(music) #26 THE WIND BLOWS THROUGH YOU - Stress & Pain Relief (Jason Newland)

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland. This is Stress and Pain Relief podcast. Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes.

I hope you're well and it's very, very windy here today, like outside. The window. It's windy, very, very windy.

So you may hear a bit of the wind in the background and it got me to thinking about something that I like to do when it's windy. And I like to do this not necessarily near any trees, if I'm honest. I tend to try and keep away from trees when it's really windy.

Because sometimes they fall down, which is not good. Had a couple fall down recently in the park. So this is something that I do.

I've done it since I was a kid. I imagine that I am transparent. And when I was a kid, I would stand there with my arms out, allowing the wind to blow through me.

Now what's strange about this is part of the reason I did that is because I didn't want to be blown around by the wind. Because I was only little, very, very little when I was young. So I decided I was going to be like a tree.

And my feet were going to stick to the ground. So I imagined that my feet were firmly rooted into the ground like a tree. I put my arms out like branches.

And I decided that the wind could blow through me, which meant I wouldn't get blown all around. Now, of course, this, you know, if it had been a really, really strong wind and I would probably got blown away. But, you know, for a medium sized wind, I almost didn't realize at the time I was doing self hypnosis, really, you know, visualization.

And I was probably seven or eight years old. And I'd imagine my feet were like sprouting roots into the ground like a tree, my arms were the branches, and the wind was blowing through me. So I was transparent, and the wind was blowing right through me.

And it felt lovely, felt really nice. Now, I want to add that I was an incredibly anxious child at times, when I was little, very, I used to build things up, you know, and I just explode with tears and stuff. I just and I didn't hardly know why I was upset, because I just let every little thing build up.

And this is one of those things that used to help. So I guess I found ways to cope and to deal with life at a very early age, things that I didn't realize were quite creative, actually. You know, for such a young person to sort of come up with, it wasn't things I'd read in a book or read online, there was no internet back then.

I hadn't been taught it by anybody, I just, for some reason decided that I liked the feeling of the wind on me. But I didn't like being blown around by the wind, being, I don't mean like a kite, I didn't have a piece of string attached to my big toe. My family weren't using me as a kite in the sky.

And it was just, you know, there was that, by blown away, just being moved around, you know, a little bit. So I decided to do that. And I was able to just stand still.

And it felt like the wind was blowing through me because I was transparent. I was, I guess in my mind, invisible. And everything could just go right through me.

Almost like I didn't exist. But I did. But I was invisible to nature, and to everything else.

And I could walk through walls and you know, that kind of way of thinking. Now, what I noticed when I did that, is I felt really good. I felt really free.

But I didn't understand cognitively, what I was doing, really. I didn't know. I knew it felt good.

I didn't know why it felt good. As an adult, I realized that I was letting go of stuff. I was allowing, in my mind, the wind to blow away the stress and the emotional pain that I was experiencing.

And it was really therapeutic. And it felt amazing. Another similar thing that I've done in as you know, that I did when I was younger, and as an adult, is standing under a high pressured shower, having that shower, you know, on my forehead, on my forehead, on the top of my head.

And almost as if it's going all the way through my brain, and through my body. And again, releasing stress and tension and just completely relaxing me in a way that's, if you know, in the past at times, it's felt almost spiritual. It's such a relief, and such a release of built up emotions.

So I'm going to focus on the first one, we can do the other one another time. But the first one, imagining that you are transparent, in a sense that anything could just go through you. So you know, if someone chucked a stick at you, they just go straight through you and land on the floor behind you, as an example.

So the wind would blow straight through you. And that's what we're going to do with this recording. I'd like you to imagine this really windy, not like huge wind, but just windy, you know, windy, windy, where you can feel it on your skin, but you feel safe.

And you can still feel confident enough to sort of just stand there with your eyes closed. Remembering you're doing this in your mind and your imagination. But when you think about something in your imagination, your brain and your mind doesn't know any difference from if you're doing it in reality.

So if you haven't already closed your eyes, I'd like you to close your eyes and just get in touch with any feelings of stress, or any feelings of physical discomfort, like pain that you may have in your body. And just notice where those feelings are. Maybe it's just one part of your body, maybe it's multiple parts.

Just scan the different parts of your body, noticing, you know, moving down from your forehead to your eyes, to your jaw, your mouth, your neck, down your chest into your stomach, down the back of your neck, all the way down your back, middle of your back, your lower back. Focusing down your shoulders, your upper arms, your elbows, your forearms, your wrists, hands and fingers. And then moving down your hips, your buttocks, your groin area, and then down your thighs to your knees, then down your calf muscles and your shins, ankles, feet and toes.

Just noticing the different parts of your body and how you feel, generally. So you've got those parts where perhaps you don't feel so great, and it feels perhaps tight, tension, stressed, or painful. And now I want you to focus again this time on the parts that feel really relaxed.

