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How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners
10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation
What is Meditation?
How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners
10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation
What is Meditation?
Benefits of Mindfulness: Mindful Living Can Change Your Life
Mindfulness 101: A Beginner's Guide
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Hi, welcome back to
your Daily Mindfulness.
In today's session, we're going to
talk about the difference between
relaxation versus unwinding.
Relaxation versus unwinding.
So relaxation is a state many of
us are somewhat familiar with.
At least we have experiences
or small doses of it.
And this is where we're not caught
in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn
reactivity where we're not in a
nervous system activation state.
Something in us is allowed to be calm.
The mind, feels a little bit more
calm, the shoulders aren't so tense.
And even though this might not be
a very familiar experience to us,
most of us have a sense of what it's
like to be in a more relaxed state.
But there's a difference between
inhabiting relaxed states versus
unwinding deep tension that gets
accumulated over the course of a
lifetime due to the traumas of life,
micro and macro, and all the different
experiences that we accumulate as human
beings being in the world that don't
always get processed in real time.
Although these are different, relaxation
supports unwinding deep tension, because
the thing that keeps that tension bound
in us is being in an activated state.
All that stuff that's lingering
beneath the surface, the stuff that
I like to say is in our backpack
of life that's weighing us down.
When we continue to just keep pushing,
pushing, pushing, and we stay in
that nervous system activation,
none of that gets addressed.
We just keep adding more and more to it.
But when we allow ourselves to drop
into a state of relaxation, of ease,
of internal spaciousness, well now
we're no longer adding more tension.
We're no longer adding more
things to our backpack of life.
And we also give some of that stuff that's
been lingering beneath the surface, the
space to unwind, to actually be released,
to soften and to not be, hmm, how to say,
yeah, to not just continue to perpetuate.
So this happens in a meditation practice.
I mean, think about like five minutes,
10 minutes, 20 minutes that you might
take when you're sitting down, you're
dropping into a more relaxed state
and you're also giving some of the
stuff that's been there beneath the
surface, the opportunity to arise.
Have you had that experience yourself?
If you sit down and just like,
oh, I feel pretty calm now.
But then an emotion seems
to come out of nowhere.
Maybe a sadness that arises spontaneously,
or maybe a feeling of agitation.
Usually what this is, is something beneath
the surface that's been unresolved.
But now that you're giving yourself
the space of presence, of care,
of compassion, it's having the
opportunity to be worked through.
It's not bad, it's not wrong.
It's a sign that things are starting
to move again and getting reintegrated.
And so you just meet that with a calm
nervous system, with that relaxed state.
And eventually it will pass.
It will soften.
It will release.
And it will integrate with the rest of
you allowing us to move back into our
life without all of this extra tension
and baggage that we've accumulated
over the course of a lifetime.
So this is the difference
between relaxation and unwinding.
They're both important, but
they are different journeys.
They inform one another specifically,
relaxation, informing the unwinding.
And hopefully this gives you something
to think about on this journey of
maybe softening some of that deep
tension that has been lingering
beneath the surface of your awareness.
Thanks for your practice.
Let's settle in for today's meditation.
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