A lot of people who label themselves "stressed out", are nothing of the sort. They are just tired. Learn about how you may be confusing the two and why it is essential to look out for both stress and fatigue in your daily life.

Are You Stressed or Tired?

In this session, we will talk about the science of naps. I like to know how things work. I find that, if I know how my brain and body will respond to a certain thing, it works better for me. What makes a perfect nap? What timing should we choose? An hour or 15 minutes? Where should we nap? What happens to our brains and our bodies when we nap? How can it benefit us in the long and in the short run?

The Science Of (Power)Naps

Gratitude is a beautiful practice for any time of day, but practicing it right before bedtime, allows you to put your worries aside and instead fill you heart, body and mind with warm and fuzzy feelings. Get comfortable, relax your body, and fill yourself with gratitude tonight.

Fall Asleep With A Grateful Heart

When we go to bed with the express goal of falling asleep quickly, we can often get in our own way. Getting to relax the body and the mind before we drift off can be very useful. In this exercise, we will relax our bodies and then take some time to visualize ourselves at the beach. The body, the breath, and the visualization come together to get you to accept rest into your life.

Sea Visualization For Sleep

A long, slow body scan to get ourselves ready for a deep, restful night's sleep. This exercise uses techniques based on the MBSR body scan and autogenic relaxation to relax your body and mind when you can't sleep.

Body Scan for Deep Sleep

In these strange times, it can often be very difficult to focus on the good in our lives, to be grateful, and to place an emphasis on the positive. In this gratitude mediation, we'll practice gratitude both for the good and the bad in our lives.

Gratitude For Difficult Moments

Even if we've practiced mindfulness and meditation for a while, it's possible our thoughts go into overdrive when bedtime comes. This mindfulness for bedtime exercise will help you transition between your waking and sleeping life and send you off on a good night's sleep.

Bedtime Mindfulness

Sometimes, when our thoughts get the better of us, it seems impossible to meditate. In this case, we can still use affirmations to calm and center ourselves and remember that we are not our thoughts, we are observers.

Affirmations For A Chaotic Mind

A short, effective practice to regain some calm and clarity at the moment. With gentle guidance, I'll invite you to become aware of your breathing, and then use the awareness of your breath to gain acceptance for your present moment. The practice contains no music and can be done anywhere, anytime, in any position. A great way to start or end your day or take a break right in the middle of it.

Breathing For Calm And Clarity

A relaxation with affirmations for self-acceptance. We will begin by relaxing the body and the breath, finding a nice, safe space in your mind, and then repeating some affirmations for self-acceptance and self-love. This relaxation also exists in a shorter version to start your day with a boost.

Affirmations For Self Acceptance

The mind is like a river. In this meditation, we will use guided imagery to help you imagine your mind as a river and your thoughts as the water that runs through it. The mind, like a river, is never completely clear or completely still, it is ever-changing and ever-moving. With the help of this meditation, you can calm your mind and prepare for sleep.

River Relaxation For Sleep

This meditation will allow you to relax your body before drifting off to sleep. Rather than movement or muscle relaxation, we will simply allow different parts of our body to relax, and relax again. We'll begin by relaxing the right and left sides of the body, before moving on to the back and front body and the internal organs.

Relaxing The Body Before Sleep

In this session, we will use our bodies to help us relax and move into a nap. We will practice a technique that is sometimes known as progressive muscle relaxation. We will tense and relax different parts of the body in conjunction with our breaths. This will not only relax our bodies but also enable our breathing to slow down. We know that a slower breath can help us move into a more relaxed state, and ultimately help us to get some sleep.

Using Your Body To Prepare For A Nap

We'll be taking a nap together in this exercise. First, we'll relax the body, and then, I'll tell you a story. You can let me chat in the background while you relax or sleep, or you can treat it as a guided visualization, where we leave our worries of the day behind. Although this is a nap exercise, you could also use it to relax and clear your mind before you go to bed. Curl up, cover-up, and enjoy.

A Transformative Nap

A gentle exercise on emotional awareness. After creating a safe space for ourselves, we will spend some time with several emotions, exploring the physicality and texture of the feelings within us. When we become more familiar with our emotions, instead of keeping them at a distance and dismissing them as good or bad, we come to a step closer to ourselves and to healing. The quote I share at the beginning of this recording is from Chögyam Trungpa: “We have to be brave enough to actually encounter our emotions, work with them in a real sense, feel their texture, the real quality of the emotions as they are. We would discover that emotion actually does not exist as it appears, but it contains much wisdom and open space.”

