You can encourage your body to relax just by paying attention to it the right way.

Using standing qigong, you can build up a relaxation feedback loop between your feeling awareness and the body's natural ability to soften when circulation improves.

The qigong expression, drawn from Chinese medicine, is, "your mind moves your chi and your chi moves your blood".

In the first lesson on standing qigong, we worked on creating a buffer between "real life" and "practice time" with five minutes of settling in. Now we want to move a little deeper into the body and explore how increased you can trigger relaxation with increased feeling awareness.

Check out this guided practice session (download the mp3 below). In this 10-minute scan, you'll move beyond body alignment and the initial "settle". As you go longer now, you will start to enliven each section of your body, bringing awareness and increased sensation to each new place, from head to toe, which naturally softens the tension you uncover:

Softening 10-Minute Practice Mp3 (right click to save)

Up next in this series: We'll look at a powerful way to refresh yourself in a 20-minute recording on "sinking your chi". I'll be posting these as weekly updates, so be sure you're on the email list below or check back with this bookmark to see the entire series.