7 Simple Steps To Fall Asleep By Relaxing Your Brain 2

Do your thoughts stop you from falling asleep and getting a good night's rest? With these 7 simple steps of mindful breath and thoughts, your body and brain will totally relax and release tension, stress, and anxiety, leaving you ready to fall fast asleep. With nature sounds: background birdsong during the commentary, followed by a few minutes of ocean waves at the end.

Transcript

And the first step is to simply become aware of your breath. I'd like to suggest two ways or two things to think of as you do this. Two approaches to awareness of the breath. The first is to really feel the physical sensations of the breath in the body as you breathe in and out. That helps us to really get into the body to ground ourselves and connect to the present moment through the breath and through the body. The second suggestion for awareness of the breath is to try and avoid the idea of making effort to focus or concentrate on the breath. So I like the idea of having a really nice and open and light awareness. So I'm not excluding or ignoring or trying to block out the awareness of anything else. So I'm still aware of thoughts, Sounds, Other sensations in the body, How I'm feeling. All these things of the present moment are perfectly welcome within my awareness. It's just that I'm simply deciding to pay a bit more interest, A bit more alertness and attention for a short while on the breath. So I like to think of this as keeping the awareness gently in the centre or the foreground of my open awareness. And allowing everything else to happen just around the breath, Just very slightly in the background. And this approach is the foundation of all parts of this meditation. So worth spending some time just seeing if I can relax into having this open awareness with the breath gently at the centre. The second step is very simple indeed. And that is to not make any effort to change the breath in any way. So allowing the breath to find its own rhythm, Its own depth, Its own speed. But we can make this an engaged part of the meditation, Not a completely passive part, By realising as we breathe that we could be changing the breath. I could be breathing more deeply or more quickly or I could stop the breath altogether. So just keeping that awareness of the fact that you could be changing the breath but you're actively choosing not to. This is a particularly useful step when we move on to the thoughts. So again worth just spending a bit of time firstly with the breath, Just getting that sense of not changing something but knowing we could at any moment. In this case just allowing the breath into the body and letting go, Allowing the breath out of the body. Keeping that awareness nice and open, Allowing everything else to happen around the breath. The final step for the breath is to see if you can certainly change your experience of the breath from feeling like you are breathing to feeling more like the body is being breathed by the breath. See if you can get a sense of feeling and experience of the body being breathed by the breath. So no effort needed from yourself at all. Just before we move on to the mindfulness of the thoughts, Just take a couple of moments to check the body, See if there is any tension that we are holding on to and just consciously relax any tension in the muscles. Just checking the arms and the legs, The back and the chest, Shoulders, Hands, Feet. And just allow yourself to let go of any tension, Allow the body to relax. Maybe notice how much easier it is to just allow the breath to flow freely through the body the more we allow the body to relax. Okay, So let's move on to the second half of the meditation and mindfulness of our thoughts. We are going to follow the same three steps as we began with the breath. So we can allow the breath to move slightly into the background of our awareness along with sounds, Sensations in the body, Feelings, Emotions, All the other things happening in this moment just there in the background. And invite our thoughts to be in the foreground or in the centre of our open and light awareness. So what does it feel like to be aware of your thoughts as you are thinking them? The next step of the thoughts is to not change your thoughts in any way. This can be a little trickier than with the breath as we tend to be a lot more attached to our thoughts, To the content of our thoughts. We identify a lot normally with our thoughts. We usually want them to be a particular way. So this is a little challenge to really allow your thoughts to run wild, Be completely free and allow yourself, Your mind to think any thought at all. It really doesn't matter at all for this meditation how positive or negative, How fast or slow, How deep or shallow your thoughts are. So keeping that nice light, Open awareness, Remaining present and just allowing your thoughts to do anything at all. If you find yourself running away with a particular thought, Just remember that you are just keeping the thoughts in the centre of our awareness. But we still want to keep that awareness nice and open so that we are still aware of the body, The breath, The sounds, All the other elements of the present moment. So we can remain open and present regardless of whatever thoughts happen to be passing through the mind at this moment. So I am breathing and thinking. I am aware of thoughts, Also aware of sounds in the background. And the final step for the thoughts, As we did with the breath, Rather than experience yourself to be doing the thinking, Just realising that actually we don't have to make any effort to create a thought, To remember to think, To produce a thought. If we just sit back and watch with this open awareness, You can notice that thoughts happen to us, They occur to us, They appear within the mind, Within our awareness. Without any effort needed from us whatsoever. And copying what we did with the breath and the body, We relaxed the body and allowed the breath to flow even more freely through the body. I'd like you to now turn your attention to the head and to begin with, In particular the face, And become aware of all the muscles across the face, Around the jaw, Around the eyes, And allow your face to completely relax. And becoming aware of the top, Back and sides of the head, The scalp and the skull, Allow all these parts of your head to relax completely. How does that feel? And then approaching your brain in exactly the same way as any other part of your body, Simply allow your brain to totally relax. How does it feel to allow your brain to relax completely? Allowing your whole head, Face and brain to all be completely relaxed, And allowing your thoughts to flow that much more freely through your relaxed brain. Just as your breath is flowing freely through your relaxed body. So I'll leave a few minutes of silence before we finish, Just to give you time to really enjoy simply being present with an open awareness, Allowing your breath to flow freely through your relaxed body, And allowing your thoughts to flow freely through your completely relaxed brain. So I'll leave a few minutes of silence before we finish, Just to give you time to really enjoy simply being present with an open awareness, Allowing your thoughts to flow freely through your relaxed body. So I'll leave a few minutes of silence before we finish, Just to give you time to really enjoy simply being present with an open awareness, Allowing your thoughts to flow freely through your relaxed body. So I'll leave a few minutes of silence before we finish, Just to give you time to really enjoy simply being present with an open awareness, Allowing your thoughts to flow freely through your relaxed body. So I'll leave a few minutes of silence before we finish, Just to give you time to really enjoy simply being present with an open awareness, Allowing your thoughts to flow freely through your relaxed body. So I'll leave a few minutes of silence before we finish, Just to give you time to really enjoy simply being present with an open awareness, Allowing your thoughts to flow freely through your relaxed body. So I'll leave a few minutes of silence before we finish, Just to give you time to really enjoy simply being present with an open awareness, Allowing your thoughts to flow freely through your relaxed body. So I'll leave a few minutes of silence before we finish, Just to give you time to really enjoy simply being present with an open awareness, Allowing your thoughts to flow freely through your relaxed body. So I'll leave a few minutes of silence before we finish, Just to give you time to really enjoy simply being present with an open awareness, Allowing your thoughts to flow freely through your relaxed body. So I'll leave a few minutes of silence before we finish, Just to give you time to really enjoy simply being present with an open awareness, Allowing your thoughts to flow freely through your relaxed body. So I'll leave a few minutes of silence before we finish, Just to give you time to really enjoy simply being present with an open awareness, Allowing your thoughts to flow freely through your relaxed body.

Reviews

Birds singing, ocean waves and Stephen’s gentle voice and meticulous commentary were the perfect equation for my body and mind to melt away in a deep, relaxing and beautiful conscious state. I was breathed by the breath which felt very calming and wonderful. Thoughts caused challenges but I re-anchored myself with my breath to stay in my open and self-awareness to allow, acknowledge and letting go of any difficult thoughts - It felt so peaceful inside and out - my practice this morning is helping me to see my day through. My whole body feels energised and so is my mind.

Stephen, thank you for a beautiful conscious space I found myself in which has left me in a harmonious sensation. Stephen thank you so much for creating this beautiful gem💎 🙏🏻💚✨🤗