Introduction
Learning how to relax on your patio furniture is not a hard thing to do. Relaxing comes easy for some people. For others, it’s difficult because of work matters, family problems, spousal issues, work activities and the list goes on. This article will help you become cognoscente of the things you need to do to become relaxed by using your own patio furniture and putting all those stress related problems aside, replacing them with pleasing thoughts and relaxed feelings.
Patio furniture is meant to be used as a way to enjoy the outdoors. Unfortunately, in many homes, patio furniture is not used as the owners originally intended to use it. As an added benefit to this exercise, you will reacquaint yourself with your under utilized outdoor furniture and hopefully start on a new journey to spending more time in the back yard.
For this exercise to work, you have to be serious about it and practice the benefits during your normal day activities. Especially those activities and thoughts that increase your stress.
Although you may not think so, you can relax and you can relieve the stress in your life. You control your mental state and your actions. Things that happen to you or things you think about can all be controlled by you. It just takes some practice and time to control them and sometimes a few initial bouts with a good massage therapist to help them improve a little faster.
Identifying a Restful Place
Once you begin practicing being relaxed, you will need to make it a habit to continue the long term benefits. One way to accomplish this is to identify a restful place that you have free access to and something you can practice that keeps your mind occupied while your body learns to react to your new activity. With consistent practice, you will find increasing awareness of your relaxed state of mind and body. The key to successfully transferring your awareness of relaxing to your normal dally activities is practice.
Getting Started
To get started, choose one or two pieces of patio furniture that you would like to use as your inspiration. The pieces you pick will be your reference to remembering and translating your stress and uneasy feelings into a relaxed and pleasing state of mind and body.
- Now, schedule fifteen minutes to a half hour each day throughout the week to practice this exercise.
- Choose one of your pieces of furniture and sit or lay down as appropriate.
- Clear your mind of stressful thoughts by concentrating on your body and mental state.
- Identify what hurts, what muscles feel tight and otherwise feel uncomfortable. These are the physical areas of stress you need to take control of. List these in your mind.
- Identify the thoughts that are causing your stress. Yes, thoughts. Your boss is not causing your stress, it’s how you interpret things in your mind that is causing your stress. List these things in your mind.
- Now that you have become aware of what is bothering you, it’s time to begin relief. It does not matter whether you start with the physical or mental list, but choose one of the lists and begin to work on it.
- When acting on the physical list, concentrate on one particular part of the body at a time such as your ears, head, cheeks, jaw, neck, upper back, middle back and so on. Become completely aware of the muscles and tendons in these areas. Focus on one of them one at a time and relax them using your mental ability to control those parts of your body. As you move along between the different parts of your body, go back and make sure the previous ones are still under control. Don’t short cut your self by going through this too quickly. Take your time. While you are practicing this decompression exercise, you will begin to experience a satisfying positive feeling throughout your body. This feeling is what you are looking for. Remember it.
- When acting on your list of mental stressors, remember, these are a state of mind, they are not physical and therefore can be suppressed and handled without stress with practice. Pick one stressor at a time and determine the root cause of why it is stressing you. Mentally tell yourself that you are no longer going to let this issue stress you out. You are going to take this issue in stride and deal with it without it interfering with your well being. When you tell yourself this, you must mean it. Remember the satisfying feeling you have once you have completed and concord each item on the list.
Summary
After several days or weeks of practicing this exercise, you should be able to automatically call upon the relaxation techniques you have developed in practicing stress relief to trigger the actions necessary to help you in your daily routine. Although we identified patio furniture as an easy convenience to act as your inspiration, any furniture or location can be used. The added benefit of using your patio furniture to assist in your relaxation is that it will become the place you will always want to visit and take advantage of because of the pleasing affects you associate there.
Check back for our next article to learn about arranging patio furniture.
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