our body and psyche are relaxed, we will be in a state of balance, and that balance means health. If we are deeply relaxed, our body’s natural tendency will re-create health for us—true, deep, meaningful health, including a healthy body.
The first step, the starting point that we can readily appreciate and learn, is to lead the body into deep relaxation. Relieving emotional and mental stress is hard to begin with, as causes of anxiety are difficult to isolate and often difficult to treat using conventional means. However, if we relax the body, that reflex produces relaxation of emotions and mind.
Mental anxiety, stress and physical tension are intricately connected and interdependent. They are all disease-producing factors. However, truly break that connection at any one point and relaxation spreads all through. Healing begins.
Pause to consider a cat. A lithe, graceful cat. Watch it on the move. It moves with an ease and smoothness that is a joy to watch. In slow motion it is a sight to behold. Yet, if it has to react in a hurry, it can—in an instant. It will pounce in a flash, or turn and run with amazing speed. So too, it will often stop, consider a situation at length and then go on with its business. Concentration and relaxation are mutually supportive. All so easy, so relaxed. This, to me, shows what relaxation is all about. It is being physically relaxed and so being free to make an appropriate response.
If we are relaxed we react appropriately. We do not rush into things and overreact; neither are we sluggish and unable to take appropriate action. What we do is simply appropriate.
There is no need to avoid the problems of everyday life. Life should have challenges and a zest of endeavor. Such challenges become causes for stress only when we do not handle them appropriately.
If we do not react to challenges well, tension and anxiety cloud our normal processes. They interfere with judgment and reactions, so that responses become inappropriate. If our mind is confused or anxious, we have great difficulty thinking clearly and are highly likely to make poor decisions. However, the more relaxed our being, the more calm and clear is our mind, the more likely we are to make good choices and to do the appropriate thing.
Common Forms of Relaxation
Where then, do we find this relaxation? Some of the common ways we relax in a healthy way are through sleep, exercise, hobbies and holidays. All have their place.
Sleep
Sleep is an excellent way of dealing with acute stress. Even sleep imposed by drugs will often provide the time and space necessary for adjusting to and dealing with a major, temporary stress. We certainly need a regular amount of natural sleep to avoid fatigue and added stress.
As an aside, here is an important tip. We can significantly improve the quality of our sleep by doing our relaxation exercises when we go to bed. When you get into bed at night, spend five minutes, perhaps ten, doing your relaxation. This is important. If you have muscular tension when you get into bed, your body is like a spring and you will spend half the night unwinding. Researchers have observed people sleeping and documented the muscles of tense people struggling to unwind. In a series of jerks and twists, the body tries to get itself relaxed. For some people this can take most of the night and so they wake up without having much profitable relaxed sleep. So do spend a few minutes before you go to sleep and practice the progressive muscle relaxation exercise. As you get that good relaxed feeling all through, you will find that you can put yourself to sleep. You could well find that you need less sleep than you used to, as well as waking feeling the better for it.
In chronic stress situations, however, while sleep may provide some relief, it changes very little. We wake up with the same problems and responses that accompanied us to sleep. We need to look further.
Exercise
Exercise is well worth considering. In the right amounts, it helps to relax physical tension by tiring the muscles and so creating a natural form of relaxation. Also, it certainly invigorates and makes the body feel better, as well as being well proven to relieve depression, promote well-being and aid the healing process generally. Exercise warrants being a feature of our healing program and more detail on the best forms of exercise for recovery comes in the next chapter.
Hobbies and Holidays
These can be very pleasant diversions. They also provide an opportunity to relax, to release and to let go a little. They can certainly aid our general level of well-being. They are well worth considering, but frequently they produce little change in our overall situation.
Meditation and Deep Relaxation
The practice of meditation has the potential to produce the most profound and effective levels of deep relaxation. Another reason the specific meditation technique we recommend for healing works so well is that it starts with deep physical relaxation. Then, relaxing the mind enhances the effect.
However, let us be clear about this. While meditating once or even three times a day is clearly beneficial, if we get up from our meditation and spend the rest of the day just as tense and uptight as ever, the benefits will be relatively small. What we need is to take the relaxation, along with the calm and clear mind, from the meditation into our daily life.
This is most important. The relaxation we feel during our formal meditation periods needs to become a way of life for us. We need to aim to be as relaxed as possible because except when we are faced with an immediate threat, relaxation is our hallmark of the balance we seek.
This is not to say we will be sluggish or lethargic. On the contrary, we will react quickly and be sharp and alert but, like the cat, be relaxed at the same time. There are a number of ways to achieve this.
Integrating Relaxation into Daily Life
The Automatic Flow-On Effect
As you begin meditating, you will notice the calm you feel during your formal sessions of practice remains with you for a short while after. Meditating regularly in this way throughout the day enhances this effect, so that one session’s benefits soon begin to flow on to the next. This is why it is useful to spread a number of meditation sessions throughout the day. While initially you will seem to have good and bad sessions, soon you will notice a cumulative effect that means you get more benefit from each experience of meditation.
This effect can be increased still further by improving the quality of the meditation and by becoming more aware of relaxation throughout the day.
Speeding Up the Process of Relaxation
Initially, as we learn to relax and meditate, the progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) is a very helpful technique. Using the physical act of contracting muscles and letting them go leads to a very reliable experience of relaxation and helps us to appreciate what it feels like to be deeply relaxed. But we can then progress and learn to relax more quickly and, in fact, more deeply. Here is how we do it.
The next step is to experience the same level of relaxation we did through using the full PMR, only this time we do so without physically contracting the muscles. We simplify and speed up the process. So now, we focus our attention on the muscles in each area of the body, and using the same sequence as we did with the PMR, this time we feel those muscles relaxing without having contracted them first. Once we have mastered this step and can feel that same deeply relaxed body we felt with the first technique, we go even further.
Now we learn to relax the legs as one unit, rather than the feet, then the calves and the thighs. We learn to relax the torso as another “block,” and then the head and neck. Ultimately, it is like we can sit to meditate, bring our attention to our bodies, and, almost like throwing a switch, feel the whole body
