Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Karyn Williams guides a 26-minute guided meditation focused on healing emotional and physical illness through self-compassion and reframing. After a progressive relaxation countdown, she invites listeners to acknowledge their illness or emotional condition and the anger, frustration, and upsetting thoughts that often accompany it. She then walks through a shift in perspective: treating your body with forgiveness and kindness, as if it were a child doing its best; releasing anger as unhelpful; connecting with others who share similar struggles; realistic reassessment of what you can manage without overloading yourself; and finding alternative ways to live meaningfully despite limitations. She closes with a series of affirmations—refusing to see the body as a failure, gratitude for its effort, acknowledging capability within limits, and commitment to daily kindness—and ends with gentle guidance for returning to normal awareness. Suited to anyone managing chronic or acute illness seeking a compassionate, psychologically grounded approach.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Karyn 20th October Part 2.mp3
UUID: 4de0d96e-0824-450c-afbf-6d4758de0032
Teacher: Karyn Williams
Collection: Meditations (Karyn Williams)
Date: 2016 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 25.8 minutes
Words: ~1,772
Okay. That’s great. So this one, as I said, is dealing or coping with illness in our way of healing ourselves emotionally. And I’m I’m not sure if I do touch on much physical, but if you feel like any emotions welling up, that’s very natural. It may not.
You may feel, you know, hold back in this arena, but, basically, if you do, that’s that’s good because you’re you’re actually experiencing them. And once they’re experiencing, you can subside those emotions and actually feel better even though they may return, which is very typical of human beings. We we oscillate between good and bad. So let’s close our eyes again. And just sitting comfortably, feet squarely on the floor, hands in our laps.
Or if you’re feeling a little bit warm, you can just rest them on your thighs so that they’re not clasped together and circulating heat through your body. Circulating heat through your body. I’m just going to count now. I’m gonna count back from ten to one. And as I do, just let your body and mind become more and more relaxed.
So to begin with, at number ten, we’re feeling our muscles start to relax. At nine, our hands and feet are warm and relaxed. Eight. Our muscles are becoming loose and heavy. Seven.
Just notice your attention drifting, becoming more relaxed. At six, relaxing even further, feeling peaceful. At five, a tingling feeling of relaxation is spreading through your body. It’s a pleasant feeling, a relaxed, pleasant feeling. At four, you’re further relaxed and peaceful.
And at three, you’re free of any tension. Two, almost completely relaxed now. And finally, one, you are now deeply relaxed, very deeply relaxed and comfortable. And feeling now completely relaxed, I’d like you to think about the illness or the condition you are or have been dealing with. Maybe physical illness.
It may be emotional issues within your life. Just think what it is that you’re here today to address. And it’s very likely that you have many upsetting thoughts and feelings associated with that condition or your illness. It could be that you even feel at war with your own body and are angry and upset by it. Having an illness may make you feel like your body is betraying you.
Mental or emotional illness is associated with similar ideas and feelings of physical illness. It can feel like your brain or heart is betraying you. The brain is a part of the body. And for the purposes of this meditation, I’m going to refer to brain and body simply together as the body. And you can refer to whatever your issue is, whichever way you prefer.
And it’s okay to be upset. It’s perfectly normal to have feelings of anger and frustration when dealing with illness in your body. It’s highly likely you may have thoughts from time to time such as why me? Why is my body attacking myself itself? Why is my body causing me so much pain and fatigue?
Why do I have these negative feelings, upsetting emotions that I really don’t want and only ruin my day? Just take a moment to explore the questions you may have about your illness or emotional state. And it can be frustrating when no suitable answers are found to our questions. Often, who are in poor health are frequently angry and sometimes feel guilty. They often blame themselves for this situation, and they often believe that they are missing out on life or not making meaningful contributions to the world.
We need to remember that our thoughts contribute greatly to our wellness. Thinking negative critical thoughts of ourselves, our body, or our situation can keep us stuck and can prevent healing. So let’s try to turn around some of the upsetting thoughts that we may have and try to find a more healing perspective. First of all, love yourself. Send a feeling of warmth and caring throughout your body.
Feel it in every cell, a warm, good feeling of love. It’s okay to love yourself. And look at your body with an attitude of forgiveness. Your body is like a child who is just trying to work through something, and it’s actually doing the best it can to deal with an issue that it hasn’t dealt with before. This condition has made you feel poorly.
