Achieve Deep Relaxation with Patience

Headspace Studio. (birds chirping) Hi, it's Andy here and welcome to Radio Headspace into a Wednesday morning. Question for you. When you go on holiday, are you the kind of person who can immediately switch off, relax, and sort of settle into your new environment? Would you tend to find that at least for the first few days or so, the thoughts continue? When you go to bed, do you immediately fall asleep as soon as your head hits the pillar? Or are you someone who sort of lies there and all the thoughts of the day sort of come up and sometimes it can even get in the way of you falling asleep if you do meditate. Are you someone who immediately sort of settles in? It's all essentially the same thing, of course is there is a sense of wanting to reach a state of relaxation a little quicker or perhaps even as quickly as possible. And for most of us, that's simply not how the body works, it's not how the mind works. There's a certain amount of momentum that happens in our life when we are caught up with the the busyness of life, the stress of life, it sort of accumulates and it's perhaps a little unrealistic to expect it to immediately cease as soon as we sit down to meditate or lie down at night or go on holiday. So, it is really helpful to think about this as you approach different parts of your life where you have the room and the opportunity to experience a calmer mind and less sort of tension in the body. When you sit to meditate rather than thinking that, okay, I need to do this as quickly as possible and why isn't it happening? That's all thinking, that's all effort. It's the opposite of letting go. There is no room for relaxation. I remember my teacher, he would say, but the first 15 minutes of an hour long meditation, don't worry too much about it. The mind's just kind of relaxing. It's just calming down. Same thing if you're doing a 10 minute meditation. Just accept the first few minutes, the mind, that momentum just playing out, starting to slow down. At nighttime, when you go to bed, just because we are lying down and we close our eyes, doesn't mean that we're immediately, the mind's gonna switch off and we're gonna go to sleep. Perhaps even give yourself, build in that time and say, okay, for the next 15 minutes, maybe even for the next half an hour, if you get to bed early enough I'm not even gonna try to go to sleep. I'm just gonna let my mind wander and do its thing. Giving it the space to relax and unwind. We may find that we even fall asleep during that time and the same again when we go away, when we go somewhere new, we might get really frustrated with ourselves sometimes that...