The Taproot Podcast - Guided Meditation For Fear or Phobia

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

Immerse yourself in the transformative world of Ericksonian hypnosis with this powerful guided meditation for overcoming phobias and healing trauma. Inspired by the revolutionary therapeutic methods of Dr. Milton Erickson, the brilliant psychiatrist who fathered modern hypnotherapy, this deeply engaging visualization process will guide you to reframe your most challenging fears and traumatic memories as opportunities for profound growth and resilience. With great care, skill and artistry, we'll invite you to translate your anxiety or traumatic recollection into a vivid symbolic image, explore that inner landscape with genuine curiosity and self-compassion, and playfully experiment with small tweaks to the image that generate large-scale positive shifts in your embodied experience. Through this process, you'll viscerally discover how much innate power you have to flexibly shift your perceptions and emotional responses, even to your most deep-rooted traumas and anxieties. More than just a set of techniques, this meditation journey will steep you in the fundamental principles of Ericksonian hypnosis - utilization of your mind's inner resources, indirect suggestion to bypass resistance, and paradoxical interventions that often move you forward by first moving you back. You'll come away with an unshakable felt sense of your mind's infinite capacity for creative problem-solving and a clear map for continuing to transform your obstacles into opportunities. Whether you're a therapist seeking to expand your toolkit, an individual struggling with PTSD, phobias, or anxiety, or simply a curious explorer of your own vast inner potential, this immersive experience will repattern your neuro-emotional circuitry and reawaken your faith in your own indestructible spirit. Join us to reclaim your birthright of inner freedom - it's time to stop surviving your story and start authoring it.

Hey guys, this is Joel with the Taproot Therapy Collective Podcast and now today we're going to do a meditation for a phobia or a specific piece of a trauma that you feel comfortable working with or maybe just an icky or bad realization or emotion that you have a hard time feeling and going through and that you want to work with your tolerance for and help resolve it and go through it and find all the roots of it in your body and your somatic associations and let all of those go. So before we start I want you to find a position that lets your body feel fully supported, seated or lying down. Make sure you're in a safe space to meditate, not driving, not

somewhere where you may be interrupted. And let your eyes gently close and take a few slow, deep breaths. And fully expand your belly on each inhale, completely releasing on each exhale. And with every breath, I want you to feel your body settling more deeply into a state of relaxed awareness and now bring to mind a specific phobia or fear or traumatic memory or just an energy that is hard to feel has an icky bad quality to it. And I want you to let it surface in your consciousness without any need to analyze or judge. Whenever a need to analyze or judge pops up, just notice that. And also notice an opposite part that is more open. And notice both parts. Come and go. And then notice how your body responds to this when you bring

it into your mind. If you smell it, if you feel it in your skin or in the way that your body wants to react, if you hear something or if you just kind of remember it as a visual, go to the parts that are the harder parts to think about. If it's something you're afraid of doing in the future, make that real. If it's something that is from the past, revisit that. And notice how your body responds to this fear or aversion. And maybe you weren't able to find any of those pieces

of sensation and just treat it like an energy that you don't understand yet. If that's the case just feel it as an energy that is somewhere living in your body and I want you to find where that is and notice how it wants you to move and the sensations and memories it brings up. And then I want you to begin to trace that fear through your body and notice where you feel it the most intensely and map out every spot like you're charting a course for a trip to go from the beginning to the end and go ahead and finish this thing so it can be resolved. You may notice a knot in your stomach, a constriction in your

throat, a pressure in your chest, or more subtle sensations. Notice if your shoulders are pulling forward, your knees and thighs are pulling together. Maybe your hands are kind of rising up or clenching like they want to protect your heart. Maybe you feel like you want to disappear, run away, but I just want you to stay with those sensations and notice them and notice which one is strongest, which urge to move or part of somatic reaction or pain and imagine

you can direct your breath into that area as if the breath is a soothing healing minty balm and picture the breath gently surrounding and permeating the sensation. On each breath in and each breath out let it form a cloud to protect you and create a little cushion of space and ease between you and the places that you're afraid to go and the things you're afraid to feel. And now I want you to let your imagination start to give you an image that captures or represents this fear or aversion. And it may be a vivid literal scene related to something you've witnessed or a more abstract symbolic representation and if it is a literal memory try and turn that into a mythic or metaphorical image like a painting or a little sketch

in your notebook maybe you're a mouse in a field hiding under grass that is too thin and there's a hawk above you or maybe you're in a closet and it's dark and you don't know if you can come out and you hear voices. But go to a place that will arise and trust that metaphor that you're making to be something that represents where you need to start in this moment on this journey. And take some time to

really explore that inner landscape or memory and notice the sensations that you get in a carpet, smell, colors, textures, shapes, sounds, big sounds, little sounds, wind, temperature, humidity in the air. And if there are other figures in the scene beside yourself, observe their faces and their postures and their movements. If it's not a literal memory, explore this energy and feel all the parts of it and what it feels like it wants and where it feels like it wants to go. And the more you can immerse yourself in this symbolic world, the more insight and transformation that it's going to bring. And as you inhabit this inner environment, this space that you've created, this container, I want you to notice how it makes you feel in your whole body.

