Baca Lah! » Soul Food

De-stress: Mini relaxations

Nel Fahro-Rozi — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:31:33 +0000

This are excellent tips I came across in Everyday Health.

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The best-written book on stress control is no help to you if you can’t find time to read it. If you only have a short while to spare, dip into the stress-busting suggestions described in this section. Whether you have one minute or half an hour, you’ll find ways to ease your day.

Mini-relaxations can help allay fear and reduce pain while you sit in the dentist’s chair or lie on an examining table. They’re equally helpful in thwarting stress before an important meeting, while stuck in traffic, or when faced with people or situations that annoy you.

Here are a few quick relaxation techniques to try.

When you’ve got 1 minute

Place your hand just beneath your navel so you can feel the gentle rise and fall of your belly as you breathe. Breathe in slowly.

Pause for a count of three. Breathe out.

Pause for a count of three.

Continue to breathe deeply for one minute, pausing for a count of three after each inhalation and exhalation.

Or alternatively, while sitting comfortably, take a few slow deep breaths and quietly repeat to yourself “I am” as you breathe in and “at peace” as you breathe out.

Repeat slowly two or three times.

Then feel your entire body relax into the support of the chair.

When you’ve got 2 minutes

Count down slowly from 10 to zero.

With each number, take one complete breath, inhaling and exhaling. For example, breathe in deeply saying “10” to yourself. Breathe out slowly.

On your next breath, say “nine,” and so on.

If you feel lightheaded, count down more slowly to space your breaths further apart.

When you reach zero, you should feel more relaxed.

If not, go through the exercise again.

When you’ve got 3 minutes

While sitting down, take a break from whatever you’re doing and check your body for tension.

Relax your facial muscles and allow your jaw to fall open slightly.

Let your shoulders drop.

Let your arms fall to your sides.

low your hands to loosen so that there are spaces between your fingers.

Uncross your legs or ankles.

Feel your thighs sink into your chair, letting your legs fall comfortably apart.

Feel your shins and calves become heavier and your feet grow roots into the floor.

Now breathe in slowly and breathe out slowly.

Each time you breathe out, try to relax even more.

When you’ve got 5 minutes

Try self-massage.

A combination of strokes works well to relieve muscle tension.

Try gentle chops with the edge of your hands or tapping with fingers or cupped palms.

Put fingertip pressure on muscle knots. Knead across muscles, and try long, light, gliding strokes.

ou can apply these strokes to any part of the body that falls easily within your reach.

For a short session like this, try focusing on your neck and head.

Start by kneading the muscles at the back of your neck and shoulders.

Make a loose fist and drum swiftly up and down the sides and back of your neck.

Next, use your thumbs to work tiny circles around the base of your skull. Slowly massage the rest of your scalp with your fingertips.

Then tap your fingers against your scalp, moving from the front to the back and then over the sides.

Now massage your face. Make a series of tiny circles with your thumbs or fingertips. Pay particular attention to your temples, forehead, and jaw muscles.

Use your middle fingers to massage the bridge of your nose and work outward over your eyebrows to your temples.

Finally, close your eyes. Cup your hands loosely over your face and inhale and exhale easily for a short while.

When you’ve got 10 minutes

Try imagery.
Start by sitting comfortably in a quiet room. Breathe deeply for a few minutes.
Now picture yourself in a place that conjures up good memories.
What do you smell — the heavy scent of roses on a hot day, crisp fall air, the wholesome smell of baking bread?
What do you hear?
Drink in the colors and shapes that surround you.
Focus on sensory pleasures: the swoosh of a gentle wind; soft, cool grass tickling your feet; the salty smell and rhythmic beat of the ocean.
Passively observe intrusive thoughts, and then gently disengage from them to return to the world you’ve created.

Power of thot

Nel Fahro-Rozi — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 08:46:57 +0000

If you feel like a victim, or a lil bit down, this article by Shirley Scott is really a good reading to perk you up

The Power Of Thought And How To Create Your Desired Reality

What’s a thought? It’s pure energy! It can be focused or scattered. How powerful is this energy?

What does this unseen energy do for us or against us? Just by thinking something can we change our lives?

Where do thoughts come from? If we didn’t already have some knowledge about things, could we get thoughts about them? A thought is the product of metal activity, an idea, notion or opinion. Wow, this could be complicated, so let’s simplify it. I’d like to take you on a trip into the world of thought.

A thought is an energy form that starts in our brain. It doesn’t stay in our brain because it’s energy and the minute we think it, it leaves us, like a radio wave. So we can forget what we just thought or we can take that idea and manifest it into reality. Science is proving that our brain is like a generator of power.

