A few weekends ago, I hosted an event live from our Week Long Advanced Retreat in Nashville, Tennessee. My staff affectionately calls these “Lovestreams” – and this one, titled “Love Heals,” introduced a new meditation to the world called “Love Your Body.”

More than 23,000 people tuned in to practice it live, together, for the first time ever. Since then, the demand for “Love Your Body” has been so great, I’ve asked my team to move up the release date and make it available as soon as possible.

The good news is, we’re ready to share it with you next week. In the meantime, I want to walk you through some fundamentals of how to practice this short, powerful, immersive meditation.


Lying Down While Remaining Relaxed and Awake

In this work, we practice four types of meditation – sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. If you’re an advanced student in our community, you’re familiar with how to work with each of these. But if you’re new to the work, you might have a different idea of what it means to practice a meditation – especially lying down.

Typically, at our retreats, I work with participants for the entire week before we practice full-length, lying-down meditations. That’s because most inexperienced meditators fall asleep when they lie down for extended periods of time. They’re not yet primed to do the inner work, or experienced in cultivating a state of being relaxed and awake – that is, relaxed in the heart and awake in the brain.

But as my team and I worked on “Love Your Body,” and it became a deeper and deeper exploration of the profound, healing properties and power of love, I knew we had to make it available to everyone.

So, let’s talk about how to work with this meditation, at any level of experience, so you stay relaxed and awake – and ready to receive.


The Door Between the Conscious and Subconscious Minds

While there’s no right or wrong way to do this meditation, I designed it to be practiced lying down the entire time. It’s short (only 30 minutes), so it’s a good opportunity to learn how to cultivate that state of relaxed awareness in a reclined posture – and not fall asleep.

The reason to practice remaining relaxed and awake is, it’s the perfect state to open the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind – the space that allows your autonomic nervous system to receive new information.

In other words, lying down with your eyes closed while remaining conscious and aware lets you linger in a suggestible state; one in which you can reprogram your mind and body – according to your directed attention and intention – back to health and homeostasis.

So, make yourself comfortable lying down, but not so comfortable that you want to fall asleep. You don’t want to miss that door in a theta brainwave state between the conscious and subconscious minds – where you can install new information.


Love Your Body ... With Your Heart

“Love Your Body” is a heart-centered meditation, and in the accompanying (roughly 15-minute) introduction, I go into detail about how to understand and work with the energy of the heart. Now, I want to walk you through the meditation itself, step by step.

Once you’re lying down and comfortable – but not so comfortable you’ll fall asleep – you’ll start with putting your attention on your heart. And where you place your attention is where you place your energy. Our research shows this to be true: when you place your attention on your heart, you literally are giving it a very low frequency of energy.

Next, I'll ask you to take some slow, deep breaths to work with your body and relax it. As you slow your breathing down, you’ll slow your brain waves down, gradually converting from the sympathetic nervous system (the “emergency,” or fight-or-flight system) – to the parasympathetic nervous system (the system of relaxation; growth and repair; rest and digest).

You’ll then practice, with your heart, feeling elevated emotions – like gratitude, appreciation, love, kindness, care, inspiration, generosity, or compassion – to awaken its energy. You’ll bring those emotions to your heart – and fall in love with it.

Once the heart center is activated, your body is in the right state to receive new information. Now, with loving attention and intention, you’ll connect your heart to a part of your body that needs to become more whole.

Think of your heart as the center of wholeness – where polarity and opposites merge. So, if you want to make another part of your body ­– one that is in pain, sick, malfunctioning, diseased, or unhealthy – whole, you’d want to connect your heart to it.

With that in mind, you’ll put your focus on that part of your body and feel your connection to it with your heart – bringing the same energy to it as the elevated energy in your heart. Once you can feel that same energy, you can raise the frequency in that part of your body by synchronizing and matching it to the energy of your heart.

You’ll feel grateful for your body, feel kindness and care for your body, feel appreciation for your body, and fall in love with your body – with your heart.

Finally, with your heart connected and radiating love to your body, you’ll be prompted to send your body the signal it needs to repair and restore itself back to order. The autonomic nervous system can get to work – and you’re ready to receive.


Let Your Love Heal You

It’s important to keep in mind this meditation is most effective through repeated practice. Like any discipline, the more you do it, the better you get at it. And the more you do it, the more you entrain your body – right down to the subatomic level – to a more elevated, orderly, coherent frequency.

So, I encourage you to practice this meditation on a regular basis until you start noticing changes. Pay attention to how you feel when you first begin practicing it – and see what happens over time as you change the energy of your heart and radiate that energy to your body. As you change your inner environment, look for evidence of change in your outer environment.

Our research has shown that when you practice sustaining elevated emotions, a host of changes take place in your body. And it starts with the heart – the center of wholeness and creativity, where love is born.

It’s said that love heals ... so let your love heal you.

I’m so excited to introduce “Love Your Body” to the world. Stay tuned for information about its release in the coming days. I hope, by practicing it, you’ll fall in love with your heart – and bring its healing wholeness to your body.