"The train of life rarely remains on track forever without needing some sort of overhaul or repair. Like the human body, run it too long and too hard and it will show signs of wear until breakdown is in the offing.
Our behaviour and response pattern to life's events are controlled by our thinking, feeling and doing components of our behaviour. Whenever there is a breakdown in the sequence of thought, emotion and action, our body comes into turmoil and our health is automatically affected for the worse. Confusion of thought, unsettledness of feeling and uncertainty/inappropriateness of action emerges, resulting in increased anxiety and tension, irritability and loss of sleep at one end of the spectrum and emotional instability, mental breakdown, self-harm and even suicidal thoughts at the other end of the scale.
I look at the crazy and frenetic lives that people lead without giving their mind time to think, take stock or pause for breath. I know a number of people who behave like the proverbial 'workhorse' and go through their busy day without taking a break. They are rarely thought better of for displaying such behaviour and are more likely to be taken for granted and taken advantage of instead. When I was a Probation Officer, many colleagues worked through their lunch hour without stopping. Such people have to give themselves permission to stop before they burn out and crash! Often, stopping one's frenetic activity is viewed as a 'privilege' as opposed to that of a 'necessity', and when this state exists, it identifies the mind and body being on a collision course; a crash in the making, just waiting to happen.
Not sleeping properly, losing one's patience easily and forever feeling under pressure are sufficient body signs for you to see the red signal lights and put on the breaks, because if you don't exercise this control, the body will decide for you and force you to stop by allowing the impending collision to occur; thereby imposing the consequences on you.
For fifty years now, I have been a Relaxation Instructor and for twenty of those years, I was also a Stress Management Consultant. Way back in the early 70s, I'd already established the reputation as being one of the country's foremost authorities in the field of relaxation methods. I mention these facts, not to blow my own trumpet of importance, but to illustrate that where the subject of relaxation and stress management is a concern, I am neither a beached whale nor am I spouting hot air.
Let me say that one of the most important signs of excess body stress and tension bordering on ill-health is the lack of good sleep. Over twenty-five years as a group worker involved with helping stressful clients taught me that before I could get them to go in the right direction (ie think straight and adopt healthy behaviours), it was necessary to put them back on the right track. That primarily involved providing them with appropriate advice on good sleeping practices. Getting through one's day for a tired adult is no different than a tired pupil getting through their school day and being able to take in the lesson whilst being half asleep at their school desk.
So during the 70s, I outlaid almost £2000 and ninety hours of my time in a recording studio and produced a 'special relaxation tape', that I could freely give to group clients of stressful behaviour and poor sleeping practices.
At the time of producing my relaxation tape to improve sleeping, there were hundreds of relaxation tapes on the market, with the prime difference being the choice of background music and the nature of the chosen relaxation scene being listened to. I knew that 'wanting' to get a good night's sleep and being constantly tired wasn't the same as being able to get a good night's sleep with an overtired body and an overactive mind. So, I decided to use a hypnotic device called 'auto-suggestion' to help switch off the stressed person's overactive thought processes and switch them onto a different track of thought to help them get off to sleep. Without getting too complicated in my explanation, simply let me say that the message I give on my relaxation tape and the instructions I ask the listener to follow ' is spoken by me at precisely the same pace of breathing we all employ at the moment we drop off to sleep'. Also the instructions I softly provide to a musical background 'are designed to produce muscle suppleness and increase the sensation of body temperature that mirrors the precise muscle tension release and body heat that is present in a sleeping body'
In short, when a person drops off to sleep; when they are in deep sleep and have an unbroken and untroubled sleep, 'their breathing pace and breathing pattern, along with their body temperature, and body heaviness and muscle suppleness is of a certain required order'. By simply reversing the natural process of good sleep, my relaxation tape encourages developing the presence of precise sleeping conditions, which then automatically sends the tape listener to sleep. Because I change mid-tape from giving instructions to the trainee's body in my voice to one of asking them to give their own body instructions, we can say that any prior hypnotic effect is transformed to auto-suggestion (ie self- hypnosis).
I enclose my relaxation tape from my website that works on the principle of 'auto-suggestion' and where my speech is paced to the natural heart rate of 'going off to sleep.' This tape was professionally produced almost 40 years ago and has proved highly effective with thousands of people using it. I was offered £10,000 in the 70s to sell its copyright by a company producing relaxation tapes but declined. The tape was not produced to make me money and has never been sold. Instead, it was always given freely to between 7,000 and 10,000 stressful recipients over the past forty years. Today, physical copies do not need producing by me as they can be freely downloaded from my website or even listened to on a mobile phone. As the tape is now forty-five years old, it reveals how advanced its quality production was back in the 1970s.
The tape should never be played while driving or performing any other precision task. It was produced as a gift to society by me during a previous life-threatening period in late 1970. Pregnant women, persons with any kind of brain abnormality or people with very low blood pressure levels 'Should Not Use This Tape'.
For general relaxation purpose, find a comfortable chair and place to relax where you will not be interrupted, close your eyes, listen to the tape and follow the instructions, particularly the ones related to breathing patterns, self-statements and imagined scenes. Half an hour daily is recommended. If you want to use the tape to improve your sleeping practices, put the tape on when you are in bed and follow the same process as previously outlined. Usually, someone in bed rarely gets to the end of the tape without first having fallen asleep. It usually takes about one month of daily practice to achieve the required results and daily practice thereafter makes the process work quicker, better and more automatically. In short, practise using the tape daily and sleep can eventually be induced within five minutes of hitting the pillow. I have also used this relaxation process to deal with my pain since childhood from numerous operations and have found it a boon since my heart condition prevents normal operations, which have to be treated locally whereby I remain conscious throughout.
If you find it helpful, please pass on access details to others who might benefit. http://www.fordefables.co.uk/relax-with-bill.html"
Love and peace Bill xxx