EasySleepMusic.com

This exercise is designed to cleanse your body of stress and tension. It’s a variation of the “Deep Breathing” exercise described in an earlier post. If you haven’t read this earlier article, you may want to visit it, as I’m not going to go into the “deep breathing” details in this post.

The exercise:

Begin by standing in a sturdy comfortable stance, feet shoulder width apart. Breathe in deeply through your nose, and exhale through your mouth. While exhaling, try to feel the breath leaving through the soles of your feet.

For the first few exhalations, feel the toxens in your body escape through the soles of your feet. Feel cleansed oxygen and energy enter your body when you inhale.

For the next few exhalations, feel the tension and stress melt away.

Next, let regrets and negative thoughts about the past disappear. Allow worries about tomorrow slip away.

All that remains is the sensation of the breath entering and exiting your body.

This exercise should leave you feeling invigorated and cleansed of toxens, stress and negativity.

An effective way of promoting relaxation and reducing stress, is to regularly “escape” from the pressures in your life. You may have more opportunities to escape than you think.

Think of some daily or weekly event that you find unpleasant, an example may be mowing the lawn, commuting to work, or vacuuming the house. Situations like these usually don’t occupy our mind, so stressful thoughts of tomorrow’s work and the time we are wasting, can creep into our minds. Instead of allowing these circumstances to affect us negatively, use them as an opportunity to take a break and put your stressful day behind you. For some this may be as easy as listening to a recording that is either soothing, or allows you to “rock out” and escape. Some people may like to listen to books or comedy on tape (these are often available at your local library). Whatever you decide to use to help you escape, be prepared: have it with you in the car, for when you get stuck in traffic, go to the library on the weekend so you have a new book on tape to listen to when you mow the lawn. When you perform these activities, remove yourself from the situation and allow yourself totally escape. Recognize these situations as an opportunity to enjoy yourself and relax.

The Zen Buddhist principle of “mindfulness” is nearly the opposite of what is described above, but it provides another effective way of converting negative situations into positive ones. This technique involves keeping the mind completely absorbed by the current activity. Focus on your thoughts, sensations, movements, emotions… Mindfulness takes practice and concentration, but can bring great rewards. When done correctly, this practice can remove us from mundane, repetative, or unpleasant tasks, and transport us to a relaxing, introspective world.

Having trouble sleeping? Maybe a little music will help you sleep.

But what Canadian researchers are proposing is not a blast of your favourite pop singer, or a relaxing piece of classical music, but individually tailored “brain music”.

The therapy has been developed to help insomniacs.

A team at the University of Toronto has created music which matches a person’s brain waves.

When that particular piece of music is played, people’s anxiety levels seem to fall, and they are able to relax and sleep.

more on http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2198316.stm

A recent experiment in Japan tested the power of music to send us into a deep slumber. Leo Lewis stayed awake to test the results.

To the casual eye, many features of everyday life seem destined to lull the Japanese to sleep: the steady rattle of a stuffy commuter train, the drone of a monotonous lecturer, the thrum of an office air-conditioner.

But the job of artificially persuading them to drift off into slumber turns out to be much more complicated. Give them pillows, blankets and bombard them with nearly three hours of drowse-inducing music and most will still be wide awake at the end of the show.

The audience at an extraordinary mass experiment in sleep-induction in Central Tokyo ten days ago is still not sure whether Dreams Kaimin - Kaimin is best translated as “good sleep” or “sound sleep” - was a success or not. It set out, under the supervision of one of Japan's most celebrated “sleep doctors”, to use the power of music to push 1,500 people into sweet oblivion. More than half simply enjoyed an entertaining night out at the theatre.

Certainly, there were plenty of people whose heads slumped on to their chins during the carefully arranged playlist of gentle classical and modern music, but then it is not uncommon to see Japanese concert-goers nodding off during Franz Ferdinand and Guns n' Roses concerts.

What has still not been established is whether the concert produced more than the natural quotient of snoozers, and whether those who did grab forty winks did so in record time. If there was one firm conclusion, said those whose shoulders became ad hoc pillows for their male neighbours, it was that a lot of men fell asleep as soon as the female vocalist began.

The Times