Relaxation

Every Wednesday, come along for an evening of relaxation and mindfulness.

As well as exploring how the mind works and how to improve your capacity to function to your full potential, learn to relax deeply, instilling peace and calm into your life permanently. Each week take away tools to reduce stress and live happily.

We will include a wide range of subjects, including nutrition and the correlation between mood and food. The best exercises to do and how exercise has a positive effect on your well-being.

Look at ways to create your ideal life, and clarify your dreams and ambitions into compelling and exciting goals.

Some evenings there will be inspiring and enlightening movies and documentaries to watch, all selected with the feel-good factor in mind.

These relaxation evenings will be on-going for 1½ hours per session. Please call, text or email to say how many people will be attending.

relaxation

Relaxation is a way of life – it is not just something you do when you lie down in a relaxation posture, and it is not just a matter of letting everything in the body go floppy.

To be effective in dissolving accumulated tension, relaxation needs to be carried out to a specific level. The purpose of relaxation is to stop everything in order to allow the person to become aware of their own energy or life-force.

Our bodies are designed to cope with the ‘cave-man’ type of stress which uses our ‘fight or flight’ survival mechanism. However, the type of stress we encounter today is different, eg, too many things to do and not enough time to do them, emotional problems, the stress of living with a rebellious teenager, a depressed or alcoholic partner, or a situation at work that you feel you can’t do anything about.

When the mind is continually running, the tissues of the body build up stress. If the person relaxes – not just their body but their thoughts – they will begin to feel this energy inside. Relaxing the body is the first step because when we are under stress everything in the body tenses up, so if you do the opposite and relax the body, it will begin to relax the mind.

The second stage in relaxation then is to train the mind. Most of us have very little control over our minds and when we are worried about something, even though we may know it is not doing us or the situation any good, we can’t stop, and the thoughts keep churning around and around, depleting our energy and making us feel drained. If someone tells us to ‘stop worrying’, we can’t do it - our thoughts have got control of us.

To try to stop our thoughts is not easy, so we adopt a step by step approach whereby we teach you several techniques that involve focusing the mind precisely on what you are doing. This develops your ability to be ‘one-directional’. For example, we may get you to focus on your breathing to such an extent that surges of energy are released from the body and immediately you feel better. Once you have learned this technique, you can begin to apply it in all areas of your life.

The aim of relaxation is to remove the stress, to take away what is not really us and put us back in touch with the life inside.

© Linda Keen, 2010