A Relaxation Exercise

Posted on by

Self Help TidBits

Five-Finger Relaxation Technique

This technique is great for lessening anxiety and building confidence. It only takes a few minutes to learn, and is actually very powerful.

To begin, get in a relaxed position, close your eyes, breathe slowly and deeply.

  1. Inhale, and as you exhale, touch your thumb to your index finger. Recall a time when your body felt a healthy fatigue, like how you felt sinking into a chair after a day of hiking, or just stepping out of a hot tub. Breathe deeply and try to feel the heaviness of your muscles.
  2. Next, touch your thumb to your middle finger and think of a time when you had a loving experience – when you felt a strong sense of closeness or connection with another, like a long embrace.  Feel the sensations of warmth and love moving through you.
  3. Now, touch your thumb to your ring finger and recall the nicest compliment you ever received. Listen. Take it in. You might want to imagine thanking this person… Accepting the compliment demonstrates your high regard for this person.
  4.  Finally, touch your thumb to your little finger. As you do, reflect on the most beautiful place you have ever been. Let yourself soak in the environment – the colors, light, breeze, sounds, texture and smells. Allow yourself to stay in this place for a while.

Now gently bring yourself back to where you are. Remind yourself that you can awaken this experience any time throughout your day by touching each finger, saying:

5-finger relaxation

5-finger relaxation

 

More TidBits – Therapy self-help

 

How to Fix Everything!

Posted on by

Being Alive copyFreeing the mind from hidden beliefs.

~ Excerpts from Byron Katie

“Beyond what the mind tells us is always kinder than what it sees, that’s the privilege of an open mind. 

As the  mind matures, it learns as a student of itself. Everything adds to it, enlightens it, reveals itself to it, feeds it. Nothing is against it and never was. This is a mind that has graduated out of a polarized state. It’s no longer split; it has ceased to be two-sided.

As the mind begins to open,  it’s living out of a fearless, undefended state, and it’s excited, hungry for knowledge. It realized that it’s everything, so it learns to exclude nothing. This excitement eventually levels to an openness that is so gentle, so without opposition, that it is experienced from all angles,and there is simply nothing to defend. And in the absence of defense it is openness.

Because I no longer defend, it’s not possible to oppose anything but my own thinking.

When there’s no opposition, the chaotic mind, whether it’s verbal or not, hears itself, because that’s all there is to hear. It notices loudly that the only opposition is its own.

I have noticed that in the face of what we are believing, reality waits to be noticed; eventually we wake up to it or not.

“The Work” is about collapsing that time, that dream, that trance. The unquestioned I-know mind will lead you to believe that your stressful thought in the moment is not only true but it is true forever. It is powerful enough to create the entire world as you understand it.

In this moment now, all the pain that was ever suffered in the world is past, and that is the grace that we cannot appreciate when we are believing our past/future stories.

Because the mind is believing its thoughts, often we feel tortured now as we live.

But the story we superimpose onto reality can be hell.  I invite all people directly to the wisdom inside them, and The Work can take you there anytime you are open to your own self, your own true wisdom. Find the way out of the nightmares that you experience by going in.

Until you wake up to reality in the moment, it is very difficult, even impossible, to love what is. Have you noticed?

The only thing that can cause you stress is the story of a past or a future.

What I love about the past is that it’s over! What I love about the future is that it doesn’t exist. What I love about this moment now is that I can “be” this, be that, I am awake. No problem!”

Find out more about “The Work” at thework.com