Sylvia's Mind Calming Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Sylvia's Mind Calming. Today's episode is a little different from the usual guided meditation. This one is a subliminal recording, designed to support the best food choices for peak physical and mental performance. So before I begin, let me explain what subliminal audio actually is. A subliminal recording carries a spoken message that sits below the level...

Send us Fan Mail Every life is made of chapters. Some end by choice. Some end without warning. Some we have been trying to close for years and haven't quite managed. A relationship. A job. A version of ourselves. A period of life that has run its course and is ready, now, to be honoured and released. This short exercise guides you through the felt experience of closing a chapter. Not rushing...

Send us Fan Mail Think about your favourite piece of music. It is made of notes. But it is also made of silence. The spaces between the notes are not empty. If you remove them and you no longer have music; you have noise. And yet when we listen to music we never think about the silence. We simply experience the whole.  What if our minds work exactly the same way? Our experience of life is made of...

Send us Fan Mail This morning on a nature walk, something extraordinary happened. First, zooming in on a single bee. Its extraordinary detail, its colours, its wings, its complete absorption in what it was doing. And then looking up at the sky. Vast, open, infinite. The same world. Two completely different perspectives. This 5 minute exercise uses that same principle. You will zoom in to whatever...

Send us Fan Mail We all have one. An invisible rule book. A set of rules we carry about how the world should work, how people should behave, how life should go, how we ourselves should be. Rules we never consciously chose, that were handed to us by our upbringing, our experiences, our culture, and that we have been living by ever since without ever stopping to question them. Rules like: people sho...

Send us Fan Mail One question. One shift. Six minutes. When the world feels overwhelming, busy and relentless, it is worth pausing to ask: is the world actually busy? Or is it my mind? In this short and quietly powerful exercise, I invite you to step back. To see the world from far away. To observe both the world and yourself from a distance so great that the busyness begins to look very different...

Send us Fan Mail When anxiety, stress or overwhelm hit, your breathing is the fastest and most direct route back to calm. This is not a meditation. It is a practical 5 minute breathing exercise that uses a specific pattern, 6 counts in, 3 count pause, 9 counts out, to directly activate your vagus nerve and your parasympathetic nervous system, switching off your body's stress response and rest...

Send us Fan Mail Letting go is sometimes the hardest thing we do. And yet somewhere inside you, you already know what needs to be released today. A feeling. A memory. A person. A worry. A fear. A thought that keeps returning. Anger. Guilt. Grief. Resentment. Uncertainty. A story you have been telling yourself for too long. Something someone said. Something you cannot control. Something heavy that...

Send us Fan Mail This meditation is different from all the others. There is no landscape to visit. No place to go. No external world to step into. Just you. And your body. And eighteen minutes of the most gentle, intimate attention you will give yourself today. In this deeply relaxing meditation, I guide you on a quiet journey through your own body from head to toe, finding wherever tension has ga...

Send us Fan Mail The seventh episode in the Falling Asleep By series. You are in a mountain clearing at night. The air is cool and clean and thin at altitude. A small bonfire crackles beside you, warm and intimate, casting its amber light across the clearing. And above you, the Milky Way.  🌌 That river of ancient light stretching from one horizon to the other. Millions of stars. Billions of years...

Send us Fan Mail The sixth episode in the Falling Asleep By series. It is night in an ancient forest. 🌲 🌲 🌲 Moonlight filters through the canopy above, falling in soft silver shafts onto the moss and the ferns and the forest floor. The air is cool and still and carries the deep, rich smell of earth and ancient wood. You are lying on a cashmere blanket on a bed of soft moss. Dark and warm and co...

Send us Fan Mail The fifth episode in the Falling Asleep By series. 🌸 🌸 🌸 It is golden hour in an ancient cherry blossom orchard. Above you, a whole canopy of soft pink blossom, heavy and generous, petals falling constantly and gently like the warmest, softest snow you have ever known. You are lying on a cashmere blanket beneath the oldest tree. The air is warm and sweet. Somewhere in the dista...

