Mindfulness connects us to our body. We recognize if we are hungry or thirsty, in pain, comfortable or ill at ease. Some studies have shown mindfulness practices to be as effective as prescription painkillers in pain management.13 They have also been shown to enhance the body’s immune system, increasing resistance to chronic and infectious diseases; to improve heart and circulatory health by lowering blood pressure;14 and to alleviate gastrointestinal problems15 and insomnia.16 Crystals, too, offer a host of powerful physical benefits and combined with mindfulness provide a potent healing tool.
Stress is the number-one prime suspect in negatively affecting our health and is estimated to be the underlying cause of around 60 per cent of illnesses.17 The response is due to the body’s ‘fight or flight’ survival mechanism. When a threat is perceived the body gears up for violent muscular action and adrenaline floods the system to help us respond: blood pressure rises, heart rate speeds up and breathing accelerates. In the fast-paced 21st century, it is not uncommon to experience this response several times a day, triggered not by a real danger, such as a dangerous animal, but by a worrying email, a traffic hold-up or thoughts about a work deadline.
Denying stress internalizes it and can lead to pain, insomnia, anxiety and depression, with symptoms including irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, exhaustion, muscle tension, heart attack and strokes. Stress can also lead to overeating and also to malnutrition due to intestinal reactions. The mindful answer is simply to allow stress to be: to acknowledge it but not to focus on it. To stay in the moment, breathing mindfully and rhythmically. Gently tapping your crystal over your upper chest quickly brings the body back into balance.
Mindfulness practices target your attitude to pain and help you to focus elsewhere. Begin by grounding yourself in your body, taking a few mindful breaths. Try to breathe into your pain, mindfully acknowledging the pain and its sensations – accepting it, embracing it, being with it. You could find words to describe the pain, score it on a range of 1–10 but without judgement. Simply acknowledge what is and then move your awareness to a part of your body that is pain free. Be with that. Be aware of how different that feels, again without judgement. Switch back and forward three or four times, letting go of any fear. Notice how the pain lessens, but do not focus on it. Placing a pain-relief crystal over the site and breathing the pain into that also helps to alleviate it.
Breathing is the key to mindfulness and to dealing with stress or fear and their physiological consequences. Whenever you are asked to ‘breathe’ in this book, it means taking a conscious breath, slowly and with focused awareness, feeling the air moving in through your nostrils, passing down through your throat and trachea, and into your lungs. Feel how your ribs and lungs inflate with the pressure of the air and your belly expands. Pause comfortably and mindfully before breathing out. Feel how your belly and the ribs and lungs deflate as the breath leaves them. Follow the breath back up the trachea, through the throat and out of the nostrils, or your mouth if you prefer, to gently sigh or purposefully whoosh out your breath. Drop your shoulders and rest for a few moments before breathing in again. Place a crystal over your belly and pull the breath down to it, then breathe out from the crystal to enhance the process.
Eye of the Storm (page 44), Bloodstone (page 48), Amethyst (page 64), Malachite (page 68), Flint (page 88), Azurite, Hematite and Clear Quartz relieve pain and stress. See also Agate (page 58) and Blue Lace Agate (page 66).