Revitalising Breath

The oxygen you take in whenever you breathe in revitalises every cell in your body - but you can help that process along by imagining and visualising it actually taking place.
By using your imagination, you can send energy-giving breath to wherever you like - anywhere that feels dull, or painful, or sluggish. Try it out!

1. Take a deep breath, and bring your arms slowly out in front of you and slowly up over your head.
2. S-t-r-e-t-c-h as you breathe out and slowly bring down your arms to your sides.
3. Breathe in again, bring your arms slowly out in in front of you, and slowly up over your head. Imagine your breathe revitalising your whole body, filling it with energy. Try to feel your body becoming alive with the oxygen that is spreading through all parts of your body.
4. Exhale slowly, bring your arms down to your sides, and imagine all your tension flowing out through your fingertips.
5. Repeat that sequence three times - and try to notice any sensations you may feel. You might experience warmth, tingling - or just a feeling of relaxation.
6. Now focus on an area where you feel tension or pain, and take another deep breath, and imagine/feel it moving into that area. Imagine that breath massaging that tension/pain away - and exhale.
7. Take another few deep, invigorating breaths - and imagine your whole body full of energy and vitality.
8. S-t-r-e-t-c-h your whole body, palms up, toward the ceiling. Rock your body from side to side by switching your weight from your right foot to your left foot, right to left, right to left.
9. Bring your arms slowly down to your sides, and take a few moments to enjoy the sights, sounds, colours around you and the feeling of being very, very alive.

Emily - http://www.therapypartnership.com/

Crying Your Heart Out is Pretty Good For You, Too.

And if you really, really need to do it on the bus - then you should.

On the whole, we're very bad at crying, and the fact that we're very bad at it, and persist in keeping 'a stiff upper lip', is very bad for us.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that everyone is a chemical factory - and that's true. The problem is that some of the chemicals people produce when they are over stressed, miserable and unhappy constitute the sort of garbage that a 'green' person would refuse to dump in landfill.

The ability to weep is a uniquely human emotional response. Only human beings of all living creatures are able to cry – and with good reason; the human body produces a great many chemicals in response to stressful situations, and some of them are very, very toxic indeed.

Tears produce protein, which helps rid the body of toxic chemical waste; they encourage the body to produce a natural painkiller called Enkaphalin - and they free pent-up emotions that might otherwise create physical problems.

Tears comfort and calm, cleanse the body, relieve pain and sorrow, get rid of tension and defuse stress.

If you feel the need to cry, then you should cry no matter where you are – and if you feel that you can’t cry immediately, then it’s very important to do it later on because if you don't you're going to be storing some very unpleasant garbage.

We all have to repress tears sometimes because it isn’t always possible or appropriate to cry when we want to, but letting tears out after the event is easy enough to manage; it's not hard to find a weepy movie - and, of course, writing about whatever it was that upset you earlier in the day will often make you cry, because the memory of it will make you shed the tears you felt like shedding at the time.

Better to cry later than not at all. And the method you use to make yourself cry is immaterial; the important thing is to cry, and go on crying until the crying stops of itself – which means, of course, no 'stiff upper lip', no admonitions to 'pull yourself together', and no smoking cigarettes to try to stop the flow.

Emily - http://www.therapypartnership.com/

It's Good to Talk To Yourself. Just Don't do it Aloud on The Bus.

When people are over-stressed or when bad or unpleasant things happen to them, the unconscious mind automatically causes the body to react to compensate - and the first line of defence it’s likely to come up with is an increased need to talk.

Verbalizing what you’re thinking or feeling about yourself or your situation or the unpleasant things that happened to you today, or yesterday, or even long ago, will allow you to achieve several very important things:

• You can clarify, realise and understand what EXACTLY has made you so upset, so stressed, or so angry.


• You can get things out of your system.


• You can neutralise unpleasant situations.


• You can turn your internal pressures down - or off.


• You can dissipate your anger and avoid negative mental activity.

And no, you don’t need a therapist or even a friend to talk to in order to get the benefit of saying everything you want or need to say, because the essential element of the ‘talker plus listener‘ equation is the act of putting thoughts and feelings into words, and not the fact of having another human being to talk to. Listeners – even (and perhaps particularly) professional listeners - are comforting to have, conducive to communication, and encourage the development of ideas by asking questions, but they aren’t essential to the defining, cathartic process of verbalising thoughts and feelings.

The cheapest, most efficient, and most private way of talking is to talk to yourself – in writing. And the ‘private’ part of that is very important, because most of us have some things locked away inside us that we would never want to reveal to another person – even a professional ‘listener’ - and which therefore might otherwise never be verbalised at all.

If you don’t want to commit those particularly private thoughts to paper – and I can understand why you might not want to take the risk of having someone read what you’ve written either now or in the future - there’s always the cat, the dog or a tree in the park. You can talk to any one of them, because none of them ever tell tales – and you’ll still have said what you wanted or needed to say.

Everyone needs to talk often – actually everyone needs to talk every day – about the things that have annoyed or upset them that day. And, of course, they also need to finally come out with all those things that have been niggling away at them for months (or even years) and which can sometimes add the emotional weight of past events to present problems.

Diaries – real ones as opposed to the ones that remind you that you need to go to the dentist next Wednesday – have gone out of fashion. That’s a pity. Garbage is something that needs to be thrown out – and you can offload an awful lot of it into a very small, very cheap book.

Talk to yourself often! It’s good for you. Things tend not to get quite so out of proportion if you do.

Emily - http://www.therapypartnership.com