Opening
≈ 3 min
Breath and Light. Settling and arriving.
A practice for the anxious hours, the restless nights, and the distress that can come when a dose wears off — a way of meeting the hard moments differently, not a way of making them disappear.
Parkinson's carries more than movement. Many people live with anxiety, with the low grey pull of a difficult day, with sleep that won't settle, and with the particular distress of an "off" period — those stretches when medication has worn thin and the body feels least like your own.
This practice does not try to fix any of that. It offers something quieter: a familiar, repeatable place to return to when the day is loud — a way of loosening the grip of a hard moment so that it can be lived through rather than fought.
An honest word about "off" periods. This practice will not shorten an off period or change your medication cycle — those follow their own pharmacological clock, and nothing here alters it. What a settling practice can offer is a gentler way to be inside those stretches: less alarm layered on top of the physical difficulty, and a steadier place to wait from. Your medication schedule, and any changes to it, belong with your neurologist and Parkinson's nurse.
You can do this sitting or lying down, eyes open or closed, at any point in your day or night. There is nothing to perform and nothing to get right.
Guided audio, approximately 15 minutes
Audio placeholder. This narration has not been recorded yet. The finished recordings will use an ElevenLabs voice clone of Jeremy's own voice, and that will be disclosed here and on every practice page — so that you always know you're hearing a synthesised version of a real person's voice, not a stranger and not a hidden machine.
The programme follows the same four-part shape across every practice. In this one — the only non-motor practice in the set — the middle movement is handled a little differently, and it's worth knowing why before you begin.
The four movement practices in this programme — Walking Freely, Finding Flow, Steady Ground, and The Steady Hand — share a technique in their middle movement. A figure appears at a distance, is watched moving with ease, and then steps into you, so that watching becomes doing. It's a way of rehearsing an action from the inside.
This practice sets that device aside on purpose. Calm is not an action to rehearse, and there is no performance to step into. Placing a serene figure in front of you and asking you to become them can carry a quiet, unwanted message — that where you are now is wrong, and that you're falling short of some better version of yourself. On an anxious day, that's the last thing worth adding.
So instead of watching and merging, this practice simply arrives — at a place of settledness that is already yours, or that you can imagine into being, and then rests there. It's a restorative exception, and it's the more honest fit for what this practice is actually for.
The words below are the script beneath the audio — read them slowly to yourself, or read along while you listen. Every line is an invitation, never a command.
And you're here now, reading or listening. You've already taken the time to be here, which is its own small kindness, and there's nothing more you need to do to have begun.
Perhaps you're sitting. Perhaps you're lying down. Perhaps your eyes are still open, and perhaps in a moment they'll feel like closing on their own. There's no hurry in any of it — you can take this at exactly the pace that suits you.
You're breathing. You've been breathing all along, without having to think about it — the body has been quietly doing that for you the whole time. And now, if you like, you might just notice it. Not changing anything. Only noticing the breath that's already there.
And you may find, as people often do, that simply letting the breath be noticed lets it lengthen a little on its own. The out-breath, especially — long, and unhurried, like something being set down.
And somewhere — in the room, behind your eyes, or in a memory of a warm afternoon — there's a soft light and warmth. You don't have to summon it sharply. Just let it rest somewhere it's easy to rest: the shoulders, perhaps, or the hands, or the slow rise and fall of the chest.
Somewhere in you — or somewhere you can bring to mind — there's a place that is already calm. It doesn't need building. It's more like a room you already have, that's been quietly waiting, with the light already on.
It might be a real place you've been: a shoreline, a garden, a kitchen at a certain hour, a seat by a window. Or it might be nowhere in particular — just the feeling of a place where nothing is being asked of you.
And you don't have to travel to it, or earn your way in. You can simply notice that you're already there. The ground holding you. The air a comfortable temperature. The quiet not empty, but easy.
If the storm is still going on somewhere — the anxious thought, the tremor, the difficult hour — you can let it carry on at the edge of things, the way weather carries on outside a window. You don't have to make it stop to be here. You're beneath it now, in the settled place, and it can do what it does without needing your hand on it.
So you rest here for a while. Nothing to reach for. Nothing to fix. Just a person, in a calm place, breathing — which turns out to be enough.
The body has a quieting system of its own — one that doesn't need instructions, only a little space to work. As the breath slows, that system begins, gently, to answer.
There's a long nerve that runs from the base of the brain, down through the throat, past the heart, and into the belly — a kind of quiet wire threaded through the middle of you. When the out-breath lengthens, it's this pathway that carries the message inward: you can ease now. The heart slows a touch. The muscles that were braced let go a fraction. The alarm turns itself down.
You don't have to make this happen. You couldn't force it if you tried — that's rather the point of it. All you're doing is giving it room: one slow breath, and then another, each long out-breath a small signal travelling down that quiet wire, and the body, in its own time, beginning to answer back.
And whatever is difficult in the body today — the stiffness, the restlessness, the wearing-off — you're not fighting it here. You're just letting the quieting system do the one thing it knows how to do, alongside everything else that's going on.
And when you're ready — in your own time, with no signal to wait for — you can let the ordinary sounds of the room come back. The surface beneath you. The light in the space you're actually in.
You don't have to carry the whole calm out with you. Just a little of it, however much came — a slightly longer breath, a slightly looser shoulder, a sense that the settled place is still there and can be returned to whenever the day gets loud again.
There was nothing to achieve here, and nothing to get back to. You didn't fail if the storm kept going, and you didn't have to fix anything to have done this well. You met a hard moment, and you stayed with yourself through it — which is the whole of it.
And whenever you need it, the settled place will be here. It doesn't run out.
Phase II works with the parasympathetic nervous system — the body's "rest and settle" branch, carried largely by the vagus nerve. The illustration below is a placeholder only.
Two strands of research sit behind this practice, and they're not equally strong. The clearer one is for mindfulness and meditation broadly: several randomised trials in Parkinson's have found reductions in anxiety and depressive symptoms, which are among the most common and most under-treated non-motor features of the condition. That evidence is for mindfulness programmes as a category — not for this specific guided-imagery script — so it supports the idea of a settling practice more than it validates these exact words.
The second strand is thinner and more specific: a small home-based study reported that listening to relaxation guided imagery (but not to relaxing music) was associated with more daily "on" time. It's an intriguing signal, but it's small and preliminary, and it should not be read as proof that imagery increases on-time or replaces any part of medical management.
Taken together, that's why the badge reads Emerging rather than Moderate or Strong: a real and encouraging basis for offering this as a wellbeing practice, and no basis at all for promising it changes the course of the disease.
Full references — Dissanayaka et al. (mindfulness for anxiety/depression in PD), Kwok et al. (meditation RCT), and the relaxation-guided-imagery / "on"-time work — are listed on the Bibliography page.
The four-part structure used across this programme — Opening, Phase I, Phase II, Closing — is Jeremy's own synthesis, drawn from the Ericksonian and solution-oriented tradition he trained in. It has not been tested as a unified protocol in any clinical trial. The individual ingredients (imagery, breath work, relaxation) have research behind them, as noted above; the particular way they're combined here is a considered personal design, offered in good faith, not a validated treatment.
Please treat this as a complement to your care, never a replacement for it. Guided imagery sits alongside medication, physiotherapy, speech therapy, and the guidance of your Parkinson's team — it does not stand in for any of them.