By Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar | Posted: May 14, 2020
Are you tired? When you were working, when the lockdown wasn’t there, you were tired working, tired speaking, tired of going shopping. You’re tired of this; you’re tired of that. Your children tire you. Your spouse tires you. Your friends tire you. Everything is tiring, isn’t it? Are you tired?.
Just think about it. Every day you get tired, right? When you get tired worrying, you sleep well. If you’re not tired, you can’t even sleep well. Do you know that? What do you need to get tired?
Types of tiredness
There are several types of tiredness, also; one is physical tiredness. This is understandable. If you haven’t walked, if you get onto a treadmill because we’re in lockdown, you can exhaust some energy and get tired.
But the mental tiredness that comes from thinking and thinking and thinking and overthinking and overthinking wears you out. It’s the worst type of tiredness that you can ever experience, the mental tiredness. And your emotional tiredness is just as bad. Heartburn, fear, anxiety-- but, are you tired of all this also? Are you tired of thinking?
How to stop feeling tired
Are you tired of feeling anxious? Just look back at your life and see how many times you’ve felt anxious. Still, you’re existing. Still, you’re intact now. You’re still sleeping. Right? You’re eating. You’re alive. Why don’t we just look at our own experience, and come out of this emotional tiredness, intellectual tiredness. There’s a way to get out of this. Do you know what it is?
Pranayama-- your breath is linked to your emotions! Every emotion has a particular rhythm in your breath. But we seldom attend to our breath. We don’t even know that there’s a link between our emotions, how we feel, and our breath, breathing pattern. We don’t even recognize that every thought, every worry in our head, has a definite pattern in our breath. So if you change the pattern of the breath, your worries will also stop.
Do you know the secret? It’s a secret, but share it with everybody at home. Your worries are linked to your breath. You can’t directly get rid of emotions or thoughts. But you can do it through your breath. If you’ve been part of any drama or acting group, they tell you to breathe differently when you have to express different emotions. When you have to show anger, you cannot show anger like that (calmly breathing slowly). You have to breathe faster. Only then, anger can be expressed.
And, when you’re feeling serene, the inhalation is slow and soft. You don’t feel the exhalation at all. When you’re frustrated, your exhalation is powerful, but you don’t even know when you’ve taken a deep breath in. Now, doing some pranayamas, you can reverse this. You can change this. Yes, you can come out of mental tiredness.
Breathing exercises for various blocks
Many people have writer’s block. Sometimes they want to write something, and do something creative, and they can’t do it. For them, I’d recommend Sudarshan Kriya. This is the best way to get out of your blocks. As a precursor to this, I’ll tell you some simple breathing exercises.
Take a long, deep breath, hold the breath, and then breathe out through the mouth, as though you’re blowing out through a straw. See how long you can breathe out. This can also bring down your high blood pressure, your tension. This can calm that down. You can keep your eyes open, but you have to keep your gaze at 30 degrees. Or, you can do it with your eyes closed, even better. So, you breathe in through the nostrils and breathe out through the mouth as slowly as possible. Just five such breaths can calm your mind, can snap you out of worries. One more exercise:
After this you can do the bhastrika pranayam. With your elbows bent and hands loose by your shoulders, you breathe in and throw your hands up, and with the same force, breathe out and bring them down to your sides again. Breathe in and out with the same speed. This bhastrika pranayam can refresh your head and remove your tiredness. Don’t do too much. You can do 10 or 15 counts or 20 counts at the maximum. Like this, you can do two or three sets with a little rest in between.
I’d also recommend that you listen to music and chanting. You can try this either sitting or lying down, just listen to chanting for 15-20 minutes and you’ll see. At the end of it you’ll feel very energized and more lively.
So for physical tiredness, get rid of it with good rest. For mental tiredness, get rid of it by doing pranayama, some yoga, and meditation. Emotional tiredness? Listen to chanting. Songs of any language, any religion, those can really uplift your emotional well being.
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