Relaxation Practices that Reduce Stress

The body’s natural relaxation response is a powerful antidote to stress. Relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, visualization, progressive muscle relaxation, meditation, and yoga can help you activate this relaxation response. When practiced regularly, these activities lead to a reduction in your everyday stress levels and a boost in your feelings of joy and serenity. What’s more, they also serve a protective quality by teaching you how to stay calm and collected in the face of life’s curveballs.

Meditation

In meditation, the mind is focussed. Practice the means by which meditation can happen, using tools of self awareness, eye focus, mantra, imagination, inward focus allowing yourself powers of concentration, recharging mental, physical and spiritual aspects of ourselves.

If you are engrossed in a conversation with someone, do you notice everything going on around you? As long as you are absorbed, you do not. This is the entry point into meditation. The senses are capable of responding, but they do not because they are withdrawn.

Stress itself is not harmful, but our inability to deal wth our bodies' response to it can be. If you can learn to cope with the changes that life presents you, or change your response, you can handle life's stress. To this end, developing a meditative capacity and practice is invaluable.

While meditating, explore your awareness, exploring the inner frontiers of your consciousness with the mind of a scientist and the heart of a lover.