#196 A break from caring - Relax & Sleep Hypnosis Daily

Hello and welcome to Relax and Sleep Hypnosis Daily. My name is Jason Newland. My website is jasonnewland.com. Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes.

And for some reason I've got a bit of a croaky voice today. And whenever I get a croaky voice, I always try and sing that old song from Paint Your Wagon. It was James Coburn, I think it was.

I was born under a wandering star. Probably no one under the age of 50 would remember that film. Anyway, this is going to be just a relaxation session.

And in my opinion, probably 99% of the process of falling asleep is relaxation. Relaxing. To the point where you kind of don't care anymore.

Things that were bothering you before almost become impossible to concern you. And I realise some people wouldn't want that. You know, logically thinking I don't want to not care about something that's really important to me.

It's not like that. So, you know, if for example, if you're going through a difficult time you've got, let's say a relative that's unwell, something like that. You stop caring about that situation for the duration of the relaxation.

It doesn't mean you stop caring. Of course not. You still care about the important things when the relaxation finishes.

And you're still caring in your heart and, you know, in your body, in your mind. You still care and love that person. But you won't be concerned.

You won't be worrying. You won't be thinking about those things that you were thinking about before. You let them go temporarily.

And just to let you know, if you hear any weird, stomachy sounds, it's not me. It's the giant dog that's on my sofa. His stomach's been gurgling for the last hour.

Okay, for the last 10 minutes. I like to exaggerate. So it's not me.

Now, my stomach does sometimes gurgle, but I just did then, weirdly enough. I'm giving myself suggestions and it's immediately happening. I just said my stomach sometimes gurgles and it gurgled.

That was him that time. In that case, I sometimes win the lottery. No, nothing.

Anyway, worth a try. So really, these podcasts and kind of everything I do is pretty much about relaxing. Trying to find different ways to let go of your stress and tension of your body.

Let go of the worries about the future. I mean, I don't know what the correct word would be about the past, but I find myself sometimes still worrying about stuff that happened in the past. It's happened, it's gone, it's done.

But being concerned about it, being, you know, I think sometimes it's just, it's time to let it go. Whether it's for a short period of time, you know, like this, while you're listening to my boring voice, or perhaps you decide that big bucket that you're carrying around, big old pail of bucket or whatever, big thing full of, let's say water, but this is the past. Concerns, stress, tension, anxiety from the past, carrying that bucket around.

It's hard work. It's a big old bucket. So maybe you could just tip the whole thing on the floor.

That might be a bit too much to do all in one go. You could just put the bucket down for a while. Give yourself a bit of relief.

Allow yourself to relax. A bit like when you get home after shopping, you know, you might have only walked for 10 minutes from the shop, and your carrier bag's full of groceries, and it's digging into your hands and your fingers. And then you put them down on the floor and that relief, even though they weren't necessarily heavy.

But this is a relief of like, oh, it's just nice just to let it go. What you could do in your mind is make a hole in the bottom of that bucket, just a little hole. So it starts to empty by itself in its own time, gradually, slowly.

So that over the next few hours, next few days, maybe weeks, months even, less and less of the problems from the past are being carried around by you in that bucket. In a way, walking around with our concerns of the past, we need a toilet, don't we? We need to think of those worries from the past like poo. We don't walk around with a bucket full of poo.

Or it'd have to be a truck full, wouldn't it, if we're walking around for a lifetime full of poo. We don't, we flush it away each time. Perhaps that's something that we could learn to do with past stuff.

Perhaps that's what you could learn to do with something that irritated you or upset you last week, and just flush that away. Flush it away, because you never see it again. That's a good thing about toilets, is you don't see them again.

You might see another similar version, you know, in four or five hours time, but you don't see that thing, that thought, that worry is flushed away. It's gone. It's a one-way system.

That reminds me, I had a bad stomach a couple of days ago. I really need to buy my toilets and flowers to say sorry. Chocolates, or maybe not chocolates, I don't think it's going to want to see chocolates, but flowers.

