Stop Trying to Meditate. Do this Instead

I remember lying on the floor wracked with pain, unable to move without excruciating pain as the shingles virus ravaged my face and moved into my scalp. It felt like someone was stabbing me with hot needles.

The smallest movement of my eyelids or eyebrows created waves of pain so strong that I became nauseated and dizzy.

In the background I could hear a YouTube video with Thich Nhat Hanh leading a meditation, one that I had found soothing for years — but now, it created agitation and frustration.

Why?

When Meditation Agitates More than Helps

When our nervous systems are vibrating with overstimulation, it’s like trying to calm a galloping horse and expecting it to stand still.

Instead, I found that the way to return to calmness was not through my mind, already hijacked by pain and deep anxiety. It was returning to what my father, a Korean and Vietnam war veteran taught me — focus on the body — on physical sensations to ground myself.

But what if the predominant physical sensation is pain?

So, I focused on where there was not pain, the tips of my toes. I wiggled my toes. I focused completely on the sensation of a slow lifting of my toes and the sensation of toe tips stretching to touch the sheets covering my body. Then, the sensation of toes dropping to the fitted sheet under my body.

I focused on noticing that as I lifted my toes, my chest expanded without pain as I breathed in oxygen. I felt the sensation of my ribcage softening as I exhaled.

That’s all that existed in my world for five full minutes — toes lifting and dropping — breath expanding and contracting. At the end of five minutes, my nervous system began to let go of the pull towards firing waves of constant pain.

My thoughts were not racing as fast. The frantic beats of my heart slowed also.

I used this technique when I had acupuncture done along the trajectory of the viral path. The excruciating needle insertions became tolerable.

Throughout the 20 minute treatment, I focused on my fingertips, tapping my thumb to my smallest finger, ring finger, middle finger, and last index finger as if I were playing some kind of air piano. I noticed the soft sensation as my thumb connected to other digits. I noticed my breath starting to follow a pattern of deepening naturally.

How the Smallest Physical Movements Liberated Me from Deep Grief

Later, when my father passed in 2020, on the heels of the final sale of my marital home after a divorce that had dragged on for over a year, I sat by the Zen garden that held my father’s ashes and felt as if my entire world had collapsed.

I couldn’t imagine how I would ever get up off that bench.

I was paralyzed by the weight of losing my father, my best friend, my hero, and my rock. He was always present and there for me even when he was deployed in war. The gaping hole in my soul felt larger than the life left in me.

Without realizing it, I began to simply lift toes and drop them. Breathe in and out. I sat there for 30 minutes — doing nothing but lifting toes, dropping them and breathing.

When I rose, for the first time since the long years of care-taking my father to his final breath — I felt a clarity I hadn’t felt since I was a young child swinging high on a hilltop playground swing set, sea breezes causing the rusting metal posts to creak with each back and forth motion.

The ocean glimmered in the distance with an expansiveness of possibilities, undefined. I felt an openness to receiving God’s love in a way that soothed and comforted without me asking to be comforted.

This was the unmistakable, unshakable inner well of peace that my father embodied in every part of his walk as a soldier, husband, father, brother, community leader, teacher, and hero whose last assignment was escorting Vietnam prisoners of war home.

So, when you are torn and shattered — by pain, physical or otherwise, or when the weight of grief, anger, rage, loss, fear, and anxiety screams at you — don’t meditate.

Instead, lift your toes up and down and breathe into the sensations of your body — play the air piano on one hand.

Don’t try to still an overloaded mind. Instead, give your brain something physical to focus on so that the wild horse can finally stop galloping and settle into a soothing slow canter that will help you find your way back home to peace.

Kay Hutchinson is an energy medicine specialist helping people restore wholeness when their worlds fracture. I’m teaching a 4-week Qi Gong series starting March 28th; if you would like to learn deeper body resets, please join us!