Hi there. I'm AnnMerle. I want to give you some, hopefully, brief information about the practice that I've designed for you. The practice is just a taste of what it feels like to melt into rest in our bodies. And I want to thank Jill Miller, my teacher. I've been studying with her for about eight years, and I've taken what she has taught me about breath, recovery, calming the nervous system, myofascial self-massage, and how to get stronger safely.

I've taken all of Jill Miller’s work and adapted it for the very specific circumstances that you and I find ourselves in being women over 50 who have worked very hard for our lives. And for whom stress has become a normal part of our lives. So normal, in fact, that we don't recognize it. We don't see it. It's invisible.

When I used to get frozen shoulders, again and again, frozen shoulder go to physical therapy, frozen shoulder, go to physical therapy. I didn't understand that it wasn't simply a weak muscle. Stress was teaching me to grip and hold on. I was holding on as though hanging from a ledge for dear life. I know that sounds dramatic. But that's how my body felt. And I didn't see it. I didn't feel it because it's invisible.

What I had to do was learn to unwind that constant state of fight and flight in order for my body to recover and then rejuvenate. There is a process for this unwinding, but most of us don’t know how to do it. We’ve been taught that if we have a frozen shoulder, for instance, that the muscles have simply gotten tight and we need either to do more yoga or to or to go to a physical therapist, or, God forbid ,have surgery, which we might need in order to fix things that have wrecked us.

All of us in this era of our lives need to learn how to feel rest in our body. And rest allows us to recover. I have some notes here and I have to look at them. That's the way it is. And I want to tell you some of the benefits of rest.

I think of my dear mother who has left us, but she used to get very angry if I suggested that a nap would be helpful. She should really yell at me and say, “I don't need to rest. I'm not resting. I'll rest when I'm dead.” How many times if you heard that?  Then, I'd walk by her bedroom and see her laid out on the sofa, snoring away.

You can't sleep if you can't rest.

What does rest do for us?

It's so important for our whole nervous system -- every part of our nervous system. It helps us shift out of fight and flight into rest and digest. We can't digest our food if we're in this constant state of stress. We might experience IBS, constipation, and many other issues. We need to be able to relax in our bodies. Rest improves neurological function. Rest and relaxation helps us to manage stress more effectively and recover after doing something really hard for a while.

We need to rest. It helps us be more resilient to heal. Physical and emotional resilience are crucially important. It helps our muscles to recover from workouts. You may have this newly popular information for anyone across the lifespan: when you work out really hard you need to give your your muscles time to rest, recover, and rejuvenate before moving on to another hard work out. Otherwise you're just continually tearing yourself down.

Rest gives us the wherewithal to respond from our authentic selves in situations that we are not are not comfortable in and find it hard to speak our truth. When we're rested, It's a lot easier to be compassionate and empathetic but to hold boundaries as well.

The two practices that I include in your rest, recover, and rejuvenation experience have two parts.

First, a five-minute, simple breath practice, which offers you an opportunity to learn the abdominal thoracic breath that I have learned from Jill Miller. This breath practice teaches you to get breath into your body where your nervous system can feel it and benefit from it. But also, that longer exhale that I coach you through is the crucial piece. It slows the heart rate down and it helps your body to let go of the gripping and the tensing that we feel.

I first give you a five-minute breath practice with managed breath. You are inhaling intentionally and exhaling intentionally and you can do that anytime, anywhere. It's a practice you cannot do it too much.

The next 10-minute practice is what's called non sleep deep rest., or NSDR. Others call it yoga nidra or it's very much like the savasana that you might have experienced at the end of a yoga class. The NSDR experience helps you to create this deep state of rest.  My words guiding you help mitigate the tendency of our minds to pop in and do what they habitually do, which is remind us of the things that we're always thinking about. This is designed, and I was taught this by Jill Miller, to use verbal cues. I'm talking to you to lead you through a state of relaxation and you're scanning your body and your breath is not managed as it is in the first five minutes. You're simply observing your breath. All of this deep relaxation has been demonstrated through scientific studies have to help mental clarity and renewal and emotional resilience and physical health.

I have used NSDR to great advantage as I write my book. I will set my timer for a certain period of time. And then I will lay down to take a break and do some NSDR, some yoga nidra , or whatever you want to call it. And I come back feeling just as refreshed as I need to be to continue,  because writing as you probably know is very hard work and very taxing on the mind.

Rest is crucial and in my private, small-group coaching program, it is one of the five gateways into a self-healing practice. I hope you enjoy this short practice. I welcome your comments. I welcome our conversation. I think we have to stick together because I think women over 50 are generally ignored and not not offered their full voice. It’s. very hard for us to step out into the world and maintain our presence. We need to be well rested to do that. Let’s  join together and take our rest as we need it.

Let’s learn how to rest, recover and rejuvenate. I look forward to hearing from you. Take care.