Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

The relaxation response practice recording is for people who like to have verbal guidance at the beginning of this simple little relaxation exercise (since you have your eyes closed, this is actually quite useful). I got the idea from a recent client. I give all my clients a bookmark with the practice steps written out on one side (that’s how simple it is), and she mentioned that she’d probably use a meditation recording she had because it gave her verbal guidance. I thought, why not make a short recording of the steps?

I’ve had the relaxation response practice in written form posted for a while, but hopefully this makes it accessible to more people.

As I say on that page, Dr Herbert Benson, Director Emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has done extensive research to show that what he calls the “relaxation response” is beneficial for anxiety, cardiac problems, headache, hypertension (high blood pressure), irritable bowel syndrome, insomnia and pain, among other conditions. He claims that it helps with any disease that is either caused or made worse by stress, in proportion to the contribution of the stress to the disease.

Another thing that it and practices like it do is help you to release the external pressures of life and allow your authentic self to come forward. Along the way, I should warn you, you can experience some fairly strong emotions – often anger – as you stop distracting yourself from feeling them. But this passes, and if you practice regularly you can become a more “in focus” person, more alive, and kinder and gentler.

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