Self-Massage And Deep Breathing Reset

This practice can help us reset after a difficult day and be ready to sleep or restore our energy at any time. We start with the feet and gently massage the marma points. Use your favourite massage oil or body lotion to involve your olfactory sense, or a body brush if you feel sluggish or too oily. Then we lie down and use diaphragmatic and full yogic breaths to completely relax and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, repair biology switches on.

Photo by Kate Stone Matheson on Unsplash

Transcript

Okay so let's take a couple of breaths and notice our body. We're just going to check in and see how it feels before we start. Hello body. Feeling our body from the inside. Noticing how the energy feels in our feet and our hands. Without wanting to change anything if we can. And we'll have a look back when we get to the end of the practice and see if this has changed. So let's get our oil or our massage lotion and we'll get a bit in our hand and either foot. We'll start with a little bit of lotion on our hands and we're going to start on our toes. So the bit where the toenail meets the finger that's a marmar point. So what that means essentially is it's a junction in the body. It's a junction of different tissues. So we're just going to rub gently the bit where the nail starts to emerge from your toe. We'll give each one a little rub and then there's between your big toe and your next toe there's a little flap of skin. So I can show you on my hand it's just the same bit but on your toe. Let's give that a little massage it's all gentle and the idea with this is that the prana in the body is always moving when we're healthy. But when you get traffic jams, Blockages in our energy flow and you can think of that in terms of blood or lymph or like pure energy then you get the conditions for disease. So in this massage process we clear blockages. So in the center of the sole of your foot so think maybe an inch or two below the ball of your foot and you'll know when you've found it because there'll be a sensitive bit. So do it gently and you just run gently with some circles in the center of your foot center of the sole. And then we'll do the ankle. So we can do all around the ankle because there's numerous points there. Okay and we're going to swap over and do the other foot. So same again we start with our nails. So okay and then the little flap between our big toe and our next toe gently. And then see if we can find a sensitive bit on the sole of our foot. So maybe an inch behind below the ball of the foot just gently make a little circle in that area. If you find a sensitive bit then that's exactly it we don't want to make a hole we just gently and then our ankle. So this is obviously the oil I've got the lavender oil this is obviously good if you've got vata skin so vata is a bit dry tendency to be dry and thin skin but if you've got kaffir skin it might not be the best thing for you you don't want to put oil on top of kaffir so you might use a brush like a body brush. So our feet are happy halfway roughly halfway up your calf so your calf muscle is sort of split into two either side there's a so in the center the back of your lower leg and we can just gently rub that area and again if you find a sensitive bit that's probably exactly it but we can just massage that area generally and there's no need to worry about finding the exact point we can just do that area and then the knee all around the knee the front and the back. Lots of junction points here between the tendons and the bones muscles nerves. Okay and then we'll swap to the other leg we'll find that point on our calf and if we're unsure we just generally do the back of our calf muscle and the knee all around the knee above and below. Okay so if you make fists with your hands and at the widest point of your hips we just do some sort of gentle circles and then your sacrum so at the base of your spine is your sacral bone and there's a lot obviously your spine and your neck contain a lot of junctions it's your communications system so nice and gently finding your sacrum give me a little rub we can work our way up to our kidneys so that's roughly where the ribs are ending at the back and then we can soften our arms a little bit swapping them over at the front or crossing our arms over at the front of us and then we can do the sides of our ribs just below our armpits okay and then release our arms let the shoulders soften a little bit coming to the front of our body finding where your nipples are and going straight down to where the ribs end is your stomach and your spleen we can give those a gentle massage and then coming up a little bit further between your shoulder and where your chest begins there's a little dip through the front of the body between the shoulder and the chest on both sides again gently all right we can use a bit more lotion if we want now because we're going to do our hands and it's exactly the same place as your feet so we'll start with the nails so and then that little flap between the first finger and the thumb and the center of our palm and we can swap over do the other hand so the nails of the other hand so and this is it's nice self-care at the end of a hard day it's looking after yourself giving yourself a bit of love and attention the flap of skin between the thumb and the first finger and the center of the palm so okay we're going to work our way up again so the elbows all around the elbows so and the other one so we're going to work our way up towards our head now you might want to take your glasses off if you've got them on so the base of the neck is those diamond-shaped muscles between the shoulders and the neck that's where your neck goes into your body and give that gentle smooth