(10 hours) #44 Relaxation is the core - Stress & Pain Relief Podcast (Jason Newland) (18th October 2022)

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland and this is stress and pain relief. Basically, only listen when you can safely close your eyes. So the reason, now I say this at the beginning of each of these recordings, is the reason it's stress and pain relief, chronic pain relief, is because the same techniques help both of those issues.

Something I discovered quite a while ago, and back in 2006 when I started doing pain relief recordings and helping people face to face, is I realised that relaxation reduces chronic pain. So the more relaxed someone was, or became, or become, the more that physical sensation or the experiential feeling of that chronic pain reduces. So there's various reasons why that may happen.

But, you know, relaxation is the core for me. There's techniques you can use, but relaxation, deep relaxation, is 99% of falling asleep, in my mind. That's my opinion.

And when I make recordings for falling asleep, the hypnosis recordings, the more relaxed you become, your mind starts to drift, you may be focused and, you know, with a recording like this I do, this is a focused recording. But after the focusing, after the concentration on maybe following the technique that I am providing, you then become more relaxed. And it's natural when we're relaxed, deeply relaxed, that our minds start to wander.

Now, relaxation can be caused or created by so many different ways. It doesn't have to be someone like me talking very slowly or monotone or counting down from 100 to 1, or getting you to focus on how you physically feel, like doing a body scan. It doesn't necessarily have to include suggestions of comfort and relaxing each body part, noticing your muscles in your legs relaxing, or your hands relaxing, your fingers relaxing, noticing your eyelids relaxing.

Those are ways to do it. There's so many different ways to get to that physical and mental feeling of relaxing, because it's not just physically relaxing, you relax your mind. And that whole process is, it's kind of weird, it's a circle, becomes, you know, you relax the muscles in your body, which in turn relaxes your mind.

And when your mind becomes more relaxed, your body becomes more relaxed, which causes your mind to become more relaxed. You know, so it's an ongoing thing. And this is probably nothing new to people listening.

So there's also other ways to relax. Something that I like to do is listening to music, probably more classical music. Although I do like to, you know, sometimes listen to a favorite album or like a combination of songs, favorite songs.

I also like to listen to motivational recordings as well on audible. So you know, it depends what you like. Sometimes it's nice to just have some peace, to have nothing.

You know, to have no background music or talking. One of the things I quite like to do is when I'm lying in bed, I like to just listen to the background sounds. It might be the wind outside, maybe the birds outside, you know, depending on what time I'm going to sleep.

If I'm having a nap during the day, I quite like to listen to the birds, even the traffic in the distance or trains or a plane going by. Anything, if you're in that frame of mind where you're not being reactive, you know, you're just choosing to lie down on your bed or you're choosing to sit back in your sofa on your sofa and close your eyes and you're making that purposeful choice to just let go, to just be with whatever's going on without expectation, without needing complete silence, because you're unless you're, you know, you've got the hugely soundproofed room, the windows are soundproofed and all that stuff.

I mean, I've got some soundproofing in this room, but sounds still get through.

Neighbours downstairs, if they decide to turn a vacuum cleaner on, I'll probably hear that. If the cleaners coming into the hallways of the blocks and, you know, banging around or if someone's in the garden, you know, I hear those sounds. Now, it's more of a distraction for me if I'm making a recording, because those sounds aren't picked up that much on the microphone, apart from like really loud ones.

Sometimes the birds can be quite loud because there's lots of them all at the same time, having a party five o'clock in the morning sometimes, especially in the summer. This time of the year, because it's October the 18th, 2022, and it's 7.38 in the morning and the birds are making no sound. It's weird, like the birds have become very quiet lately.

They're still there, they're just very quiet. So I just imagine they're sleeping a lot at this time of the year. And when you get in touch with what is natural for all of us, it's natural to relax.

It's natural to sleep. It's natural to have emotions. It's natural to have a busy mind sometimes.

Just as I said that, the birds started tweeting in the tree. Isn't that weird? They must have heard me. It's natural for the birds to just start tweeting and singing.

But once you know that your mind can slow down and become calmer, once you know that when you decide to take some time to just listen to me talking, that things do slow down. And when things slow down internally, you start to feel different. That relaxation starts to increase on its own.

Without me even mentioning it. Without me suggesting or asking you to relax your back or your chest, notice your stomach relaxing or the back of your neck, your shoulders. You know, without me mentioning that kind of stuff, you may notice yourself that connection between your mind slowing down, becoming, feeling more peaceful and your body also feeling more relaxed, that feeling of calmness.

It's always within our grasp. It's never more than a, at the most, a few minutes away if you choose to take the time. And I wouldn't even say effort, because it's the opposite to effort.

You can't force yourself to feel relaxed. You can't force yourself to feel tired. You can't force yourself to have different physical feelings in your body.

But you can encourage them. You can encourage those parts of your body that maybe were problematic to calm down, to slow down, so that you're no longer having an emotional reaction. Instead, you're observing, just observing from a distance.

And as your mind calms down even more, your body also follows. So there's that sense of peace that spreads through your body, almost like it's traveling through your veins to the different parts of your body. And there's that focus in your mind.

And it's not so much like a sharp focus necessarily, but it's more a peaceful, observing, just a calmness of thinking, where you know that there's nothing that you need to think about. If you choose to think about something, you can. It's available to you any time.

But if you've chosen to just take a bit of time off, chosen to let go of that other stuff for a while, and you can see it as an almost an experiment, testing, to see if what I'm talking about is useful. And that correlation between your mind and how your mind feels calmer, more peaceful. And your body, and how the whole of your body, but specifically any parts that were causing you discomfort before, feel different now, feel different, calmer, looser.

And even if you decide to close your eyes and sit down or lie down for 10 minutes, a couple of times a day, just to give yourself a break, something quite unusual starts to happen. You begin to prepare in your mind and your body, begin to expect to feel relaxed, almost instantly, even as you're walking towards your chair or your bed. And in your mind, you're expecting that as soon as you lie down or sit back in your chair, your sofa, you close your eyes, your mind slows down very quickly.

And it's that sense of relief and release of those physical sensations that you choose to let go of. And then there's that increase in comfort that you embrace, that you can enjoy, that you expect to have, feeling more and more relaxed, experiencing this sensation spreading through your body, not focusing on any particular part, not discriminating, but just engulfing every part of you. So that sense of comfort and letting go applies to every part of your body equally, without judgment, so easily, so naturally, as your mind continues its peaceful journey.

And there's a certain feeling that you won't experience anywhere else, this feeling where your mind is really peaceful and still, and it's a lovely feeling. And you may wonder, why do you, why don't you experience this more often? Why don't you give more time to feel in this way? And maybe you can, if you choose to let go, to feel more peaceful, more relaxed. And as your mind and your body no longer seem separate, and they never were separate, your body affects your mind, your mind affects your body, always has, always will, in a positive way, positively causing you to feel amazing, and relaxed, and peaceful.