It doesn’t know right from wrong or good from bad; that’s up to our consciousness and sub-conscious. Our brain only knows it’s supposed to do two things.

Put energy into ideas that we are focusing on so we can manifest them into reality.
Bring us the energy or situation we are focusing on.

So if we’re focusing on being a victim, we’ll be a victim. If we’re focusing on being poor, we’ll be poor. If we’re focusing on our fears, we’ll have them brought to us so we can overcome them. If we focus on being afraid of taking that first step to manifest what we want, we’ll never take it. But if we focus and take that first step to change our life, the brain brings us more opportunities to take more steps in that direction.

The power of thought to manifest what we want and even what we don’t want is very powerful. What we focus on is what we get. However, most of us don’t even think we’re focusing on something. The first thing we have to do is to find out what we’re focusing on.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to find out what you’re thinking about:

Are you always thinking about money and how you never have enough?
Are you always focusing on what everyone else has instead of being grateful for what you have?
Are you focused on a fear of changing your job or you life in someway?
Are you afraid of losing your spouse or partner?
Are you focused on your bad childhood or adulthood?
Do you think you’re always a victim and never get what you want?

When we continuously tell people we’ve never received what we wanted, it’s like we’re telling the Universe that we’re a victim. We’re telling our brain that we’ll never get what we want because we’ve never gotten it before and why should we get it now. We’re telling ourselves that we aren’t good enough to get what we want. We’ve just talked ourselves out of getting something that we want because it has never happened before.

Ever hear the saying, “Change your mind, change your life”?

By changing your mind, you change the energy that’s coming from your brain. It starts a whole new way of looking at life and getting the things we want out of life.

So when you’re feeling sad or upset or mad or other emotions, you need to get out of them by changing your thought pattern. After all, emotions are just energy patterns that are controlled by our thought pattern. You can’t be mad or sad if you think you’re happy. So the power of positive thought can get us out of any emotion we’re feeling.

You know the saying, “you can’t make anyone happy that doesn’t want to be happy.” It works on every other emotion too. So instead of being mad at someone for something and wasting a lot of energy on it, step back from it and change it with a different thought.

Here’s an example – your lover just broke up with you and you’re hurt. We’ve all experience this but if we stay in this hurt, we can cause ourselves disease. So instead of being hurt or mad, step back from it and see what lessons you learned from the relationship. What warned you this was going to happen? If you look hard enough and be very truthful with yourself, you’ll see a pattern or events or something that told you from the beginning that this relationship was a lesson and now that it has ended, you’ve learned that lesson. Or maybe you were stuck and couldn’t learn your lesson from this person, so the Universe is moving you on to someone from whom you can learn the lesson.

And as you start this process of stepping back from the relationship, you start to change your thought pattern from angry to investigating what happened. There should be no blame or guilt, just looking at what happened. You’re now changing the hurt and anger into something you learned and can move on with your life with more knowledge to help you with future relationships. You have changed your thought pattern from negative to positive.

We need to let go of old patterns that have been weighting us down, pushing us further and further away from what we actually want. The trick is to find out what is best to let go of and what we wish to keep.

Here’s only one example of how we do this. Let’s focus on how alone we may feel. You focus on this loneliness everyday. All day you think how lonely you are. You don’t have any friends and you never do anything or even get asked to go anywhere. All your energy is focused on being lonely instead of getting to know someone. Whether you’re aware of it or not, people can feel this depressed energy and they don’t want to be around you.

Because we’re energy beings, we feel energy from other people and other living things. Aren’t you aware when other people are happy or sad? Don’t we feel the energy they’re putting out into the world? And if we can feel other people’s energy, remember – they can feel ours too.

So change your thought pattern. Take yourself to lunch with a smile, and don’t worry about being alone. Start focusing on having friends and being friendly to someone first.

We always think another person should introduce themselves to us first – why is this? It’s the fear of rejection and we take it personally. But didn’t we learn in school that both the boys and the girls wanted to dance but both were afraid to ask the other one first. Are we still in that mind set?

We need to start putting our hands out to people first and when you do you’ll find friends. Here again is a change of mind set. It’ll change your energy pattern and your brain will start to focus on bringing you people with whom you can do things.

This is an example of how changing your thought pattern can start to manifest what you want in your life. This is just the beginning of controlling the focus of your thoughts and thought pattern.

Without being conscience about our thoughts we’re like robots doing the same thing over and over again and not knowing why. It’s like something or someone has control of our lives, and they do– they’re called our thoughts.

So start being aware of your thoughts, your thought patterns and watch your life change. This is just the beginning of manifesting what you really want out of this life.

To find out more about animal communicator, Shirley Scott, click here to please visit her website on Animal Communication.