There’s something slightly misleading about short relaxation practices: a ten-minute audio can look small; a five-minute exercise can look simple. And on their own, they are.
But if you’ve ever found yourself feeling overwhelmed, unable to switch off, reacting more quickly than you’d like, overthinking everything, or simply wanting to get away from whatever is going on, you’ll know that feeling more relaxed isn’t always as simple as it sounds.
I know that feeling because I’ve experienced it myself.
There have been periods in my life when I felt as though I was constantly responding to whatever was happening around me. Relationships changed. Places I lived changed. Jobs changed. I was often moving on to the next thing before I’d really had a chance to settle into the last one, or maybe because I couldn’t find comfort or a feeling of safety where I was.
My life wasn’t necessarily chaotic. But there was a lot of change, and not a great deal that felt steady.
Looking back, I think that at some level I knew I needed something that would help me find more steadiness within myself. I didn’t necessarily have the language for it at the time. I just knew that I was interested in healing and approaches that worked with the body as well as the mind, and that I wanted to understand more about how I could feel different in myself.
That was what eventually led me to relaxation therapy.
I trained in France as a relaxologue énergéticien — a Relaxation Practitioner with an energy-based approach — in a structured, stage-based approach to relaxation. The different stages were designed to take you through a process of growth and development.
When I started the course, I had no idea how significant the training would be for me. I certainly didn’t expect it to take four years instead of two.
And I didn’t know that it would give me the thing I was subconsciously looking for — something steady that I carry with me through all the changes in my life and which I could keep coming back to.
I didn’t appreciate until much later that the strength of relaxation therapy doesn’t necessarily sit in any one exercise or technique. It sits in the structure around it. And in the way you return to it over time.
That realisation is what sits behind Relax & Realign.
Why I Started the Training
I’ve always been interested in self help and healing and I wanted to find an interesting course to do in my spare time. I was living and working in France at the time, so I didn’t go to France specifically to do the training. It was just where I happened to be. I hadn’t heard of relaxation therapy before and when I came across this training, I was intrigued because it seemed to bring a number of things together: breathing and body work, guided relaxation and reflection all provided an opportunity to explore what was happening internally.
What I found was a structured approach that I could practise for myself, rather than something that depended on being in a particular place or attending a particular class. And that became increasingly important.
When Relaxation Isn’t Always Relaxing
One of the things I think is easily misunderstood about relaxation work is that you simply do an exercise and feel relaxed. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you don’t.
Sometimes stopping and becoming aware of what is happening in your body can actually make you more aware of tension, discomfort or emotions that you’ve been keeping busy enough not to notice. That was certainly part of my experience.
It didn’t always feel good. Sometimes a practice felt calm and easy. Sometimes it felt pointless. Sometimes it was frustrating or uncomfortable. You don’t always feel peaceful when you stop and notice what’s going on. Sometimes that’s why you avoid stopping and you keep life busy.
But this was all part of it. The aim wasn’t to produce a particular feeling. It was to come back to yourself — whatever was there. That’s one of the reasons it took me longer to complete the training.
The training was bringing things up for me as I was also dealing with my own personal growth and working through past challenging experiences. So sometimes I just walked away from the training, taking a term out here or there – almost forgetting about it while I processed (or tried not to process) whatever was coming up. There was a point when I wondered whether I would actually finish. Not because I thought I was failing exactly, but because I had that feeling of, “Oh, that’s another thing I haven’t finished. That’s another thing I’ve moved on from before I really came to the end of it.”
Then after a break, I’d always find myself coming back to it. So although the training was usually completed in one or two years, mine took four. And, in hindsight, I think that was one of the most important parts of it.
What the Training Was Like
During my training in Paris, the work was delivered in weekend sessions across the year, with ongoing personal practice in between.
The weekends were full. We worked in small groups and moved through a range of approaches:
- breath and movement
- guided relaxation
- Vittoz psycho-sensory approaches
- energy work
- reflective work
- creative exploration
Later on I also learnt about stress, trauma, the body, and how different systems interact.
Between weekends, there was regular personal work to do — not just writing or learning, but practising. Breathing, moving, noticing, reflecting, returning to the same exercises in everyday life.
There was also a requirement to experience the work one-to-one with a qualified relaxation therapist, and to move through each of the stages of personal growth. So it wasn’t something you attended and then left behind – it was something you lived with.
Small Practices, Repeated
One of the things that stood out to me was how small each element was: nothing was overwhelming and nothing required hours of effort. But everything was repeated and that repetition mattered. It created variety — you weren’t just doing one technique over and over — but it also meant you were approaching the same internal space in different ways: sometimes through breath, sometimes through movement, sometimes through stillness or imagery.
Over time, I began to build familiarity with my own internal state — not just intellectually, but physically.
Something I Could Carry With Me
One of the biggest things that came from completing the training was realising that the practices had become an internal process — something I could carry with me. They didn’t belong to a particular place and I didn’t need to go to a class. I didn’t even need someone else to guide me through it.
So when things changed in my life, there was still something that stayed the same. The relaxation practice itself had become the steady thing I could return to – the place that felt familiar and safe.
And I think that is one of the reasons it has stayed so important to me.
Using It in Real Life
It became especially important during subsequent challenging periods. At times when there was pressure, conflict, uncertainty or change, I found I could much more easily come back to simple things — grounding, breathing and so on, to stay as present as possible through change, and to find inner calm.
