(10 hours) #16 REALITY OF HOW YOU FEEL NOW - Stress & Pain Relief (Jason Newland)

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland and this is Stress and Pain Relief Podcast. Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes. Hope you're well and all of my recordings, just to let you know, they're all available on my website to stream for free and to download for free.

You can also listen to lots of different podcasts that I have and are all over, you know, the internet on all of the main podcast hosts such as iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, you know, TuneIn, Luminary, the list is quite long. So thank you wherever you're listening. So, today's recording, I'm going to focus on, I like to focus on different parts of the body sometimes to gauge how you're feeling.

But I quite like the idea of just focusing on your skin only. Might sound a bit weird, but hey, let's give it a go, eh? So, of course you can't necessarily go touching all of your skin, so I can't reach half of my bits anyway. So, what I'm going to ask you to do is if you've got a t-shirt on or something, or maybe a top on, maybe roll up the sleeves if it's comfortable to do so.

And I'm going to ask you to just touch your arm and your hand with the other hand with the fingertips, okay? And you're going to be doing both arms. Now, if you have a physical issue with your arms, you know, some kind of painful condition or something like that, of course don't do your arms. Maybe you could do the same thing with the tops of your thighs if you're sitting down.

It really is a case of where you can reach. You could, I guess, do your chest or your stomach as well. In fact, I might actually incorporate all those parts in this recording.

And part of the reason for this is mindfulness, I guess. It's getting grounded. It's getting in touch with your body, not just the physical discomfort that you may have been feeling leading up to listening to this recording.

Because sometimes, I'd say often for myself, I can get a little bit carried away with focusing a bit too much on, for example, my lower back pain. Sometimes it will be, it will take up a large percentage of my attention and it doesn't need to. I allow it to.

In fact, I don't allow it anything. I'm the one doing it. I'm the one focusing on my back.

My back's not doing anything to me. My back is me. You know, my back is not out to get me.

It's not some kind of conspiracy theory thing going on. You know, it's my back. There's a condition.

There's some issues there which causes severe discomfort at times. But I'm the one that chooses to allow that discomfort to cause or I allow it, allow the stress to increase. And I know this goes anti, you know, goes completely against how we are kind of brought up to think about things.

Well, the thing is, when we actually decide to get in touch with reality, I don't mean that we're not in touch with reality all the time, but there's a certain reality that as humans, we can have a tendency to try and not want. You know, an example would be, this is how things should be. I shouldn't feel, I shouldn't have this pain in my back.

Just walk into the garage and back. I'm 50 years old. I'm not 90.

I shouldn't have this. That's not the reality. The reality is the discomfort is there.

So me thinking that it shouldn't be there and getting angry and getting tense and getting stressed, which only makes it feel worse, actually hinders. I hinder myself. I get in the way of my own potential relaxation.

And we could say recovery in that moment, a chance of recovering, you know, maybe not permanently, but at least feeling a bit better. But if I'm continuously thinking to myself, this is not how it should be, it should be, my back should be exactly how it was when I was 25. Well, it's not.

The reality is it's not. It probably looks quite similar. Put a bit hairier, I don't know.

I haven't seen my back ever. I don't know what it looks like. I don't have a twisty head.

I can't see all the way back there. I imagine it looks lovely. I don't know.

Might look like ice cream. I don't know. The fact is, if we fight reality, we're not going to win.

All we're going to do is get more frustrated. And this, you know, the fighting against reality is, that's a book in itself, you know, the whole thing can't be covered in a short relaxation session. Just for the sake of how you're feeling, accepting that, well, this is how I feel now, rather than I shouldn't feel this way, I should feel differently.

But then you've got the reality and then you've got creativity and imagination. Imagination doesn't go against reality. It works with reality.

Creativity and imagination can in fact, change your perception of reality to the point where maybe, okay, my back's hurting or my back is not as flexible as it used to be. And there's certain things perhaps I can't do the way I used to do them. But you know what? I don't care about that anymore.

In this moment, I really don't care. Or I imagine feeling a warmth in my back, almost like an itchiness inside as the blood goes to that area, healing it so that it calms down and it feels more relaxed. So the reality is changing there and then.

Your perception of what's happening and that's what's happening. You go by how you feel, that's the reality. Rather than if you get angry and get stressed and I don't want this, I want to feel relaxed, I shouldn't feel anxious.

Oh, that's never going to get you anywhere, or me or anyone. I've tried it. I really have tried these things.

And they don't work. They just make things worse. Because then I'm walking around like a victim.

Like I have no control over my own life at all. I really am just being controlled by other people. Like I'm a remote control doll or something.

And none of us are that. So part of this technique, this recording is with that in mind, the idea of getting in touch with the reality of now. Now, I don't know where your physical discomfort was, or where the stress is.

I know myself, I feel stress. When I do feel it, it can be all different parts of my body. It can be my eyes, my head, my shoulders, my stomach, my jaw, my neck.

It can be even in my breathing, it could be in my mind, it can be almost all encompassing at times. So this is something that's really good for getting in touch with now, this moment, getting in touch with how you physically are feeling right now. And what better place, what better way, what better place than here, what better time than now, and what a better way than to just touch your own body gently.

