How to regain both calm and energy

First of all, I recommend doing a little breathing exercise, which is extremely simple and yet surprisingly effective. It will help you to be more successful with the relaxation session I’ll be telling you about next.

So why is breathing so important? It’s because breath brings life and energy. Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to breathe properly and that’s why they feel breathless, depressed, tired and tense.

Someone who is feeling tense and nervous naturally breathes badly. However if you’re feeling all strung up, you can calm yourself and relax thanks to the breathing technique that I’m going to teach you, because it’s extremely soothing, both physically and mentally.

The first thing you need to do to breathe well is to exhale fully. You naturally need to breathe out properly before you can take a good deep breath in, because how can you hope to really fill your lungs, if you don’t completely empty them first?

So before you inhale, begin by exhaling as much air as you possibly can. Once your lungs are thoroughly emptied, breathe in by swelling your abdomen and then complete the process by gradually filling the top part of your lungs. This is called abdominal respiration.

This type of breathing produces an extremely beneficial type of massage. How? Because abdominal respiration is fuller and deeper than other types of breathing. It will help you to relax your solar plexus (an important nerve centre situated behind your stomach) where your tension originates – hence expressions like “having a knot in your stomach.”

To begin with, train yourself to do twenty deep abdominal respirations, counting up from one to twenty, WITHOUT ALLOWING YOURSELF TO BE DISTRACTED. You’re probably saying to yourself “what could be simpler, I can do that easily.” Well go ahead and try! I’ll bet that to start with, you won’t even get to 10 before you allow yourself to be distracted.

It’s not as easy as you might think to “disconnect yourself” from the outside world and turn your focus inwards. However, if you can master simple “exercises” like this while at the same time using the I.G.R.7 in accordance with my instructions, you will really be able to start changing your life.

I know perfectly well that initially, you will start to think about something else when you get to around 7 or 8. But this doesn’t really matter and indeed it’s perfectly normal. I have hardly ever witnessed a case where a “non-initiated” person could count twenty deep respirations right to the end without allowing themselves to be distracted by something else.

Persevere and go back to zero each time your mind wanders. Don’t tense up or get cross, and stop after a few minutes even if you haven’t reached 20. You will have completed your first deep breathing exercise and you will already feel a lot calmer. Start breathing normally again. What you have just done represents the first vital step on the road to relaxation.