Which sensations are stronger now than when we started? Which ones are softer? And where do you feel open and expansive and where do you feel tight and constrained? And let your somatic experience be your guide to the emotional heart of the image. And now begin to experiment with making experience be your guide to the emotional heart of the image and now begin to experiment with making small modifications to the scene. I want you to realize that you now have power over it, that it is inside of you and you are holding it and you're in the hands of your mind and start to change it. Start with something that is small and concrete.

If there's a shadowy figure in the distance, for instance, try gently brightening the light around the edges. If you're in a dark space, I want you to light a candle. And if you're in an enclosed space, see if you can open a window or a door just to crack even if you're scared And if it's a mythic image, I want you to make small changes that remind you of your power And your sense of control even if it's just moving a pedal I want you to change the image Just a little bit and if you're working with this as a more abstract energy notice how you can play with the energy slightly and move it around like water in a pan and make these changes very gradually one element at a time and observe closely how each shift impacts your embodied experience.

If you want to pause the meditation in order to have more time to play with this sense of control, you can do that now. As you change the image, you may notice a slight loosening of tension, a deepening of breath, a fleeting sense of possibility, but trust your intuition to guide these modifications. You might play with adjusting colors, shifting the size or the scale of objects, altering the speed or the rhythm of movement, slowing everything down to a stop, making sounds more quiet. Or you could introduce new sensory elements like a jacket or a warm coat, a blanket, a flashlight, a candle, or a soothing

scent like jasmine or rosemary or lavender. Or you might experiment with your own position in the scene, moving yourself to a different vantage point or even stepping outside the scene altogether and observing it from a distance. And as you engage in this process of creative alteration, you may find some elements are more responsive to change than others. An unyielding surface might suddenly reveal a hidden doorway. A menacing figure might transform into a benevolent guide. A discordant sound might start to harmonize into a soothing melody and at the same time you may encounter resistance from certain parts of the image or from certain protective parts within yourself. If this happens, don't try and force the change.

Simply acknowledge the resistance with respect and redirect your attention to an aspect of the scene that feels more malleable. Sometimes it helps to have a tool you can imagine that there is a paintbrush that you are swiping in front of your face and movement like moving your hand may help. You can smooth something away and cover it up and paint over it. Or lighting a scented candle or some burning sage as a tool may help change the scene. Or if you're having a hard time changing a physical sensation, open a drawer in front of you and take out what you need. And remember that this process is not about achieving a specific end,

but about reconnecting to your innate capacity for flexible perception and creativity to solve your problem and the ability to have power over your past. And with each small modification, you're reminding your mind and body that you have the power to shape your experience in any given moment, not by denying your fear, but engaging with them in a spirit of curiosity and play even when they confront you, even when they scare you. And if you want to pause the meditation to play with several elements of your image,

you can do that now. And I'll continue exploring your inner landscape in a way for as long as it feels fruitful, making measured modifications, observing their impacts and honoring any resistance that arises with patience and with compassion and as you do so you may find that your original phobia begins to feel more workable, more fluid, less like an immutable truth and more like an imaginative story that can be revised and retold and as you feel your fears beginning to yield

to this process of artful reshaping take a moment to reconnect with your breath and with your body and feel the ground beneath you steady and supportive and sense the expansiveness in your lungs, in your belly, the freedom in your limbs and in your digits. And notice how much more space there is in you than there is fear because you are vast and infinite and you have started to play with some of the multiplicity of the self. And when you feel ready to conclude this practice, I want you to take a deep and cleansing breath and slowly open your eyes and take a moment to reorient your surroundings, knowing that you can return to the center world of creativity

knowing that you can return to this inner world of creativity and imagination anytime you wish, that it's always inside of you. And then the days and the weeks to come, let your daily life become an ongoing extension of this practice. Whenever you feel the old fear arising, see if you can meet it with the same spirit of curiosity and play that you brought to your visualization and what might want to shift or reconfigure in your inner world in the same way the elements of your inner scene want to evolve? How might you experiment with small tweaks in your automatic or habitual response? Pausing where you'd normally react or choosing a new action where you would normally feel paralyzed. And as you start to live the insight that

your reality is an endlessly creative construction constantly available for artful modification. Notice how the grip of your phobias begins to loosen little by little and let this growing sense of freedom fuel your commitment to the lifelong adventure of growth and of change. venture of growth and of change. And remember your fear served a purpose once, but it didn't need to define you forever and with every breath you have the chance to author a new story, one in which your trials become your triumphs and your wounds become your wisdom and your limitations, become your invitation to expand and to remember your expansiveness and may you come to know yourself as the creative master of your own experience now and always.

And may every challenge become an opportunity to deepen your faith in your own endless resilience and ingenuity and endless capacity for transformation.