Hey, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about melting tension in the body. So I'll tell you a quick story. When I was in high school, I, I think I went about four years with my shoulders up to my ears like this. It was just my default setting.

I had a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, and that showed up in my body as tension. And so when I eventually went to college, I went to my first yoga class and I remember the yoga teacher looking at me and she said, Why don't you just relax your shoulders a little bit. And there, I was like, what do you mean? They are relaxed. It was so much my baseline that I couldn't even tell I was holding tension. So she said, alright, let's, let's try something.

I'm going to teach you something called progressive muscle relaxation. And I'm like, okay, what's that? And so she said, I want you to tense your shoulders as high as you can to your ears. I was like, okay. So I did it. They didn't go that high, but they went higher than they were.

And so, and then she said, now relax them. And I went, Oh, Like that. And it was the first time that I could really feel the contrast between a muscle that was very tense and stress and one that was at ease. And it was an interesting learning experiment for me because it illuminated how sometimes stress and tension becomes so much ofour baseline that we're not even aware we're holding stress intention. And so the beauty of progressive muscle relaxation is that it actually tenses us beyond where we are.

So we, we tense even more. And then when we release, we get to experience that contrast and start to feel from the inside out what tension feels like and what ease feels like. And it becomes easier to do that over time. So let's try this out. We'll do, we'll do three different practices with this.

First, take your hands into a fist. And I want you to squeeze them into a ball as hard as you can. Holding for three, two, one .And then release. Aah. Okay.

So we feel some contrast there. Now let's do it with our shoulders. This is one where you really get to feel it. So squeeze the shoulders up, squeezing for three, two, one, and then release. Aah, there we go.

The third one we're going to do full body. Okay. So squeeze the whole body as much as you can. Squeezing for three, two, one, and then release. Aah.

So maybe you got to experience what that contrast feels like, what tension feels like and then the ease that comes with this. This is a great somatic training for us to get a sense of, of just when we're in a state of tension. And when we're in a state of ease. By practicing it in the progressive muscle relaxation, we can better practice it in real life. And then we get to notice like, Oh, I'm on the grocery line right now.

My shoulders are up to my ears when they don't actually need to be. What's it like to relax? And since we've trained that before, we have more access to it in real life. So try this out. Have some fun with it. It's something you could do over a couple of seconds, or you could spend an entire five, 10, 15 minute meditation practicing this kind of relaxation.

You're doing great. Thank you for your practice. I'll talk to you soon and until next time, take care.