Intro & Overview

Hello and welcome to another guided meditation from Stillside. Today we are going to do an exercise known as cue-controlled relaxation. Before we begin, you need to pick a specific word that is going to be your cue word for the exercise. Pick something that you don’t often use in daily conversation, and something that has a neutral or happy connotation. I like the word “stillness” and that’s usually my cue word. You might choose the word “harmony” if you’re a musical person. My wife likes the word “bubbles” because she enjoys taking a bath. But pick anything you like, and just keep it in the back of your head for now.

In this exercise, we will begin with a few minutes of basic mindfulness breathing, then slowly relax the entire body using a specific visualization exercise. Once we’re in that state, we’re going to repeat our cue word over and over, helping the mind associate that feeling of relaxation with the cue word. Then we wrap up the meditation with a little more mindfulness breathing, and that’s it.

But a quick warning: Try not to overuse the cue word as a means of quick relaxation; we want to make sure that most of the time we’re using the word, it’s in the context of the meditation, in order to reinforce the positive/calming association. Then, using it only sparingly in stressful situations will ensure it retains its power to help us relax. If you use your cue word primarily in stressful situations, you might accidentally develop the reverse association and end up stressed out when you use the word!

Cue-Controlled Relaxation

Here is the full video meditation, complete with the introduction text above. If you want to skip straight to the meditation itself, that starts at almost exactly 2-minutes into the video.