I am Calm…  I am Relaxed…. Meditation

Learning to relax is an amazing skill to cultivate. Study after study shows if you have the ability to relax then you can recover from stressful events and are more resilient in your day to day life. Everyone knows that someone telling you to relax usually ends up with the opposite result. It is a skill that really needs to be built from the inside out. By engaging a few techniques that slowly but surely begin to replace those pesky thoughts  with thoughts that encourage your body/mind to relax. Depending upon how your body/mind is behaving at the time you engage this recipe for relaxing and your fluency with paying attention to the suggestions you consciously chose, this can either start effecting you quickly or slowly but give a little time and attention it will start to shift you from the headspace your currently occupy to a more relaxed and calm state of body mind.  It is amazing to me how much time and effort we will invest in making ourselves  miserable with our own thoughts and when it comes to entering a task that will affect the way you feel for the better we say we have no time. The problem is that we are addicted to letting our minds run meanly though our lives with out any compassion for ourselves. Why do we treat ourselves so poorly?  It is an old question but here is one of the ways we can cultivate a different path.

Here is the recipe:

1. Good Start

2. Engage your meditative seat.(if you need a refresher click here)

3. Watch rhythm of breath

4. Mechanics of breath ( if you need a refresher click here, it is the same as above)

6.”I Am Calm, I am Relaxed”

A. Inhale softly think to youself “I am Calm”

B. Exhale softl;y think to yourself “ I am Relaxed”

C. Your job it to pay attention and listen to the suggestions that you are giving yourself. Not only “Think” the words but allow your body/mind to feel what the words  “I am Calm” I am Relaxed”mean to you.

D. Everytime you notice that you are distrated you smile and say “thinking” and bring yourself back to the activity of “I am Calm” I am Relaxed”.  5 Minutes  to an hour if your have the time.

7.Slowly relax and shake your legs out.

Words have meaning and they can affect us on a physiological level your job is to lightly engage the words and let them resonate within you. It is kind of like looking in the dark for your keys. You reach out into the dark and you touch things, nope that isn’t my keys its a coffee cup, that isn’t my keys it is a pack of gum, there it is it is my keys. This is like looking for what the meaning and difference between calm and relaxed are as you think the words silently to yourself. Remember the voice that you use to think I am calm and relaxed doesn’t have to be yours, it could be a friends voice, Morgan Freeman’s voice, Elvis’s voice, regardless of whether it is your voice or some other voice. Pick one and hang with it, and let it change you. Surrender to the activity.