And added on to this, it feels pleasurable. Admittedly, you might want to do this in private, because even though there's nothing anti-social at all about stroking your own arm, it might be a bit weird to do it, it might feel weird to do it in front of other people. But I'd like you to get whichever, I'm using my left hand first to just stroke up and down both sides of my arm, the top and the back, the front and the back of my arm.

And the sides. And just do that as well. Notice how it feels to just stroke your arm gently up and down.

And then maybe the middle of your arm, you know, the crease where your arm bends. And just gently stroke in that area. And now do the other arm.

Stroke in the other arm with your right hand, with your fingertips going the sides of your arms. You could even go over your elbows if you like. And then the backs of your arms and the front of your arms.

And maybe the crease in the middle where your elbow and arm bend. Just gently stroking. Noticing that, what are you focusing on right now? Apart from my voice.

Of course you're focusing on your arm, you're focusing on the movement. So you've got the feeling of your fingertips. The fingertips on your other arm.

You've got the feeling of your arm on the fingertips. I'm actually getting goosebumps. It's quite nice.

And now you can just do the same with your hand. Just brush your fingertips up and down the back and the palm of your other hand. And just take turns doing that.

So this is how you're feeling right now. This is how your skin is feeling right now. So maybe now we can do the thighs, the top of the legs.

Not the thighs, but the top. Well, it's the thighs, isn't it? Yeah, so the top of the legs. From your knees upwards.

And just notice that feeling. Maybe you want to sort of just basically gently rub up and down with both hands. Up and down your knees very gently.

You can go to the sides, maybe go to the inside of the thighs. Go down to the knees, maybe if you can stretch that far. Just notice how your knees feel.

Now if you if you're wearing jeans or thick trousers or something like that, then you may not feel, you'll feel a little bit different maybe, but you should still feel the sensation of the movement of your fingertips up and down your thighs. And now moving to your stomach. And just moving your fingertips around again, maybe in a circle, either side of your stomach.

Moving all the way to the sides and down and back again. Maybe up to your diaphragm area, and then down to your belly button. And just move your hands in whatever kind of pattern pattern that you choose, noticing how your stomach feels.

And I'll be honest with you, I'm feeling really relaxed. It also feels nice as well. It might not take you as long as it does for me with my belly because I've got a massive huge belly.

So for me to really, you know, manage to sort of touch all of my belly, it would take about three hours. So I'm going to just pretend I've just done it. And then we can move up to our chest.

And you could just, you know, do this exactly the same as what you've been doing with your stomach and with your knees and your, you know, your hands and your thighs and your arms. And you could just move your fingertips around your chest. And there's something about the movement of the arms as well.

Maybe the arms, the shoulders, it feels really relaxing and calm. Now I'll be honest with you, I have zero physical sensations in my back at all. I'm focusing on my back briefly.

There's nothing going on there at all. And whatever stress levels I had before completely disappeared. Now I'd like you to move to your face.

I'm going to take my glasses off and just stroke your face starting at the top of your forehead where your, you know, your hairline is. And just moving your hands and your fingertips gently down your face. And then cupping your ears.

And again, moving your hands down across your ears and your fingertips, down your ears, the sides, down your jaw. Maybe you could do an upward stroke with your fingertips up your neck, your throat. You can just enjoy that feeling.

Sometimes the thing I like to do is just put my hands over my eyes. And whenever I do that, I feel that there's healing energy moving from my hands into my eyes. As well as almost a suction where there's any stress that may be remaining in my eyes and my forehead get just withdrawn out into the palms of my hands.

And you could place your hands on top of your head so that, you know, your fingertips are maybe touching the middle part of your scalp. And you can feel the, the warmness of your hands, the healing-ness of your hands. It feels nice.

But only do it as long as it feels comfortable because it can put a little bit of a strain on your shoulders maybe. I just noticed that myself just then, but it does feel nice. You start to realize that the power of touch really can help, really can reduce your stress, increase relaxation, allow you to get in touch with now, allow you to get in touch with how you feel in this moment.

It's really nice. This is something that you can do daily as many times as you choose. Even if you're in public, sitting at an office desk or sitting on a bus, you could move your hands together gently with your fingertips.

No one's even going to notice you doing it. Allowing you to get in touch with your skin. The biggest organ of your body, of course, is your skin.

So important. Allows you to feel pleasure, comfort and relaxation. Allows you to choose what you focus on.

So when you're stroking your palm with your fingertips from the opposite hand, you can focus on that feeling of all those nerve endings being stimulated, stimulating comfort and calmness, sending that message to the rest of your body to relax, to enjoy feeling peaceful, to appreciate yourself, to get in touch with that fact that you are an amazing person. You're kind, loving and you deserve to be happy.

You deserve to be happy.

You deserve to feel relaxed. And the more you say that to yourself, the more you start to realize that, that is reality. That is reality.

That you deserve to be happy and relaxed and calm. That is reality. And now I bring this session to an end.

Of course, if you're listening to the recording with music, the music will continue for the next hour and a half. Maybe you wish to just relax or maybe even fall asleep. And every time you hear my voice, you can automatically, if you choose, to just feel instantly relaxed, easily and naturally.

Easily and naturally. Calm and loose, full of confidence and pleasure. Confidence and pleasure.

Confidence and pleasure.