Mirror Work Guided Meditation Series to Emody Self Love

Breathed in through your eyes, your crisp reflection swirls within your iris like a fan.

Individual blades of thought, experiences, and cheekbones spin.

All blending into one seamless perception.

You drink it in. A story, a perception, that colors the lens you see yourself through.

Oh dear reflection,

Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by you. Staring into the warm, breathing body before me. It has never been just a beating heart, brown hair, veins, and flesh. It has become intertwined and riddled with self-perception. Comparable to lovers, seemingly separate, I cannot tell where one ends and another begins.

Looking in the mirror, I have flitted through many lenses: wonder, curiosity, disgust, arousal, pride, repulsion, confusion, confidence… to name a few. This body, these eyes, face, lips, even the subtle movement of nostrils as breath comes and goes offers itself as a yantra. A point of meditation. A microcosm reflecting the bigger whole.

Posture. So subtle. Yet the positioned layering of muscle over bone articulates the structure of the lens we are looking through. Is the lens one that echoes self-doubt: "maybe I am too much, and I shouldn’t let myself get too carried away?"

Or perhaps it is one that conveys deep peace. A soft joy radiating in ways that the mind cannot conceptually answer. Instead, it is transmitted through the arrangement of muscles and ligaments over vertebrae, skull, and scapula.

The sight of our reflection goes beyond just what our eyes see; it is a straight shot into the underbelly of the subconscious. We can see in direct relation to the body, a breadcrumb trail into the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

The thoughts that almost automatically arise as we catch our own gaze in our reflection. These tell us directly about our internal dialogue. What do we see in ourselves? What is the first impulse to notice within ourselves? How do we interpret this reflection of ours?

Possibility, seemingly pooled up within our eye sockets.

What place do we choose to look from?

Can we dare to ask: is this perception serving me to be the best I can be?

Can I serve myself, my joy, and this world better if I believe differently about myself?

What seeds of belief do I want to plant and tend to within?

Mirror Work Guided Meditation

To support you in your journey, I offer you a guided meditation series that guides you to recalibrate the lens you view yourself through to one that embraces self-love as an embodied felt sense and not an ethereal concept.

Day 1

In the first part of this mirror work series, we begin by raking the soil of our perception. Scraping out old stories and judgments. Cultivating a connection to ourselves beyond judgment and as a present and compassionate observer.

You can begin this practice at any stage in your self-relational journey. The baseline intention is to keep pointing your mind and attention toward the direction of pure nonjudgmental, and non-interpretational presence. These are important nutrients for flourishing self-love.

I suggest pausing and integrating the first meditation for at least one day before moving into the second.

Day 2

In the second part of this guided meditation mirror work series, we'll continue our journey toward bringing self-love to the parts of ourselves often exiled because they hold painful emotions, experiences, or perceptions of ourselves.

Through this meditation, we'll create a new somatic story that meets these emotions with compassion and tenderness. This is an essential step in the mirror work practice as it allows us to embrace and integrate the parts of ourselves that we've rejected or pushed aside so that they can begin to be held in love instead of influencing us behind the scenes. Therefore having an embodied experience of self-love, not just an ethereal conception of it.

Deepen and Return To The Practice

Save this meditation for the future after you have completed the mirror work series. Here, you will have the opportunity to be reminded of the key ingredients we worked with as we allow them to sink deeper by returning to them again.

In this integration and reminder meditation, we continue to play with the lenses of perception we cultivated in the previous meditation series.