Ritual is ritual because it doesn’t change. We begin the peer group support meeting by introducing ourselves and briefly saying why we have come to the group today. This generally involves acknowledging what we are “working on” or “hoping for” in our lives … from recovering to managing anxiety to being able to talk openly and sincerely with each other about our behavioral health. We share challenges and successes that we may have experienced over the past week.
Each new meeting starts with a brief online guided meditation (to get us all into a comfortable state of mind). Today’s guided mediation was called “Beach Imagery” (by Take Care Coaching). This was a bit different because most of our prior guided meditations were focused on our inner self and body awareness, with progressive muscle relaxation and body scan for tensions. Today we were looking outward to a peaceful place as a source of calmness.
We always check in with each other to talk about the guided meditation as a experience. Today we also talked about the nature of the image that we constructed for ourselves. Each of us had different images, as we might have expected because we are each individual people. Some imaged a beach that they had visited, some imagined a beach from a photograph or painting, and some invented a beach they hadn’t seen or experienced before. It was interesting to discover that several of us had pictured the beach at late or mid-morning. Some of us had highly detailed images. This isn’t always the case. A condition called Aphantasia reflects a limited capacity to construct mental images. For this reason, the impact of guided imagery has a different strength of different individuals. The general agreement was the thinking of being on a beach (next to nature) had a calming effect.
Source: Insight Timer