So the idea of, you know, life presents us stuff, obviously. There's always something going to happen in the future. Not all of it's going to be necessarily perfect, but maybe by just dealing with what's happening now, and looking forward to the future, imagining the future to be a pretty amazing place, because we do create our own future.

So then, moving away from the past, it can almost feel like the past becomes foggier, and now the dog sitting on the sofa is making some weird noises with his mouth. I don't normally babysit a dog. I've got my own dog, Vinnie, but he's on my bed in the bedroom.

Probably didn't need to say the word bedroom there, did I? He's on the bed. Where? In the kitchen. No, the bedroom.

And I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be a dog, because they seem to just leave stuff in the past, not worry about what happened yesterday, living for the moment. Now of course that wouldn't be ideal for a human being to live like a dog, because there'd be no planning, would there? And all we'd do is just eat all the time, and run around, and sleep.

But there's something about that mindset of not holding on to grudges or complaints.

Perhaps Herbert the pigeon's outside, he's agreeing with me. So maybe you can decide to experiment with the idea that from now on, perhaps just for a few days or a week, you're going to decide to let go of the past. Almost as if the past never happened.

Almost as if the past is irrelevant. As if you are the one that's in charge of what you do next. In every second of the day, you choose what you do next.

Which opens up possibilities, I guess. If you start to think about it, start to realize that you're more in control than maybe you at first thought. And the way you feel can change in an instant.

We've all had experiences when we felt a certain way, and then something happened, whether good or bad, and the way we were feeling changed in a second. Completely changed. And that can happen through choice as well.

Deciding to feel different. Deciding to focus on something different. Some people would say, yeah, but it's not real, it's not genuine, because this is how I feel.

I'm not just going to pretend to feel a different way. I'm not really saying that. What I'm saying is if you are focusing, thinking about something that's unpleasant, and your response is an emotional feeling of not feeling good, feeling sad or upset or unwell, then by thinking about something that's pleasant, will very much likely cause the same process for you to feel in a way that that memory or that thought causes you to feel better, more positive, happier, healthier, maybe.

Realizing that you're not a slave to your thoughts, you're the master of your thoughts. And I know it doesn't feel like that. I know it doesn't a lot of the time, it really doesn't.

But I noticed something about myself, is sometimes I love feeling sorry for myself. There are times when I know that I could change the way I feel. But I'm just dwelling in that cesspit of self pity.

Because it feels familiar, because it's easy, but at the same time it's horrible, unpleasant, harmful, unhealthy. So it is a choice, it's really a choice. Some things we can do, choose, some things we can't choose.

I can't choose whether or not Herbert the Pigeon outside continues to sing. That's him singing, he's singing a Queen song, Bohemian Rhapsody. I know, it's awful isn't it? That's his version.

He thinks he sounds good, he wants to enter into a talent contest, and I said no, he shouldn't. So I could move from here, but there's a chance there'll be other pigeons. Herbert's got a large family, there's a lot of pigeons around.

Or I can just accept that he's there, and he lives here too. In fact I think he's been here a lot longer than I have. I think he's quite elderly, I mean he's the first pigeon I've ever seen with a walking stick.

So I've, you know, I've got to show him a bit of respect. So what can you do to make a difference for you? What can you think of that feels nice? Something that you think of that every time you think of it, you actually feel good inside. You feel relaxed, you feel happy.

One of the things that I used to like thinking about was Andre, my little ferret. In the past I'd, if I was out and I was feeling a little bit, maybe not feeling so good, I'd think about him, his cute little face. And I would feel better, I'd feel more relaxed, I'd feel happier.

So maybe you can think about some things that always, always do the trick, you know. Maybe it's children, grandchildren, pets, maybe it's a memory of a holiday, maybe it's something funny that happened, something funny that you've seen or heard. And it just gets you chuckling inside whenever you think about it, a feeling of comfort and calmness, an opportunity to re-experience that sense of abandonment, abandoning the stress and tension and embracing the comfort, embracing the peace, embracing feeling good inside for no good reason other than you deserve to be happy, you deserve to be happy.

You've earned that right to be able to let go and relax deeply.