working our way up to the base of our skull just feel occipital bone where your neck begins and then gentle ziggy zaggy movements go all the way up to the crown of our head where our mohican would be where are we to have one even towards the forehead and the scalp's so sensitive that can be very pleasant isn't forehead smooth the forehead smooth some of those wrinkles away those worry lines and then our eyebrows so there's a mama point at the start middle and end of the eyebrows which is smooth with the fingertip the eyebrows and similarly beneath the eye we're just gently outlining the orbit of the eye just gently on the temples as well so we're going to smooth our cheeks upwards with the flat of the hand and the ears so the little flap that we can use to close our ears we can give that a bit of a gentle massage coming back to the center we can run down our nose so from the top of our nose to the end of our nose run a fingertip down there tip down there beneath our nostrils beneath our lip and you may notice some of these are the same points that we do the tapping on for the same reason and then lastly our neck so using our fingertips stroke gently stroke the skin of our neck and we've completed a round of self-massage so i invite you to make yourself comfortable lie down if you would like to for our deep breathing practice make sure you're warm enough you might need socks or a blanket please make yourself comfortable have a little fidget make sure there's enough room for your body you might like to have your legs out straight letting your feet fall out to the sides or if that's not comfortable you might like to have your knees bent with your feet on the floor and you can let your knees rest one against the other that can be more comfortable on your back you might like to have your arms away from your body a little bit with your palms uppermost and this might allow your shoulders to soften just noticing the position of our body once more taking a long smooth breath and as we exhale allowing our body to rest to soften to relax another long smooth breath and as we exhale our whole body getting a little bit nearer the floor once more one full in breath and on the exhale relaxing softening just a little further and noticing how it feels to be quiet and still maybe you can sense yourself becoming a little more quiet and a little more still your heart rate may be slowing and we're going to keep our eye on our heart rate as we practice the breathing because that can tell us whether we are actually relaxing or if we're trying too hard our heart rate may increase and that's a sign that we need to have less control of our breath so I invite you to place either hand on your belly below your navel and breathe naturally comfortably and the subtle movement of your hand will show you that your belly moves as you breathe as your diaphragm moves so we're not trying to change anything at the moment we're observing so then I'm going to invite you to draw a little more air towards your hand deep into your lungs gently just be subtle and gentle when we work with the breath like this because we can create tension if we force things so if our aim is relaxation we guide the breath ever so slightly deeper so that our hand moves just a little more so and we will probably find that our breath becomes a little slower so because we need fewer of these breaths so again we're not forcing trying to create that we're allowing it if it happens so let's rest with this diaphragmatic breath for a few moments keeping our focus on the breath as best we can and if our mind wanders just return so so so know that this is doing your body and mind good activating all the repair biology that you already have in place getting it working for you so please allow your arm to rest somewhat comfortable I'm going to see if we can deepen this breath a little further gently so when we're ready to inhale I invite you to draw breath into the lower lungs the side of the lungs and then the upper chest a full yogic breath and then letting it all go comfortably and then letting the breath breathe itself so we're going to use that breath and the speed the amount that you use that breath is kind of up to you you may be able to continuously use that deep deep breath if your heart doesn't speed up too much or you may just want to do one full yogic breath and then resting with the natural breath for a few breaths so the choice is yours but work with your body and not against it so when you're ready to inhale you're ready to inhale drawing the breath deep into the lung the side of the chest and then the upper lung expanding the ribs all those muscles in between your ribs getting a little bit further apart letting the breath leave the body because this is oxygenating our body even more effectively these breaths can become even slower if that happens just allow it to be so you may find it comfortable to use that full yogic breath continuously for a few moments so or you may find that creates too much tension and your heart rate increases in which case rest in between with your natural breath so so so before we leave this place how are you now body feeling our body so and in our own time we can take a few deeper breaths to energize us knowing that this reset is available to us whenever we need it and setting the intention to make the time to give this to ourselves when we need it so taking a few energizing deeper breaths and bringing movement into the body to our fingers and toes wiggling our fingers and toes our wrists and our ankles our arms and legs and having whatever stretch feels right for you you very slowly if you're lying down rolling onto your side and slowly slowly coming up to seated there's no hurry I've been very relaxed so come around gently thank you for practicing with me