In this session, we will talk about the science of naps. I like to know how things work. I find that, if I know how my brain and body will respond to a certain thing, it works better for me. What makes a perfect nap? What timing should we choose? An hour or 15 minutes? Where should we nap? What happens to our brains and our bodies when we nap? How can it benefit us in the long and in the short run?

This session discusses the science of naps, including optimal timing, location, and benefits for the brain and body, in short and long-term.

The Science Of (Power)Naps

A lot of people who label themselves "stressed out", are nothing of the sort. They are just tired. Learn about how you may be confusing the two and why it is essential to look out for both stress and fatigue in your daily life.

Don't confuse stress with fatigue, many labeled "stressed" are simply tired. It's important to identify and manage both in your daily life.

Are You Stressed or Tired?

We practice gratitude at the beginning of the day, gratitude for everything that will come towards you on this day.

Start each day with gratitude for everything that will come your way.

Start The Day With Gratitude

We'll be taking a nap together in this exercise. First, we'll relax the body, and then, I'll tell you a story. You can let me chat in the background while you relax or sleep, or you can treat it as a guided visualization, where we leave our worries of the day behind. Although this is a nap exercise, you could also use it to relax and clear your mind before you go to bed. Curl up, cover-up, and enjoy.

Relax and nap with a guided visualization exercise that clears your mind and leaves your worries behind before sleeping or taking a nap.

A Transformative Nap

When we go to bed with the express goal of falling asleep quickly, we can often get in our own way. Getting to relax the body and the mind before we drift off can be very useful. In this exercise, we will relax our bodies and then take some time to visualize ourselves at the beach. The body, the breath, and the visualization come together to get you to accept rest in your life.

Relaxing the body and visualizing a beach can help improve sleep quality by accepting rest into your life.

Sea Visualization For Sleep

How do you usually talk to yourself? Are you soft, gentle, and kind to yourself, or are you harsh and critical? In today's meditation, I'll encourage you to give yourself words of love, so you can go about your day with plenty of self-love.

Practice self-love by being kind, gentle, and encouraging in your inner dialogue for a positive and empowered day.

Start Your Day With Self Love

In today’s session, we will take a journey with our nap. Today is the day we can use our imaginations and find ourselves in a visualization of sorts. After a guided breathing exercise, I will guide you and invite you on a journey. We will visualize a walk through the forest. The natural imagery will help us relax and find some rest. Perhaps it can also inspire you to take a forest walk later.

Guided meditation session involves visualizing a forest walk for relaxation and inspiration.

A Nap In Nature

A short, effective practice to regain some calm and clarity at the moment. With gentle guidance, I'll invite you to become aware of your breathing, and then use the awareness of your breath to gain acceptance for your present moment. The practice contains no music and can be done anywhere, anytime, in any position. A great way to start or end your day or take a break right in the middle of it.

A quick breathing exercise to find peace and clarity anytime, anywhere, with no music, just gentle guidance.

Breathing For Calm And Clarity

Mildness is the counterbalancing force for perfectionism. In this meditation, we give ourselves permission to be mild, to let go of the push for perfection. We allow ourselves to be.

This meditation encourages embracing mildness and letting go of perfectionism, giving ourselves permission to simply be.

Mildness Meditation

You are strong, you are capable, you are courageous and brilliant, but sometimes, you forget. So today, we'll start the day off with building some extra confidence, so you can tackle whatever comes your way!

Boost your confidence to tackle any challenge by reminding yourself of your strength, capability, courage, and brilliance

Start Your Day With Confidence

Gratitude is a beautiful practice for any time of day, but practicing it right before bedtime, allows you to put your worries aside and instead fill you heart, body and mind with warm and fuzzy feelings. Get comfortable, relax your body, and fill yourself with gratitude tonight.

Practice gratitude before bedtime to ease worries and fill your heart and mind with warm feelings.

Fall Asleep With A Grateful Heart

Today, we'll start the day with an open awareness meditation. Together, we'll look for calm and grounding, so we can move through our days with awareness and alertness.

