 Hi, welcome to Mind and Body Mentor. I'm Sifu David and in this lesson, you will learn how to fall asleep faster and how to have better sleep. Stay tuned and I'm going to show you a few tips that will help you fall asleep quickly. So I'm going to share with you a few things I've used personally that would really help me when I'm having problems sleeping. So there's two categories. There's things that you can do before you sleep and there's things that you can do while you just started sleeping. So let's start with the things that you can do before you sleep. So I learned a lot of this from Tai Chi and Qigong and what you want to do before you sleep is to relax your nervous system so that your whole body, your mind and everything is relaxed. That allows you to sleep a lot faster and a lot better. So one of the first exercises you can do is called the Grand Tai Chi and you can stand straight with your feet about shoulder width apart. Your knees lightly bent, not too bent. Just relaxed, shoulders relaxed. And then you want to bring your hands up in a circle like this. Make a circle with the big hands and then have it come down like this. So you're making two big circles and then having them meet near the middle and then they come down like this. So when you come up, your hands are facing up, your palms are facing up. And when you come down, your palms are facing down. You can do these as many times as you want. It's nice and slow like this. So while you're doing this, you want to coordinate it with breathing. So as you're going up, you want to breathe in and as you're coming down, you breathe out slowly. Breathe in through your nose and you can breathe out through your mouth. Nice and slow, deliberate breaths. Another thing you can add to this is while you're going up, you can look upwards. Breathe in and then as you come down, just look straight and slightly down. So breathe in, look upwards. As you come down, breathe down and look slightly down ahead of you. So you can do this as many times as you want. So that's called the Grand Tai Chi and that's the first technique and first exercise you can do. You start to calm down and start to calm your nervous system in your body. The next thing you can do is called Wu Chi and what you can do is put your feet together and your legs are just slightly bent, not too bent, just slightly bent. Just make sure they're not locked and your knees are not locked into a straight position. And you want to stand up nice and tall, tuck in your chin and your spine nice and straight and then put your hands on your belly like this. If you can feel your belly button, you want to put your hands about an inch below the belly button and feel that part of your body, it's called the Dan Tian. And notice what I'm doing with my hands. I'm locking, interlocking my thumbs together. Now, there's some theory to this, some Qigong theory is that if you're a guy, if you're male, you want to put your right hand over your left hand and if you are female, then you want to put your left hand over right hand. We can explain why you do that in another video, but for now, just go along with it and put it like this. Why you do this, you can close your eyes. And while you're closing your eyes, do the same breathing. But now, center your awareness, bring your mindfulness to the part where your hands are touching. So feel your belly rise when you're breathing in and when you're breathing out, feel your belly contract. Go down. So from the side, a little something like when you're breathing in, it'll come out and when you breathe in, it's going to go in. So you can't see what's happening. My belly is coming out when I'm breathing in, when I'm breathing out, my belly is going in, going back down. So do that for about a minute to five minutes as much as time as you have. And you'll feel a lot more relaxed and more centered. And the purpose of putting your hands there is you want to collect your awareness and then want to collect all the chi into that Dantan area. Whereas when you're working out or using your body during the day, the chi goes out to your limbs, out to your head, out to your feet. And then they're very active. So now you want to collect that chi back into the center. And then now it's a time for you to rest. Now it's time for you to recharge. And that's the purpose of this exercise. Now the next exercise is called rocking. And I can't really show you my feet right now. But what you want to do is just have your feet a little bit wider than your shoulder width apart. So stand with your feet a little bit wider than your shoulder width. And then you want to do is just rock from side to side. So I'm rocking from one side. And then I rock to the other side. So rock to this side. Try to feel the weight of your body through your legs. So it's okay to bend your knees on this one. I'm just rocking from side to side. Now as you're rocking from side to side, do it very slowly. Imagine that you have two big tubes of water. Each leg is a big tube of water. And what you want to do is to imagine that you're pouring the water from one jar slowly into another jar. You don't want to spill any of the water. So you want to pour it nice and slowly. Pour from one leg. Go through and center of your body and then into the other leg. And then hold it there. Loosen it up. Feel your body's weight on your feet. See? And then you want to slowly pour the water from one leg to the other leg. Just relax, close your eyes. Another thing you can add is you can imagine that water is washing down your hands, washing down your whole body. Let's say you're taking a really nice hot shower. And imagine that water is just washing down your body, dripping down your arms, your wrists, your fingers, and dripping into the ground. Just imagine that you're in a nice hot shower doing this. Actually, it might be even better if you just do this in a hot shower and then just breathe deeply. So take a deep breath and then breathe deeply, breathe out, and just rock back and forth. It's kind of like rocking a baby. And that's what we're doing with your nervous system. We're rocking it back and forth. Nice and gently. So it relaxes the nervous system. It helps your chi to go down into your legs out of your head because when you have all the chi in your head, then you will have a hard time sleeping because you already start out the activity in your brain. So you want to bring that activity, all that electrical activity down through your body into the feet and down into the ground. So that's the third exercise that you can do to help you sleep better and help you sleep faster. So I would do those exercises for anything from three minutes. You can do a minute each up to even 10 or 15 minutes as you need it. And if you do that consistently, you'll find that you'll be a lot more relaxed in general all the time. And you don't have to do this when you're asleep. You can do this whenever you want to feel relaxed. Anytime that you want to even relieve stress or you're feeling anxious or you're feeling like you need to relax, and calm and center yourself. Those are some exercises you can do that will help you do that. And yes, we're giving away these free DVDs, Ancient Qigong Secrets for Mind and Body. All you need to do to enter the contest is to subscribe to this channel, click the notification bell to get notifications of all the new lessons and comment in the comment section and like this video and you'll be entered into the draw. Every week we're giving away a free DVD. So good luck.