Ep. 119 5-Minute Meditation to Ease Stress & Anxiety and Cultivate Compassion for LA Wildfires

Are you heart broken and overwhelmed by the wild fires in Los Angelos?
What if a simple five-minute meditation could help you transform those feelings into calm and compassion?
In this episode you’ll discover: 

1. A simple guided, five-minute meditation to calm anxiety and re-regulate your nervous system when bad news feels overwhelming.
2. How to process difficult emotions like sadness and fear while creating space for inner peace.
3. How to cultivate compassion and connection by sending healing thoughts to those affected, all while grounding your own well-being.

Listen now to discover a simple and effective meditation that helps you navigate overwhelming emotions, bringing calm and connection when the world feels too heavy.

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About the Host: 

MJ Murray Vachon, LCSW, is a seasoned clinician, educator, and host of the podcast Creating Midlife Calm, recognized by Maria Shriver as a “Listen of the Week.” Over the past 40 years, MJ has led more than 50,000 therapy sessions and developed the Inner Challenge mental wellness program and the Inner Challenge Master Class, practical tools for emotional regulation, self-awareness, and resilience taught for more than 30 years in junior high schools and at the University of Notre Dame for freshman football players. Through her podcast, teaching, and coaching, MJ helps people build calmer lives, stronger relationships, and healthier communities.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support. 

Transcript

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MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover a simple guided five minute meditation to calm anxiety and re regulate your nervous system when bad news feels overwhelming. Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife minds to overcome anxiety, stop feeling like crap and become more present with your family, all while achieving greater success at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon, a licensed clinical social worker with over 48, 000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching mental wellness. Welcome to the podcast. If you've been following along this January, you know, I've dedicated this month to helping you with New Year's resolutions. Today, I'm going to set aside our focus on resolutions to share something timely and essential. A five minute --meditation to help you cope with the overwhelming emotions triggered by bad news. By the end of this episode, you'll have an easy and effective meditation that I use on a regular basis in order to decrease anxiety and bring calm when the weight of the world just feels too much to bear. It's the second week of January and we've already been faced with events like the shooting in New Orleans and the tragic wildfires in California. By the time this airs, who knows what else may have happened. Bad news is inescapable, whether it's on your phone, your computer, or even in conversations with your family and friends. It's normal and actually healthy to feel anxious, overwhelmed, and even powerless when you are faced with the stories and the images that accompany them. Today's meditation is one that I created years ago to help me process the anxiety, sadness, and to be honest, the fear I felt connected to school shootings. has since become a go to resource, not only for me, but for many of my clients when distressing events happen, such as the recent wildfires, now I want to share it with Let's begin. Find a comfortable place to sit and ground your feet and take a couple deep breaths. As you do this, It's totally normal for your mind to go to other things. No problem. Just gently bring it back to your breath Next, turn your attention inward. Notice where in your body you feel anxiety, sadness, or discomfort. Sit still, distress, and breathe for 30 or 40 seconds. Next, Turn your attention inward and notice the distress in your body. And if you're comfortable, place your hands wherever that distress is. Could be on your heart, your thighs, your hands, your head, your arms and once again, take some breaths for about 30 seconds. now scan your body. Has the intensity of your emotions increased, stayed the same, or decreased? Regardless of the answer, take another 30 or 40 seconds to breathe. This time, I want you to imagine exhaling. your emotions, your sensations gently out of your body. So you inhale deeply and exhale, allowing these sensations to be released from within you. If you still feel overwhelmed, you can stop this meditation and continue to do rounds of breathing until your body is calmer. What we're doing is re regulating your central nervous system, which when you feel anxious, when you feel overwhelmed, heightens in order to prepare us to protect ourself. In this case, the self protection is actually re regulating your nervous system by doing this calming breath work, this meditation. If you feel that your body is calmer and you have a bit more mental clarity, move on to this next part of the meditation. What I want you to do next is I want you to think about this sad, this tragic event. And I want you to imagine the people who are suffering. From your heart or from your mind, whichever feels most comfortable to you. I want you to send them love. That can be in the form of breath, that can be in the form of white light, but I want you to hold them in your heart and do breath work, extending your feelings of compassion and healing towards them, even though they're many, many miles away. Allow yourself to do this for the next 30 or 40 seconds. Take another minute or two to continue this act of compassion. From your heart, you are sending love, you are sending peace, you are sending healing to the people afflicted by this tragedy. Notice how your inner state has shifted. From anxiety and overwhelm to calm and generosity, this short meditation transforms helplessness into a spirit of compassion and connection. In this episode, I've shared a simple five minute meditation to help you move from a place of anxiety to one of peace when bad news feels overwhelming. It's natural to feel helpless in the face of distant tragedies, but this practice helps you honor your own human reaction while fostering compassion for those who are suffering. Your inner challenge is to practice this meditation before Thursday because on Thursday I'm going to return and talk about some coping skills that can help all of us live in this time where these tragedies and these overwhelming events seem to be happening on a weekly basis. Thanks for listening to Creating Midlife Calm.