I’m currently writing a few posts for a series called Life Well Lived where basically, I answer all of life’s most important questions. I’m very wise. Except not really. Really I’m just giving my opinion, along with some other bloggers, about different topics such as this:
What are your favorite relaxation techniques? And what benefits do you see from practicing them?
Let’s be honest here: I’m in a season of life where relaxation is an elusive little thing. I’m okay with this because “for everything there is a season” and all that. I waited a long time to have a little one to chase around all day long, playing dolls and learning letters and wiping hands and changing diapers and all of the other hundreds of things that add up to exhaustion come nightfall.
I don’t have any fancy relaxation techniques like deep breathing or counting to ten or imagining myself lying on a sunny beach. With Adam Levine. Although maybe I should try that last one…
When I want to unwind I just run a bubble bath. This isn’t actually as relaxing as it seems because our hot water doesn’t last long enough to fill up our bathtub. So when I want to take a long, hot bath it’s a whole complicated process that involves Jeff heating up water in large pots on the stove and dumping them in the bathtub for me like we’re some sort of pioneer family.
Then I light some candles, which Jeff doesn’t approve of because of something about something about my track record with candles and setting things on fire. But I’m like Jeff! Candles are so extra safe in the bathroom because hello! All of this water is readily available to put fires out with!
A glass of wine + a good book is essential to this scenario or else the whole thing crumbles like Relaxation Jenga. When I want to totally zone out I read some good, solid chick lit. Or Amish fiction. Or whatever stack of magazines I haven’t worked my way through yet. But if it’s been a long day and I need some encouragement, I pick up something a little heavier (I’m currently working my way through Jen Hatmaker’s Interrupted) and take my journal in there with me. I totally have only dropped it in the bathtub once. (I use one of those bath trays like what is shown in the picture, except my bathroom is not that pretty. Or clean.) Also, whoever suggested that I put my Kindle in a large ziplock baggie for reading in the bathtub? You are awesome.
What would also be awesome would be if Jeff would indulge me in my desire to get a towel warmer so that I could wrap myself in a hot towel when I get out of the tub. Except for that when I say “towel warmer,” Jeff hears “fire hazard.”
The benefit? Is that I don’t want to throw things at puppies after I relax in a long, hot bath. And also, I’m really clean. And also, I would never throw things at puppies. What kind of person do you think I am? Actually, when reading back over my complicated process of relaxing it really just makes me sound completely neurotic. Which totally isn’t true. I’m only slightly neurotic.
(You can read the experts advice on relaxation techniques which are way more professional than mine here and enter the Life Well Lived sweepstakes for an iPod Touch – in case music is what relaxes you- here.)
(image credit: Real Simple – why doesn’t my bathroom look like that?! Some affiliate links included, please see my disclosure page for more information.)
