Leaves on a stream meditation

The idea of this meditation is to assign your worries to leaves which flow past you peacefully on a stream. This can help you to calm the flurry of worries in your mind and let them go rather than engaging with them. Breathing calmly while letting your anxieties go helps relax your nervous system and leaves you feeling at ease.

Use our leaves on a stream exercise whenever you feel stressed, anxious or overwhelmed. It can help you feel calmer about your worries and more grounded. When used repeatedly over time, this meditation can help you engage less with stressed thoughts and feel more in control of your life in general.

Regular meditation can rewire your brain to improve your mental health. Our Leaves on a Stream exercise helps you create distance from stress, and decrease your anxiety. The mental clarity that you can gain from continual practise can help you cope better with day to day stressors. 

This meditation also promotes healthy self-awareness, so you can be more responsive to stress and respond to it in a self-soothing way. Meditation also reduces the levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, which in turn alleviates the symptoms of anxiety and low mood.

The metaphor of 'leaves on a stream' symbolises the rushing of thoughts through the mind. Rather than getting swept up in the thoughts (the leaves), we can simply let them flow past us (on the stream) and instead focus on our wellbeing (by breathing slowly and calmly). 

Leaves on a stream is a mindfulness exercise, which originated as part of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy pioneered by psychotherapists. It enables you to distance yourself from what's going on in your mind and recognise that thoughts are not facts, and can be let go.