Send us Fan Mail The fourth episode in the Falling Asleep By series. As the sun goes down and the sky turns soft pinks and purples, something extraordinary happens. A cloud descends. Slowly, gently, warmly. It finds you exactly where you are, wraps itself around you, and lifts you — so softly you barely notice — into the evening sky. You are weightless. Warm. Completely held. Floating in a sky the...

Send us Fan Mail The third episode in the Falling Asleep By series. 🦋 It is golden hour. The sun is low and warm and amber, turning everything it touches into something softer, something gentler, something that feels already halfway between waking and dreaming. You are lying on a light blanket in a meadow. Long grass all around you. Soft pastel flowers, pale lavender, creamy white, blush pink, ge...

Send us Fan Mail The second episode in the Falling Asleep By series. Outside, snow is falling on the mountains. The wind moves through the trees and presses against the windows.  But you are inside. In a log cabin, lying on a thick wool rug in front of a fire. A heavy wool blanket over you. The flames warm and present, a large log burning slowly, glowing, crackling softly, holding its form and the...

Send us Fan Mail Introducing a new series — Falling Asleep By... Each episode in this series takes you to a different place, a place so warm, so safe, so beautifully still that your mind has somewhere wonderful to rest while sleep finds you. In this first episode, you are spending a warm summer night on the beach. The sand still holds the heat of the day. There is a soft linen blanket, a familiar...

Send us Fan Mail If guided meditations have never quite worked for you because your mind doesn't produce pictures, this recording was made for you. This sleep meditation contains no imagery, no visualisation, nothing to picture. Instead it works entirely through sound and physical sensation, guiding you into deep, natural sleep through the rhythm of distant sounds, the weight of your body, th...

Send us Fan Mail If you have ever been told to imagine a beautiful place and your mind simply went blank, this meditation was made for you. Many people find it difficult or impossible to visualise mentally. This is completely normal and does not mean meditation is out of reach. It simply means a different approach is needed. This 11 minute meditation works entirely through sensation and sound rath...

Send us Fan Mail Joy is a neurological state.  Research shows it is driven primarily by dopamine, our brain's reward and pleasure neurotransmitter, and crucially, dopamine can be activated by imagination, by anticipation, by the vivid internal experience of something wonderful. The brain responds to a joyful imagined experience in remarkably similar ways to a joyful real one. Which means joy...

Send us Fan Mail Anxiety is a physical experience that is felt in the body, often without us even realising it. The clenched jaw. The tight throat. The heaviness in the chest. The knot in the stomach. The shoulders that have been raised. Research shows that anxiety activates the body's stress response, flooding it with cortisol and adrenaline and keeping the nervous system in a state of high...

Send us Fan Mail In this 6 minute colour meditation, you will work with the energy of yellow and orange.  You will begin with a small glowing sphere of yellow and orange light floating in front of you. With each breath it grows, deepens and expands, until you can step inside it and feel yourself filled, from the inside out, with pure yellow light and everything it carries. Different colours resona...

Send us Fan Mail In this 6 minute colour meditation, you will work with the energy of pink and purple. You will begin with a small glowing sphere of pink and purple light floating in front of you. With each breath it grows, deepens and expands, until you can step inside it and feel yourself filled, from the inside out, with pure pink light and everything it carries. Different colours resonate diff...

Send us Fan Mail In this 6 minute colour meditation, you will work with the energy of green  You will begin with a small glowing sphere of green light floating in front of you. With each breath it grows, deepens and expands, until you can step inside it and feel yourself filled, from the inside out, with pure green light and everything it carries. Different colours resonate differently with differ...

Send us Fan Mail In this 5 minute colour meditation, you will work with the energy of blue and indigo. You will begin with a small glowing sphere of blue and indigo light floating in front of you. With each breath it grows, deepens and expands, until you can step inside it and feel yourself filled, from the inside out, with pure blue light and everything it carries. Different colours resonate diff...

Send us Fan Mail This episode is for those who have already listened to The Gallery several times. If you haven't, start there first. You already know the way. This 6 minute recording takes you straight back to the final room, the velvet chair, the cushions, the blanket and the painting, so your mind can find sleep faster, using the pathway it has already learned. Tonight there is a storm out...