Start the day with open awareness meditation to find calm and grounding, promoting awareness and alertness throughout the day.

Start Your Day With Presence

A meditation for when you wake up in the middle of the night and can't seem to get back to sleep. If you're worried about tossing and turning at night, here is a guided relaxation for you to drift back off into your dreams.

Guided relaxation meditation to help you fall back asleep when waking up in the middle of the night, ensuring a peaceful transition into dreams.

Falling Back Asleep

This meditation is focused on what surrounds us. This is traditionally known as a 'cosmic meditation', but I like to think of it as a zooming out-exercise. One that will put things in a different perspective, by bringing different things into our awareness. The exercise may not be so suitable for beginners, so I recommend you try a body scan or a breathing meditation before you jump right into this one. We'll start with a quote from the Sutras, an awareness of our breathing, and then we start to explore what else we can bring into our awareness.

A cosmic meditation that zooms out and offers a different perspective, focused on the surrounding environment, recommended for experienced meditators.

Cosmic Meditation

A relaxing exercise to practice when you crawl into bed, to help you get to sleep. One of the elements that might prevent us from falling asleep, is the desire to sleep, which sometimes turns into a stressful thought. Being too focussed on sleeping can create all kinds of tension in the mind and in the body. So let's focus on relaxing our bodies and minds instead. This exercise takes inspiration from Yoga Nidra and encourages you to feel into your body, and let go of any tension that may be there. We will breathe slowly, relax our bodies and, hopefully, drift into sleep.

Relax your body and mind before bed with this Yoga Nidra inspired exercise to help you fall asleep without stress.

Yoga Nidra for Bedtime

To start, we'll bring some intention to our morning, and our day. In this meditation, I'll encourage you to pick an intention for the day, so you can tackle your day feeling strong and confident!

In this meditation, choose an intention for the day to feel empowered and confident while tackling your tasks.

Start Your Day with Intention

Today, we'll start our day by finding balance and equanimity. Cultivating equanimity can help us stay grounded and centered on ourselves, even when the day doesn't go exactly as we planned.

Cultivating equanimity helps us stay grounded and centered, finding balance despite unexpected events in our day.

Start Your Day With Equanimity

Abundance is all around us, just think about the abundance of blades of grass, the abundance of stars, and the abundance of breaths you take every day. Today, we'll take a moment to enjoy the abundance within us.

Recognize the abundance in everyday life and appreciate the abundance within yourself.

Start Your Day With Abundance

Maybe you have been practicing relaxation or meditation for a while, in which case you will know the power of breathwork. If you are new to these practices, I welcome you and I applaud you. Today, we will learn (or re-learn) how we can focus on our breathing to relax and take a nap together. The technique today is adapted from the beautiful tradition that is Japanese Zen meditation. I hope you enjoy the wisdom of this practice, and that your nap is restful.

Learn how to focus on your breathing with Japanese Zen meditation to relax and take a nap in this guided practice.

Using The Breath To Prepare For A Nap

Even if we've practiced mindfulness and meditation for a while, it's possible our thoughts go into overdrive when bedtime comes. This mindfulness for bedtime exercise will help you transition between your waking and sleeping life and send you off on a good night's sleep.

Mindfulness for bedtime exercise helps transition into sleep and improve sleep quality for those with busy minds.

Bedtime Mindfulness

This evening, we’ll imagine ourselves in a quiet, pleasant rural setting and stargaze together. Come along on this relaxed trip into nature, to the stars and beyond. Get yourself ready for a good night's sleep.

Join us for a serene stargazing experience in the countryside, as we embark on a calming journey into nature and prepare for a peaceful slumber.

Fall Asleep With A Starry Sky

We can all use a little more joy in our lives, but sometimes it's hard to know where to start or where to fit it in our days. So today, we'll start the day with exploring, feeling, and cultivating joy.

Learn how to incorporate joy into your daily routine by exploring, feeling, and cultivating it for a more fulfilling life.

