
To do so, first you need to think of someone that to you most represents love. It can be a parent, a partner, a friend, or it can be a traditional religious figure like Jesus or Buddha. After you selected someone, just repeat the previously mentioned steps of noting the painful sensations in your body. And whenever the deeper emotions come, bring the figure of love to mind as you experience your pain. You can visualise that person in any position (gently smiling, in a prayer pose etc), and imagine rays of love coming out from your figure of love into that pain.
I do this meditation every day for at least 10-20 minutes, some days I can do it for hours. But feel free to do it at your own pace. Even just 1 to 2 minutes a day can do wonders.
Doing the Water Monkey meditation has truly been life-changing. Now I feel like I can handle anything in life, no matter how stressful or traumatic. If you want to stop being hindered by negative emotions, and have the emotional strength and courage to do anything in life, do the Water Monkey meditation.