Again, moving down from your forehead to your eyes, then moving down to your jaw, your mouth, your tongue, noticing any sense of comfort, relaxation, or even pleasure. Moving down to your throat, and down to your chest, your stomach, and then from your back of your neck down, all the way down your spine, to the bottom of your spine, and either side of your spine, at the top of your back, the middle, and your lower back.

Just noticing how those parts of your back feel now.

And then you're focusing on your shoulders, upper arms, elbows, forearms, wrists, focusing on your hands and your fingers. Now focusing on your buttocks, your hips, that whole area that pretty much divides, you know, your upper body from your lower body. Focusing on buttocks and your groin, your thighs, knees, calf muscles and shins, and then down to your ankles, and your hands, your feet, and your fingers, and your toes.

And sometimes I do get, I get muddled up when I think of hands and toes and fingers and feet and it's so closely connected. Plus sometimes when I go down the body like that, I fall asleep doing it, I get very tired. It's very almost sleep inducing to just be focusing on the different parts of your body.

So your hands and your feet, there's a connection there between them that never goes away. It's always, you know, the fingers and the toes, you know, they're very closely related. The palms of your hands, the bottoms of your feet, two sensitive areas.

And of course, you've got your wrists, and there's your ankles, both doing the same job, supporting your hands, supporting your feet. And then as you move up, you've got your forearms, and you've got your shins, you've got your elbows, you've got your knees. It's almost like a mirror version from top to bottom, in some ways.

You've got your thighs, you've got your, your muscles and all your biceps and triceps in your upper arm. So again, the thighs, of course, a lot more muscly, a lot stronger, pretty much the strongest muscles in your body. And you've got your shoulders.

And that's where the, the bones from your arms go into the socket. The same as your hips, your legs, the bones of your legs, moving into the socket of your hips. So your shoulders are pretty much the equivalent to your hips.

That's kind of where it ends really, as far as similarity, I guess. Because then you've got that whole area, stomach, your chest and your back, which is, you know, a special part in its own right, a part that does its own thing. And that's where all of the life preserving work happens.

Your heart, your lungs, your kidneys, your liver, and this digestive system and all that stuff, all that groovy stuff. And of course, there's your neck, your precious neck. It is precious, needs to be looked after.

The job it does for you and me every day, 24 hours a day, is priceless. The neck is probably the most, possibly the most unappreciated, one of the most unappreciated parts of the body. Hear how windy that is out there.

I could almost feel the wind moving through me now. So remember to show some gratitude towards your neck, because it really is your best friend. You know, without your neck, you wouldn't be able to breathe, you wouldn't be able to eat.

And it supports your head, where your brain is, the most important part, your entire body, your entire existence. Your brain is numero uno, or numero one, or number uno, whatever you want to say it. So your neck is so precious, but then every part of your body is precious.

But some are more important. Some you have to have there, you can never do without them. And your neck's always pretty much in, in action.

Apart from maybe when you're lying down. Then your brain is always in action. Even when we're sleeping, the brain is still working for you.

So this process so far is quite often a really, very simple way to relax yourself. So if you can hear the sound of the wind in the background, great. But if you can't, it doesn't matter.

You know what wind sounds like, you know what wind feels like. And I imagine wind is everywhere. Every single country of the world, there is, it gets windy sometimes.

Some places particularly, you know, really windy, windier than my underpants. So with your eyes closed, I'd just like you to imagine you're just standing there in the middle of a field, there's no trees around. You're safe.

It's a nice day. But it's windy. And you can imagine you just, you don't have to, but you can imagine spreading your arms out.

Someone might think that you're a scarecrow, but of course you're not. So just there with your arms out, and imagine the, your feet in the ground. And there's almost the roots sprouting from the bottoms of your feet, deep into the ground, keeping you stable, keeping you safe, keeping you attached to the ground.

No matter how strong the wind is, you can't be moved. You are there for the duration. And as that wind brushes against your body and your face, you can feel it.

It's not particularly strong right now. You can feel it bouncing against your body. So now, as I count down from five to one, you can make your body completely transparent, completely see-through, completely so that nothing can be stopped by your body.

Everything just goes straight through. The wind will blow straight through. Your body and your head and your hands, every part of you, the wind will blow through.

When I get to one, starting now, five, four, three, two, one. And just imagine that wind getting stronger, blowing towards you. And when it gets to you, it just blows right through you.

Blown away any remaining feelings of stress or anxiety or pain. Blowing those feelings away. Feel the pleasure that you get as that wind is just blowing through you.

Blowing through you even quicker than before. Almost just creating a certain feeling as the wind eliminates any old negative thoughts from your mind. Feeling, really feeling nice.

Really feeling nice as that wind continues to blow through your body, through your head. Completely relaxed, counting down from ten to one, with every number sending you deeper and deeper into comfort. Deeper, relaxed, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, two,