Start Your Day With Joy

You might not remember sleeping as a baby, but your body does. In this meditation, we'll get in touch with the sensations of sleep itself, slow down our breathing, our heart rate, and our brainwaves and let our body rest. Fall asleep in no time and let your inner child rest and relax.

This meditation helps you reconnect with the sensations of sleep, allowing your body to slow down and find deep relaxation, like your inner child.

Sleep Like A Baby

In this exercise, we will use our breaths to come into a state of relaxation. An excellent starting point if you are new to breathing meditation, or would like a quick relaxation exercise for the middle of your day.

Learn how to relax using breathing meditation in a quick exercise suitable for beginners or as a midday relaxation technique.

Relaxing With Your Breath

Sometimes, when our thoughts get the better of us, it seems impossible to meditate. In this case, we can still use affirmations to calm and center ourselves and remember that we are not our thoughts, we are observers.

When meditation seems impossible, use affirmations to calm and center yourself, remember you are not your thoughts, you are an observer.

Affirmations For A Chaotic Mind

A relaxation with affirmations for self-acceptance. We will begin by relaxing the body and the breath, finding a nice, safe space in your mind, and then repeating some affirmations for self-acceptance and self-love. This relaxation also exists in a shorter version to start your day with a boost.

Relaxation with affirmations for self-acceptance and self-love in a longer and shorter version to start your day with a boost.

Affirmations For Self Acceptance

A long, slow body scan to get ourselves ready for a deep, restful night's sleep. This exercise uses techniques based on the MBSR body scan and autogenic relaxation to relax your body and mind when you can't sleep.

MBSR-based body scan exercise promotes deep sleep by relaxing body and mind.

Body Scan for Deep Sleep

A series of affirmations for self-acceptance and self-love for when you need a quick boost in the morning or throughout your day.

Affirmations for self-love and acceptance to boost your day!

In this lesson, we practice concentration meditation, in the Zen tradition. We can use our thoughts to relax by focusing on one thing at a time. In this way, we can become still.

Practice concentration meditation in the Zen tradition to relax and become still by focusing on one thing at a time.

Relaxing Zen Concentration Meditation

Walking is an excellent way to meditate. I learned this technique during my stay at a Buddhist monastery. Walking helps your body and your mind, it gives us a mental boost and works to help calm us. This walking meditation helps you on your way.

Walking meditation is a beneficial practice learned at a Buddhist monastery; it promotes physical and mental well-being, providing a mental boost and fostering calmness.

Walking Meditation

In this guided lesson, we’ll nap together, relax our bodies, and visualize a calm train ride through nature that brings us to a new moment in time.

This guided lesson focuses on relaxation techniques, including napping, body relaxation, and visualizing a calm train ride through nature.

Guided Nap - Trainride Through Nature

In this nature meditation, we will use a deep, tranquil lake as a metaphor, to explore and release our feelings and thoughts in a safe, comfortable way. I'll invite you to remember or imagine a lake, and in this lake, explore the surface and the depths.

This nature meditation guides you to use a tranquil lake metaphor to safely explore and release your emotions and thoughts.

Release Emotions For Deep Sleep

This is a sleep story. I will invite you to imagine a lush, green, tranquil forest where you can take a relaxing walk before finding a little cozy house where you can lie down and rest, surrounded by easy, beautiful nature sounds. Lie back, relax, breathe, and let me talk you to sleep.

Relaxing sleep story set in a peaceful forest with calming nature sounds, guiding you to a cozy house to rest and drift off to sleep.

Forest Walk Sleep Story

You cannot pour from an empty cup, so let's fill your cup together in this guided nap. We'll first relax our bodies and then visualize ourselves in a lush, beautiful garden with a fountain. The water that runs through the fountain is there to refresh and renew you and fill your heart with gratitude. You can use this exercise as a guided nap or a sleep story, there is no cue to wake up at the end.

Guided nap to relax and visualize a lush garden with a refreshing fountain to renew and fill your heart with gratitude, no cue to wake up.