It’s perhaps made you angry, but your body is just trying to be as healthy as it’s possible. And you need to help your body to deal with your illness, your issues, and to heal. So treat your body as you would a child who you know is doing the best you can. Speak kindly to it. Love it.
Take a few moments now to imagine looking at your physical and emotional being, looking at yourself with forgiveness, warmth, and compassion. Treat your body with kindness, not only in your physical care of your body, but in the way you mentally respond to it. Be kind in your actions and in your thoughts or any thoughts that you think. Be positive and encouraging when you talk to yourself and your illness. Take on a responsibility for mentally caring for your body and allowing your body to heal.
Feeling calm, thinking good thoughts, positive thoughts can only be better for your physical condition and definitely better for your mental condition. Dealing with an ongoing illness can be frightening as you wonder what the future holds. Will the symptoms get worse? Will your abilities decline? And many fears about the unknown can arise.
It’s very normal. There’s always a sense of fear about the unknown. And, also, yes, you can feel angry angry at life, at what life has dealt you. But anger is not a good emotion. It’s a useless emotion.
Life has dealt this for you. That’s the way it is right now. There’s no sense in being angry at it. It’s okay to feel anger, of course, because that’s a natural response, but it’s a good thing to deal with that anger and to understand that it’s of no value to you to be angry within. And, yes, life isn’t always fair.
And although you may feel alone, know that there are many others out there who have experienced chronic illness, disease, troubled emotions, and that you’re not alone. You’re not the only one who has experienced this and you’re not the only one who has felt this way. So you need to connect, or do you need to connect with others similar to yourself in order to help yourself? Is that something you can plan to do in the coming week or so? Connect to others who also know exactly where you’re at and can empathize.
And maybe in the past, you’ve pushed yourself to do too much too soon. When you experience difficulty you believe that your illness is holding you back. But the reality is you are capable of many things. You just need to evaluate how much you are capable of at a given time and plan to do less than the maximum so you can successfully complete whatever it is you want to do without becoming overloaded. Do you think you should be doing more and try to push yourself?
Try to think realistically about your situation and your limitations. There is no shame in scaling back. But at the same time, if there are things that would help you, for example, to exercise a little bit more, just getting out and walking around the block. Are they things you can manage as well so that you have a holistic approach to healing? And consider that you’re not missing out on good things in life because of your illness, but that you just need to find other ways to live meaningfully and still do good things and still enjoy life, perhaps different from how it was before.
And imagine the following affirmations as completely true in this moment. Just hold each affirmation in your mind, taking in each one. I refuse to see my body as a failure and something that just makes life so difficult. Instead, I see my body as doing the best it can like a child that is trying to work through something. I’m grateful to my body for trying to do its best.
I’m capable of many things. No one is capable of everything, and it is okay to find some things difficult. There are others who go through this and also will understand what I’m going through. If I look, I will find them. I’m kind to my body every moment of every day.
And I look for meaning in things that make me feel good, the simple things, a warm sunny day, a cool breeze, a nice cup of tea. And I do what exercise I can to help my body stay healthy. And I’m healing. Now allow yourself to just relax for a few more moments, just to drift and let those affirmations sink in deep into your subconscious. Just look at all aspects of your life and acknowledge where you need to find the balance to help yourself heal.
Look at the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of yourself and work toward bringing them into a peaceful state of equilibrium. And now it’s time to close this meditation by just gently in our own time coming out, coming back to the room just when we’re ready. There’s no point in rushing. It’s all part of the meditation process to come out gently and still feeling as we have felt for the past hour, calm, at peace, feeling good. But when you’re ready, you can open your eyes and start to move your fingers and toes.
Stretch those legs. Okay. I read an analogy the other day about some people coming out of meditation. It’s like you spend half hour going up to the second floor, and then they say that’s the end of the meditation. So you jump off the balcony.
You know? It’s that sort of like, I’m so relaxed and now bang. I’m doing that. And so, I’m really concentrating a lot lately on bringing yourself out when you’re ready, and and don’t feel pushed. I mean, we’re all here together, but you could still be with your eyes closed if you wanted to.
But thank you all very much for coming today, and I hope you got something out of that. And we might see you again in another week. Okay. Enjoy that sun, although the clouds come in. Thank you.
Thank you.