Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode we're going to talk about hidden strategies for deep relaxation.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so relaxation.

Something we all typically crave more of, especially in a very high-stem world with nervous systems that are doing their best to process, manage, integrate, and release all of this stimulation as it's coming into us.

We're often craving strategies to help release that excess energy and to just find a little bit more ease in our day to day.

We have a lot of our go-to strategies. Meditation is a big one that we talk about on this podcast, but even things like useless window gazing that I've talked about just sitting, doing nothing, letting the system come back into equilibrium.

Different breathing techniques can be really powerful.

Lots of ways that we can settle the nervous system.

And often there are some deeper parts within us that tend to be in conflict, subconsciously, that create tension that we're not able to, well, we're able to perceive it, but we're often not able to address it because it's very deep.

Now when I say parts that are in conflict, I'm referencing ideas more from internal family systems therapy, which is a therapeutic modality that takes the perspective.

That there are different parts within you, similar to how there are different parts within a family, and how those parts are interacting, collaborating, working as a team, or working as enemies in opposition to each other, is going to condition whether our system feels at ease, or feels tense and disoffering.

And I've talked about this on the past in the podcast, but one of the ways that I described deep relaxation is letting go of the internal struggle.

Well, a lot of this internal struggle is happening between parts on a subconscious level.

There's the part that is craving a sense of ease and relaxation and letting go.

And then there's another part in the system that comes up as soon as we feel any sense of ease and letting go, that is the control part, the part that says, no, we need to be on top of things.

We need to be vigilant.

We need to not let our guard down because when we do, we potentially get hurt.

We miss something. There's some form of suffering, loss of love, loss of safety.

And that part immediately comes in those moments and actually prevents the system from letting go.

Now, we're all going to have this internal battle in different ways between different parts.

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