Meditation-Mind Blog

 

Sometimes the trickiest thing about stress is recognizing its signals in ourselves. In his book, Instant Calm: Over 100 Easy-to-Use Techniques for Relaxing Mind and Body by Paul Wilson, Paul Wilson details many of the ways we experience stress including such things as butterflies in the stomach, tense shoulders or jaw, heart palpitations, headaches, indigestion, difficulty sleeping and extreme irritability. The list is a long one.

After taking a good look at how stress works and its many signals, Wilson takes us through his collection of over 100 techniques for calming and soothing ourselves.You’ll find ways to calm yourself using acupressure, aromatherapy, breathing, massage, meditation, music, relaxation, physical exercise, stretching, self-hypnosis, visualization, foods, herbs and teas. And those are just the larger categories.

This is one of those books that makes you feel better just looking through it. You could probably use it like a cookbook and just open to any page and read through the instructions for inspiration. It won’t take long to find several techniques that can be combined into your own personal calming routine.

There are so many techniques that I had trouble choosing a favorite, so I decided to try the pick-any-page method myself to offer you an example. I just tried one called Comb Therapy. To be truthful, since I’m sitting at my computer and don’t have a comb within reach, I tried using a little 6-inch plastic ruler that I have in the mug where I keep my pens. That seems to work too.

Comb Therapy goes like this: Take an ordinary comb (or ruler) and, beginning at the fingertips, lightly stroke the comb over the tops of your fingers and the top of your hand and then continue over your wrist and arm all the way to your shoulder. Then repeat this action on your other arm. Continue this as many times as you like. When you feel done, sit quietly for a few minutes taking some slow, deep breaths. Very simple. Very pleasant. I just tried it three times on one hand and arm while breathing deeply and then moved to the other hand and arm. That was calming too.

You could follow this simple massage and breathing technique with one called Calm Affirmation. Sit quietly for about 5 minutes and read these affirmations adapted from Instant Calm over and over to yourself either out loud or silently:

 ”More and more, I am relaxing into a state of great peace and calm.
 I feel at ease with the world.
 I radiate this peace and calm to all around me.”

I played with this a little and found it was very effective to repeat each affirmation 3 times or more before moving on to the next one. For example:

 ”More and more, I am relaxing into a state of great peace and calm.”

 ”More and more, I am relaxing into a state of great peace and calm.”

 ”More and more, I am relaxing into a state of great peace and calm.”

Then, if you’re ready, start repeating:

 ”I am at ease with the world.”

And so on, from there.

If you want to close your eyes and make it even simpler, try just repeating the words “peaceful, calm and relaxed” over and over silently to yourself as you take slow, deep breaths. For example, think “peaceful” as you breathe in and “calm and relaxed” as you slowly breathe out.

It’s OK to experiment with this to see what is most relaxing for you.

In an early chapter of Instant Calm, Paul Wilson promises that you’ll feel better after reading this book. I’d say he’s right. If you want to check it out on Amazon, try any of the links in this post, including this one. Instant Calm: Over 100 Easy-to-Use Techniques for Relaxing Mind and Body by Paul Wilson 
 

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 1:37 am and is filed under Self-Hypnosis, Stress Relief, Relaxation, Book and CD Recommendations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.