Relax your facial muscles and observe where tension returns to deepen your awareness and release stress.

English

This meditation explores the simple idea that just by noticing where tension creeps back into the body we can start to change that tension and release pain, old patterns, and difficult experiences. 
This is also a part of a larger meditation series incorporated in this teacher's Reiki Level 1 and 2 Courses. (7)

Facial Relaxation Meditation

Hello! My name is Eden, and I am a therapist, Reiki teacher, and meditation guide. Now whether you've found this meditation through one of my Reiki courses or just through the web of life, welcome! These meditations are intended to deepen your relationship to your intuition and gifts, and facilitate an understanding of your own internal landscape. Each meditation is also a tool that can be offered to yourself or a client, so I invite you to notice what shifts within you before, during, after, beyond the meditation, cataloging the effects with words and feelings and sensations. Just letting yourself take note. Allow it to be personal and universal. Let's begin. Wherever you are, just finding a comfortable, resting posture. And taking a few slow, deep breaths to just let yourself settle in here. Letting go of the day, letting go of any to-do lists or should'ves, could'ves, would'ves. Letting all of that go and letting yourself just be right here. Taking any little movements that you need to usher in a little more relaxation in your body, maybe moving the shoulders away from the ears, maybe tucking the hips, maybe shifting the knees. This is a very simple practice, yet incredibly effective, and all I will ask is that you let yourself see yourself and be aware. So go ahead and just take a moment to observe the muscles of the face, noticing any tension. And then we relax all of these muscles in the face, the space between the eyebrows, the muscles in the eyes, the cheeks move down the cheekbones, the jaw relaxes, the tongue rests, even imagining each nostril relaxing, opening. Can you let yourself feel full facial relaxation right now? All of these tiny little muscles in the face are all relaxed. So, so good. Now soak in this feeling for just a moment longer, and then gently moving your awareness down into the body, the breath, maybe noticing what the breath is doing today, where it wants to travel to in the body, the texture, the weight, the shape. Maybe you notice the curl of the fingers, the weight of the toes. And we'll be here for just a minute now, in our bodies, observing, seeing, watching. A few more rounds of breath, just observing your body, your breath. Deep breath in, and long breath out. And just letting your awareness now circle back to all of those muscles in the face, noticing what has already tensed back up. And even without doing more, muscles have already started to tense back up, that tension is creeping in somewhere. Where do you notice it already coming back? That is a signpost of where some of your work still is, physically, energetically, whatever it may be. The fact that tension has already come back in without the face doing anything, or the body doing anything, means that something there, wherever there is for you, is alive. It is wanting to be protected, shrouded, it's personal, let it be. Not everyone has tension in the jaw, not everyone notices the eyes crinkling. This is a part of your uniqueness that is built within you, for one reason or another. And we don't need to know exactly where it comes from in order to let it go. All we need is the awareness over and over again that that tension has crept in, and ask yourself to just let it go again, let it fall away. Offering yourself that full facial relaxation again. And we thank the face for its myriad of emotions and conversations it can hold for us. And it's allowed to rest too. It's allowed to let go of old stories too. Cultivating that awareness to notice when tension has crept back into the body is a bottom-up approach to change. Going in through the body instead of the mind. Letting relaxation rewrite you. Good.