| Length | 11:57 |
|---|---|
| Subject | Healing & Self-Compassion |
| Best time | When the pain has been sat there a while |
| Position | Sitting or lying down, somewhere private |
| Style | Guided imagery, a garden you water rather than tidy. Music underneath |
For heartbreak, and for pain that has been sat there a while. A neglected garden, and a watering can with your name on it.
About 12 minutes with Steven Webb's calm voice.
You go through an iron gate into a garden that has gone to seed. Each wilted plant is one of the feelings. A lost love here, regret there, loneliness in the corner. You water them rather than pull them up. It does not pretend heartbreak takes weeks, because it can take years. But a heart blown wide open ends up holding more.
Treat me to a coffee, keep the podcast free, and get my Weekly Calm every Sunday. It is all on stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for sitting with me.
Steven
Who this is for
Heartbreak, and the kind of ache that has stopped being an event and started being the weather.
It does not try to talk you out of it. There is a moment fairly early on where you are told it is all right to let yourself be sad, and that is the whole permission the rest of it rests on.
What happens in this meditation
An iron gate with ivy through it, and behind it a garden that has gone to seed. Wilted flowers, dry patches, nobody has been here in a while.
Each struggling plant is one of the feelings. A lost love in one place. Regret in another. Loneliness over in the corner. You walk round and name them, and you do not pull anything up.
Then a watering can turns up in your hands, and you water them. Not because they are weeds you are tolerating, because they are yours.
Then you walk round again and watch things come back.
How to get the most from it
Twelve minutes, somewhere you will not be interrupted, because this one can bring things up.
Do not rush the naming. The instinct is to get to the watering can, and the recognising is doing at least half of it.
Come back to it. Healing from this takes months and sometimes years, and one listen is not the shape of that.
Questions people ask
Will this make me feel sad?
It might, and that is not it going wrong. You are being asked to look at things you may have been walking past. Sadness that gets acknowledged tends to sit more quietly afterwards.
Why water the plants instead of clearing them out?
Because the feelings are not the problem. Pulling them up is what most of us have been doing, and the garden looked like that when you arrived.
Does it get better?
Yes, and slower than anybody wants. What I would add is that a heart blown wide open ends up holding more than it did before. That is not a consolation. It is what actually happens.