I’ve always hated public speaking and when I had to give a presentation to a couple of hundred people, I used my grounding and breathing techniques so that I could speak clearly and calmly rather than give in to panic and breathlessness. On another occasion I had to meet with an ex-partner to negotiate aspects of our separation. He wasn’t the easiest person to deal with but I found that I was able to access the internal calm and confidence that I had developed and this helped me to keep my boundaries clearly in place, and stand my ground calmly.
More recently, I used these same principles during a period of illness and surgery. Preparing, steadying, and returning to the body helped me move through that experience in a more contained and manageable way. It didn’t remove the difficulties but it gave me a way to meet them.
One Practice I Still Love
Of all the practices I learned, one of the simplest is still one of my favourites: the Cosmic Breath.
It’s a particular pattern of breathing, connected to the three levels of breath and to the natural world.
I use it when I feel overwhelmed, when I want to relax more quickly, or when I want to move into a quieter, more meditative state.
It’s also something I use in my spiritual healing practice. When I’m working with healing and want to focus on my breathing and quieten my mind, the Cosmic Breath gives me a familiar way of doing that.
I also particularly enjoy the sensory awareness aspect of the Vittoz practices. It brings me very directly into the here and now — into touching, feeling, seeing and noticing what is happening in the present moment, rather than getting caught up in whatever is going on in my head. And I occasionally write with my non-dominant hand, which is another Vittoz practice that helps to harness runaway thoughts and bring my attention to the present moment.
But for me, it’s the Cosmic Breath that I return to most. It’s one of the first exercises in Relax & Realign as it offers such a lovely grounding for the rest of the programme.
The Structure of Relax & Realign
Since completing my training, I’ve developed my own Relax & Realign programme, which is drawn from the stages and some of the activities I learnt in my training in Paris. When I created Relax & Realign, I included the mind-body aspects of relaxation therapy such as breath and movement, relaxation and Vittoz, whilst my Change & Growth workbooks focus on personal reflection and development. Together, they provide a truly holistic approach to self-regulation and inner calm.
Relax & Realign follows a six-stage cycle, with each theme building on the previous one:
- Here & Now – you begin by noticing the present moment
- Noticing Your Flow – then you explore how you move outward into your world
- Building Your Power Base – then you come back and build internal steadiness
- Making Space – and only then do you begin to let go of what’s no longer needed
- Your Core Being – then you can start to connect with what is there under the layers
- Expression – and finally begin to express your true self more freely.
The order matters. If you try to let go of things without a sense of steadiness, it can feel unsettling. If you try to express yourself without knowing what you’re expressing, it can feel unclear. The process builds gradually and it’s cyclical. Once you’ve moved through the six stages, you go back to the beginning and move through them again. It might feel different next time round. You might become aware of different nuances or sensations or feelings that you didn’t notice first time round.
Why It Works
Each individual practice is simple.
It’s something you can use in small moments –
- before starting your day
- at your desk
- in between tasks
- when your mind is busy
- when something feels difficult
a few minutes at a time. Not necessarily perfectly or consistently, but often enough that it becomes part of how you move through your day.
Five minutes. Ten minutes. Breathing. Movement. Stillness.
Over time, these repeated moments begin to create something more stable internally. You’re not forcing change – you keep coming back to finding your centre and that repetition allows your body and mind to become more familiar with steadiness, with awareness, with space. And over time they become easier to access.
It’s not about getting it right. It’s about meeting whatever’s there: you might feel calm one day, irritated the next. You might feel nothing at all. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It just means it’s OK to be you, wherever you are.
Becoming Familiar with Steadiness
There’s another part of this that I’ve come to understand more clearly over time, and that’s what repeated relaxation can do for the nervous system.
When we’ve been under stress for a long time, or have been through difficult or overwhelming experiences, feeling relaxed or settled in the body doesn’t necessarily come naturally.
The body can become very familiar with being alert, tense and ready to respond. Sometimes it can take time to become familiar with other ways of being.
I don’t mean that a few minutes of relaxation can undo difficult experiences. It can’t. And relaxation isn’t always the right thing at every moment. But with practice, moments of steadiness can become more familiar. You notice what it feels like when your breathing slows a little. You notice your muscles letting go. You notice what it’s like to be present in your body without needing to do anything.
Over time, those experiences can give your nervous system something different to become familiar with. And when you have found some sense of safety in your body, relaxation practice can become a place you know how to return to. It’s not somewhere you have to force yourself into feeling calm, or somewhere you have to leave difficult feelings behind. It’s just somewhere familiar.
A place to pause, to notice, to breathe, and to come back to yourself.
That, for me, is one of the real values of practising relaxation regularly. It isn’t just about how you feel during the first five or ten minutes – it’s about gradually becoming more familiar with the experience of being in your body, and knowing that you have a way back to it.
A Quiet Foundation
When I look back at my training now, I don’t see a set of techniques. I see a structure that helped me become more steady and aware, and that helped me be able to find calm and inner stillness. It feels like a place of safety that I can carry through the changes in my life. And that’s what I built Relax & Realign around.
Exploring Further with Calm in a Crazy World
If you’d like to explore these ideas further, you can find a range of practical and reflective approaches to finding calm, understanding yourself and making positive changes through:
[Relax & Realign] · [Change & Growth] · [Peace for Health] · [Tarot & Oracle Sessions]
Explore the options on the website, or get in touch if you’d like to ask a question.
