Celebrate International Relaxation Day Every Day
For those of you who’ve been spending the last 364 days or so tightly holding your shoulders up by your ears, clenching your teeth, and twitching your eyes uncontrollably, relief is finally here! National (and International) Relaxation Day is August 15, 2024. Woo-hoo! It's the one day you can finally breathe again and chill. OK, just kidding. Relaxing just one day of the year would be ridiculous, not to mention unhealthy. Without a little relaxation every day, throughout the day, life in our stress-filled world would be pretty much unsustainable.
So, in the spirit of the day, let’s take a moment right now to relax together, or as soon as you can arrange to take 5 minutes for your mental health (maybe that is right now). Turn off the notifications on your devices. Now, try this—it’s sometimes called the RE-LAX technique:
Step 1: Make yourself comfortable in the seat of your choice, be it a chair or couch. If you find closing your eyes aids relaxation, then you may wish to close your eyes for this exercise.
Step 2: Listen to the noises outside the room. Now listen to the noises inside the room. These will come and go throughout this relaxation exercise, and you can choose to let them just drift over your mind or ignore them if you wish.
Step 3: Notice, as you breathe, that you feel more relaxed on each exhale. This is quite normal.
Step 4: Now, in your mind say "Reee" as you breathe in and "Lax" as you breathe out. For the next 3 to 10 minutes, repeat this silent "Re-Lax" every time you breathe in and out.
Finish: In your own time, gently open your eyes.
With regular practice, using this technique will enable you to relax more quickly. The word "Re-lax" can become the cue to release tension quickly and remain calm in situations you are finding stressful.
The RE-LAX technique comes from the website of International Relaxation Day. I’ll share the link at the end of this post. (Try not to Google it now; stay with me.)
Let me leave you with a few closing ideas.
Peace of mind is not in the mind. It’s in the body.
Read that again slowly. Peace of mind is not in the mind. It’s in the body. You know this from your own life. Your mind is always busy, churning out thoughts to try and distract you, and can easily steal your peace.
But you are not your thoughts. You are merely the observer of them. The way to experience peace and calm in the moment is to gently, mindfully change focus from thinking and come back to breathing. The breath is the gateway to your 5 senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The 5 senses are always on, always in the present, so getting in touch with them can help you leave behind the constantly churning “monkey mind” and its concerns with the future (planning, worrying, having imaginary arguments) and the past (judging, litigating, having imaginary arguments).
Try it sometime. Just breathe. Mindfully let go of thinking and get in touch with the now of your body’s sensations.
Mark Twain had this to say about thoughts: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
If Twain were alive today, I know he’d recommend https://www.internationalrelaxationday.com/