Exploring Our Emotions

Your breath is a powerful tool in meditation and mindfulness, in this exercise, we will use the breath to relax our minds and our bodies before going to sleep. Sleep is such a natural part of life on our beautiful planet, but sometimes, we struggle to fall asleep when the time comes. In times like these, we need a little help and a little guidance, to get us to let go of the day and drift off. Crawl into bed, enjoy and sleep tight!

Breathing Before Bed

A relaxing exercise to practice when you crawl into bed, to help you get to sleep. One of the elements that might prevent us from falling asleep, is the desire to sleep, which sometimes turns into a stressful thought. Being too focussed on sleeping can create all kinds of tension in the mind and in the body. So let's focus on relaxing our bodies and minds instead. This exercise takes inspiration from Yoga Nidra and encourages you to feel into your body, and let go of any tension that may be there. We will breathe slowly, relax our bodies and, hopefully, drift into sleep.

Yoga Nidra for Bedtime

In this session, the technique we will employ is passive muscle relaxation. Although it has ‘passive’ in the name, we will still need to do a little bit of work to relax. I will explain; in the technique, we will relax different muscles in our bodies, but we will do it without movement. This is to show you that it is possible to will your body to relax. Your mind has the power to relax your body. I hope you can keep the immense and humbling power of your brain in mind, while you do this relaxation, but also for the rest of the day. Enjoy your nap

Relaxing The Mind, Relaxing The Body

Progressive muscle relaxation with options for movement either in a chair (sitting) or lying down. This relaxation will help you let go of tension in your body, an excellent addition to your sleep ritual or to transition between your working day and free time.

Muscle Relaxation For Chair Or Bed

Maybe you have been practicing relaxation or meditation for a while, in which case you will know the power of breathwork. If you are new to these practices, I welcome you and I applaud you. Today, we will learn (or re-learn) how we can focus on our breathing to relax and take a nap together. The technique today is adapted from the beautiful tradition that is Japanese Zen meditation. I hope you enjoy the wisdom of this practice, and that your nap is restful.

Using The Breath To Prepare For A Nap

For everyone who wakes up from nightmares and is unable to get back to sleep, or cannot fall asleep for fear of having a nightmare. We'll relax the body, relax the mind, and replace the anxious images of your nightmare with a relaxed, peaceful place in nature.

Letting Go Of Nightmares

We'll relax all the major muscles in our bodies without moving them. The exercise is progressive muscle relaxation, but without the tensing up part. Passive muscle relaxation will let your body chill out in the moment and make you realize that you can relax your body with your mind.

Passive Muscle Relaxation

I made this short grounding exercise specifically for use in a chair. That makes it perfect to practice throughout the day, in moments of tension or high emotional arousal. You can practice this at your desk, during your lunch break, on the train or bus, or when you get home, to transition from the workday into your free time.

Grounding Relaxation On A Chair

In today’s session, we will take a journey with our nap. Today is the day we can use our imaginations and find ourselves in a visualization of sorts. After a guided breathing exercise, I will guide you and invite you on a journey. We will visualize a walk through the forest. The natural imagery will help us relax and find some rest. Perhaps it can also inspire you to take a forest walk later.

A Nap In Nature

This meditation is focused on what surrounds us. This is traditionally known as a 'cosmic meditation', but I like to think of it as a zooming out-exercise. One that will put things in a different perspective, by bringing different things into our awareness. The exercise may not be so suitable for beginners, so I recommend you try a body scan or a breathing meditation before you jump right into this one. We'll start with a quote from the Sutras, an awareness of our breathing, and then we start to explore what else we can bring into our awareness.

Cosmic Meditation

A series of affirmations for self-acceptance and self-love for when you need a quick boost in the morning or throughout your day.

You cannot pour from an empty cup, so let's fill your cup together in this guided nap. We'll first relax our bodies and then visualize ourselves in a lush, beautiful garden with a fountain. The water that runs through the fountain is there to refresh and renew you and fill your heart with gratitude. You can use this exercise as a guided nap or a sleep story, there is no cue to wake up at the end.