Hey everyone! Haven't made a post on here in a while, but i'm absolutely loving the new NG layout! I tip my hat to the whole NG crew and everyone else who's helped bring this site to where it is, and where it's going! Everything is beautiful! <3

I'll start my post with a PARABLE! This is the final Patch Parable that i recorded with Vanessa (She-Patch) and now up on Newgrounds just for you to enjoy!

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I also wanted to share something that was shared with me recently, which is a technique for helping out with stress, tension, and getting into a more relaxed, calm and happy state of mind, body and soul. School/work being depressing, boring, or just weighing you down and making it hard to enjoy things?

Most people don't realize it but all of the stress they FEEL works through not just the emotional or mental bodies, but also the physical body too, and so we get giant clumps of tension in our back, neck, feet, hands, and jaw...especially jaw.

We can work through the stress emotionally or mentally and it can help get rid of the tension physically, but usually its way easier to just stretch the physical tension out and feel the stress go away in the other areas of your self. The thing to remember is that you are creating the stress within yourself, even if there are external factors in creating the stress. If you were in a more relaxed state, the things that "cause you stress" wouldn't have an affect on you, and you could tackle them with ease.

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Lets start with this. <--- This is a very short 2-page pdf with neck and shoulder self-massages you can do. Your basically just squeezing certain parts of your neck or head and allowing yourself to relax, and ultimately squeezing the tension and pressure out. Makes you feel wonderful too :)

The Jaw holds about 80% of the tension in the body, you may notice that when your particular agitated you clench your jaw or hold your teeth together really tight. By massaging your jaw muscles (which will probably be really tight at first), you can alleviate a LOT of tension in your body, it may take a while and also could hurt a bit (you'll probably have to press VERY firmly with this one), but it'll really get rid of a LOT of tension.

Also, just stretching in general is really good, because you can still stretch out all of the tension everywhere else and your body can relax more. the more your body can let go of tension, so can your emotional and mental states.

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Finally, Your breath is intimately tied to your heartrate, and when you become stressed, your heart fluctuates chaotically and your breath lessens or does weird things too if you're not consciously focusing on it. A good way to get rid of these feelings is to take a step back from EVERYTHING, and allow yourself to (mentally and emotionally) zone into a state where none of it matters. Even if it only lasts for 10-15 seconds or so. Just completely forget about everything for that time and focus on your breath, breathing reaaaaally deep, nice and slow, and then exhale and let everything go. Feel as if you're breathing all of the tension and all of the worry into your lungs, and as you exhale, you let everything go. and allow your whole body to relax. You want to allow yourself to get back into the harmonic heartbeat with yourself, so that you are calm and collected, and better for handling whatever task it is in front of you.

There's gonna be a spirit science about the Heart in about a week or so, which will go into more detail about that too. The Institute of Heartmath has done some awesome work in showing scientifically how intense of a role the heart plays in everything. Here's a Free PDF.

Well, that's all for this week. See ya! <3