Embrace Effortlessness & Ease Part 1 -- Guided Meditation

The essence of meditation is effortlessness. If you find you are struggling in any way with meditation or feel you have not relaxed into it completely, this meditation may be just what you need.

This Embrace Effortlessness & Ease guided meditation is designed to help you experience greater ease in meditation. You will learn to let go of effort when it comes up so that you can flow easily with whatever you experience. All of our meditations are based on this approach, but this meditation will help you to embody the principle of letting go more deeply.

Our podcast was born in November of 2006, and this anniversary it seems like a good time to get back to basics. We are celebrating our 13th anniversary with the publication of 3 versions of this meditation, a 5, 10 and 20 minute version. The 5 minute meditation will give you a taste of ease and the longer versions will help you go deeper with the experience. The 20 minute meditation has more silence throughout. Today we are publishing the first of the 3, and this will be followed by the 10 minute in December, and the 20 minute meditation in January 2020.

Belly Breathing for Anxiety -- Guided Meditation

Belly breathing is an especially grounding and relaxing way of breathing. It’s simple and soothing. In this Belly Breathing for Anxiety meditation, we’ll take advantage of the calming effects of belly breathing, but we’ll also use it to help keep us from focusing on the anxiety (which tends to make it stronger).

What you resist persists. A key to managing anxiety is to let go of resistance. Let it be there. Trying to push anxiety out or make it go away doesn’t work. What does work is to focus on something else, like the breath. Simply allow the anxiety to be present.

Sensations and emotions come and go. Anxiety comes and goes. Just knowing that no state of mind or body lasts forever can help. All feeling states are temporary. If we don’t fuel it with our attention and worry thoughts, the anxiety will eventually subside on its own.

The soothing nature of belly breathing is enhanced if we pay attention to what it feels like to breathe in this way. Notice the soothing feeling. The body feels good with this breathing — when in the grip of anxiety the chest muscles are constricted, the breath is constricted, perhaps shallow and rapid. Belly breathing encourages relaxation and slower, deeper breaths. Notice how your body feels with this breathing. Both anxiety and the soothing breath may be experienced at the same time. You can choose to “favor” the breath and the pleasant feeling.

Once you’ve done belly breathing with the meditation a number of times, you will have developed a new habit. You’ll feel less threatened by anxiety, more comfortable with it, and you can do belly breathing anywhere, anytime you need to.

This meditation is our gift to you from our At Ease — Anxiety & Worry Relief app. Worry and anxiety usually go hand in hand. Learning how to deal with worry is a key to having less anxiety. The app has this and two other breathing meditations for anxiety, but it also provides a program to help you understand and break the “anxiety worry spiral”.

We hope you enjoy this meditation and would love to hear your comments and questions. Wishing you calm days ahead!

Autogenic Relaxation for Sleep

Many people find Autogenic Relaxation (or “Autogenic Training”) to be an extremely effective way to relax. It was first published as a technique in the early 1930s and has stood the test of time. I was taught to use Autogenic Relaxation as part of a trauma release process when I was studying the Healing Touch program. I loved it from the start.

Although Autogenic Training can be used without guidance through self-suggestion, it can also be used with guidance in which case you mentally repeat relaxing phrases after the guide. Although you can use this anytime for relaxation, I created this guided version specifically for relaxation before sleep. For this reason, there are no words to guide you out of the meditation. If you aren’t asleep by the time the voice guidance ends, you can simply enjoying resting in a relaxed state until sleep comes.

We just celebrated the 12th anniversary of the start of our podcast in 2006. This Autogenic Relaxation for Sleep meditation from our iSleep Easy app is our celebration gift to you. We hope it serves you well!

Wee Hours Rescue -- Go Back to Sleep

When we wake up in the middle of the night, our thoughts and emotions can start running wild and keep us from falling back to sleep. Perhaps we've awakened from a dream that has left us feeling vulnerable or full of anxiety or sadness. We find ourselves worrying about things and our half dreaming mind can imagine all kinds of worst case scenarios. Our daytime logic seems to escape us. Our defenses are down and our emotions are more intense. Like a child whose awakened from a bad dream, all we may need is reassurance that the dream wasn't, after real, and everything is OK.

Our Wee Hours Rescue meditation has helped many people who use it on our iSleep Easy app, so we're sharing it with our podcast listeners in hopes that it will bring more peace to your nights and help you get more sleep. Just 4 minutes of voice guidance can help you reset and slip back into sleep. This guided meditation has music in the background which continues for 14 minutes after the meditation stops.

We hope you'll find this useful and would love to hear from you. Happy ZZZZZs!

Whole Body Relaxation

Relaxation is not something you can do. It is a letting go of doing, a letting go of effort. The body and mind know how to relax, we just need to give them a chance to do what's natural.

Ideally a muscle contracts to perform an action and then when the action is finished, goes back into its relaxed state. That's the natural cycle -- relaxed - tensed - relaxed. Our dog can be lying completely relaxed on the sofa and then, with a sudden loud noise, she snaps to attention. Looking around and seeing that nothing is threatening or amiss, she's immediately back to relaxation mode. We humans, however,  are often chronically "at attention". Whether it's trying to keep up with the frenzied pace of modern life, or remaining in "flight or fight" mode after a major stress, we can find it difficult to get back into the relaxation mode.

Our Whole Body Relaxation meditation gently guides you into a relaxed state through a process of noticing tension and letting it go. Remember, your body knows how to relax. Given the chance it will happen on its own. Using this meditation repeatedly creates a new habit so that you can relax more easily anytime.

Let us know how it works for you, and feel free to ask questions!

(This meditation is a gift to you from our Relax & Rest app.)