Relax your body into gratitude with a 12-minute meditation

Take a relaxing moment to relieve stress and feel deep gratitude for your hard-working body.

Pausing for a moment with the intention of allowing our body to relax with awareness can bring a great sense of restoration and renewal to the heart. Our bodies are overworked and often neglected. This guided awareness practice will allow us to feel a sense of gratitude for our body in all its beauty and mystery.

12 Minute Meditation to Relax Your Body in Gratitude

Read the guided meditation script below and practice, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio exercises.

1. Starting out, find a posture that feels comfortable to you right now. There are many different postures that we can choose from. Check your body to understand Which posture is best for me right now??
2. Once you find that posture, just start paying attention to your body and feeling it. Here and now in this moment, not trying to fix anything or change anything about the body. Often, the body may be used only for the purpose of working, striving, and achieving, but in this moment, we are inviting our bodies to naturally relax.
3. Take a moment to feel what it means to be alive in your body right now. Bringing attention lightly to the body, simply notice: How is my body expressing its aliveness in this moment? It may be accompanied by a great deal of sensation, it may be that the body simply feels relaxed and comfortable, or it may be that energy is flowing through certain parts of our body. Whatever is true for your body at this moment, let this aliveness be what you are feeling in this moment. This is my body and I am grateful for my body.
4. Now, let your attention focus lightly on the sensations Pertains to touching whatever is supporting the body. Maybe it’s the floor or the pillow, or the bed or the sofa. Allowing your attention to relax lightly, feel your body touching and supporting whatever is beneath you. This is my body resting, which is under me at this moment and I am grateful for this body and for this support and for this moment of rest. Resting just like a newborn baby rests in the arms of its parent or caregiver. Let your body relax, the support, stability and comfort of holding something really affects your body and your awareness. In this moment, I am being held and supported and that support is constant and unconditional, and I am grateful. Whatever is holding you back in this moment, continue to feel its connection and support, stay connected to that experience.
5. We are going to start inviting our bodies to relax In sensing the space around the body. So, we are really just allowing our focus to be on the skin of the body. And with each exhale, begin to relax your attention and let it expand beyond the skin, just a few inches out around the skin, relaxing into this spot. Instead of focusing solely on the physicality of the body, we are now inviting the energies in the body – the tingling, the sensations – to actually relax into the space around us. You can use your imagination a little to imagine that, with each exhalation, you begin to feel that your body is being held by the vastness of space around the body.
6. It may be helpful to start with your back, inviting the back to relax. Just let go into the space behind you. And going to one side of the body, feeling on that side, feeling the skin, and then inviting that part of the body to let go. To relax into the space around that side of the body. And then moving to the front of the body: feeling the skin, the sensations and aliveness of the body, and just holding the front of the body and letting it relax into the space in front. And finally, reaching over to the other side of the body, feeling the skin of the body, then letting your attention rest on the space around that side of the body.
7. For a few moments, as you are breathing in and out naturallyWhile the body is relaxing, allow your attention to rest on the space around the body. The body can now be released. Breathing in, feeling the body being held in your awareness. As we exhale, we are grateful for the space around the body. This allows the body to relax.
8. As soon as we end this practiceThe invitation is for you to place your hand on your heart, the body, the space around the body, and feel a sense of gratitude and appreciation for this moment of relaxation. And remember that gratitude for the body is a way we can always reconnect with this sense of rest, presence, and ease.