Sometimes you just have to chillax y'all
Every day our lives are full of "stuff". You know what I mean, when someone asks how you are, you tend to say "I've been so busy"! Yea you know who you are - we're all guilty of it.
The best thing you can do for yourself is to take time out every day. I can start hearing the excuses "I don't have time to take time out", blah blah blah. Enough with the excuses - you make the time for it, and then it becomes second nature and part of your usual routine.
So how do you "take time out" and what are the benefits of doing so? A lot. Taking time out is easy - go for a walk to clear your mind, meditate, do some yoga, do something that takes your mind off everything else and allows you to just focus on the most important but most neglected person, you.
As a wannabe massage therapist, it is so clear to me why it is important for us to chillax and focus on ourselves. We see many clients who complain of the same ailments - back pain, pelvis being out of alignment, shoulder and neck pain, the list goes on. What these clients don't realise is that the underlying cause of all of these pains is because the client just simply doesn't take the time out to listen to their own body and its needs until it is too late. I put my hand up as being guilty over that - over the last few years when I visit MM he always says "You need to meditate or just take the time out to slow down the body for it to start healing itself". Whenever he said that I would internally roll my eyes because meditation was for hippies and as if that could do anything - oh how far I have come haha!
When you are practising yoga, meditating or just relaxing, you start to focus a bit more on how your body is feeling. The more you slow down your body, the more you will allow your body to harness it's inherent healing power to start fixing those "bad backs", "out of alignment pelvis" and "tight necks". This literally happens without you consciously doing anything. Today whilst I was lying down on the floor and meditating, my pelvis area had a couple of spasms. For me, I know it's the body releasing the stress or crap that I somehow managed to bury in that area, so I just relaxed and let the body do what it needed to do. Similarly sometimes when I lie there, my neck will start moving in various directions as it knows instinctively what it has to do in order to unwind the tension I have built up. Ditto goes for my pelvis - it starts moving itself and resetting back to normal.
Still think it's bollocks?? Why is it that after yoga, you feel so much more lighter and have grown a few cms? You have put aside the time to allow your body to concentrate and release the tense areas. When I massage my friends at home, I have started to practice cranio-sacral therapy on them. Without going into the details about how it works (because even I don't know yet), I'm essentially tapping into the body's energy and slowing it down to allow for the body's natural healing process to kick in. I always get a bit of a kick out of hearing my friends exclaiming that their body is doing bizarre things! For the past two, their pelvises brought themselves back into alignment, for the one I did today, the muscles in his chest relaxed significantly as well making him feel quite tall. For my first ever cranio-sacral guinea pig, her neck moved. All of them went home feeling extremely refreshed, relaxed, light on their feet and walking on air. This is our normal states! It's the stresses of everyday life pull us down - and if we don't take the time out to look after ourselves, we eventually feel that the "stressed out state" is normal. Do I need to remind you why it is that you get sick as soon as you go away on holidays?
We can make the conscious effort to feel "normal" all the time if we just take the time out every day to unwind. For me, I meditate twice a day. Once in the morning, once in the evening. The effects of each meditation are the same - I end up feeling very relaxed, my body puts itself back into alignment, and I feel like I'm walking on air (not to mention it also allows me to put things in perspective and handle stress better than how I used to before). Just sit, or lie down, and let the body do the rest - you'll thank yourself for it, and others will thank you for it too :P
P.S The last holiday I went on, I wasn't sick at all. Boom.
The best thing you can do for yourself is to take time out every day. I can start hearing the excuses "I don't have time to take time out", blah blah blah. Enough with the excuses - you make the time for it, and then it becomes second nature and part of your usual routine.
So how do you "take time out" and what are the benefits of doing so? A lot. Taking time out is easy - go for a walk to clear your mind, meditate, do some yoga, do something that takes your mind off everything else and allows you to just focus on the most important but most neglected person, you.
As a wannabe massage therapist, it is so clear to me why it is important for us to chillax and focus on ourselves. We see many clients who complain of the same ailments - back pain, pelvis being out of alignment, shoulder and neck pain, the list goes on. What these clients don't realise is that the underlying cause of all of these pains is because the client just simply doesn't take the time out to listen to their own body and its needs until it is too late. I put my hand up as being guilty over that - over the last few years when I visit MM he always says "You need to meditate or just take the time out to slow down the body for it to start healing itself". Whenever he said that I would internally roll my eyes because meditation was for hippies and as if that could do anything - oh how far I have come haha!
When you are practising yoga, meditating or just relaxing, you start to focus a bit more on how your body is feeling. The more you slow down your body, the more you will allow your body to harness it's inherent healing power to start fixing those "bad backs", "out of alignment pelvis" and "tight necks". This literally happens without you consciously doing anything. Today whilst I was lying down on the floor and meditating, my pelvis area had a couple of spasms. For me, I know it's the body releasing the stress or crap that I somehow managed to bury in that area, so I just relaxed and let the body do what it needed to do. Similarly sometimes when I lie there, my neck will start moving in various directions as it knows instinctively what it has to do in order to unwind the tension I have built up. Ditto goes for my pelvis - it starts moving itself and resetting back to normal.
Still think it's bollocks?? Why is it that after yoga, you feel so much more lighter and have grown a few cms? You have put aside the time to allow your body to concentrate and release the tense areas. When I massage my friends at home, I have started to practice cranio-sacral therapy on them. Without going into the details about how it works (because even I don't know yet), I'm essentially tapping into the body's energy and slowing it down to allow for the body's natural healing process to kick in. I always get a bit of a kick out of hearing my friends exclaiming that their body is doing bizarre things! For the past two, their pelvises brought themselves back into alignment, for the one I did today, the muscles in his chest relaxed significantly as well making him feel quite tall. For my first ever cranio-sacral guinea pig, her neck moved. All of them went home feeling extremely refreshed, relaxed, light on their feet and walking on air. This is our normal states! It's the stresses of everyday life pull us down - and if we don't take the time out to look after ourselves, we eventually feel that the "stressed out state" is normal. Do I need to remind you why it is that you get sick as soon as you go away on holidays?
We can make the conscious effort to feel "normal" all the time if we just take the time out every day to unwind. For me, I meditate twice a day. Once in the morning, once in the evening. The effects of each meditation are the same - I end up feeling very relaxed, my body puts itself back into alignment, and I feel like I'm walking on air (not to mention it also allows me to put things in perspective and handle stress better than how I used to before). Just sit, or lie down, and let the body do the rest - you'll thank yourself for it, and others will thank you for it too :P
P.S The last holiday I went on, I wasn't sick at all. Boom.