Do you know how to relax? Do you know where to start? The answer lies in your body. Relax your body and your mind relaxes on its own. This is not to suggest collapsing on the floor, though – this is about relaxing every nerve and sinew as you dance. To achieve this most effectively, pay attention to the following tension build-up points, for by mentally releasing the tension accrued at these points, the whole body, and hence the mind, will relax.
Relax your solar plexus – the upper abdominal area, that houses your diaphragm; the muscle that makes your lungs work. Because this is where you process your emotions, it tends to become stuck and rigid through the inevitable residual build-up of emotional toxins and unprocessed pain and trauma we all accrue, which in turn causes blocking in the breathing pattern. As breathing freely is the major key to relaxing, it pays to remain mindful at all times of keeping this area relaxed enough to feel the sun shining in it all the time, even on the darkest day – hence solar plexus.
We describe controlling, rigid people as anal or tight-arsed for this very reason. The fear of the messy, chaotic underbelly of life that leads a person to feel the compulsion to attempt to control reality, to batten down the hatches, naturally causes the anal sphincter muscles to contract and remain in a permanent state of contraction. As well as being unhealthy for the bowels, because the tension is transmitted throughout the intestines and stomach, this also causes the entire pelvic region to grow rigid. When your hips are stiff it’s impossible to dance well and Dinner Lady (or Dinner Man) will be leading you off the dancefloor in no time. So let go of the tension here and feel your hips relax; and as your hips relax, notice that release spread up through your belly and back and down your thighs all the way to your toes.
relax your body and your mind relaxes on its own.
Relax the back of your neck. Being stiff in the back of the neck and shoulder girdle also arises from trying to control life with your brain, hence why we also describe controlling people as stiffnecked. When you allow the back of your neck to soften and lengthen, your whole shoulder girdle and upper back relaxes and the blood flows to your brain better, which brightens up your thoughts and increases the sharpness of sensory input through eyes, ears, nose and mouth.
Relax your face. Because your face is the part of you that literally faces the world most, it accrues tension without you noticing – all those smiles held for too long, all those frowns – and that tension uses up precious energy that should be flowing throughout your body instead. Just allow all the expression to dissolve from your features; allow yourself to look like a simpleton and you’ll feel the tension drain from the brain, through your throat and down the front of your body.
relax your anal sphincter muscles. rude to mention it in polite company perhaps, but important.
Finally, relax your chest. One of the finest compliments you can pay someone is to call them open-hearted and full of love. Everyone loves people like that, no less so our Universal Dinner Lady. You may think open-heartedness is something you’re either born with or not but that’s not true. Open-heartedness simply comes from having a relaxed chest. Not only that, the reduced pressure on the blood vessels connected to the heart and lungs helps you live longer so you have more time to perfect your moves on the dancefloor and hence manifest more. So let go of the tension in your chest now and feel the release radiate down your arms into your hands to generally make you more dextrous and hence able to handle life more effectively.
Obviously doing it just this once, though a fine and beneficial experience, is not going to be that useful in the long-term. To gain any long-term benefit, long-term enough to get some serious dancing done, you will need to continue repeating the practice pretty much all the time from now on till you die, while you work, rest or play.
one of the finest compliments you can pay someone is to call them open-hearted and full of love. everyone loves people like that.
What you may or may not have noticed then was the flow of awareness from solar plexus, down to the groin, up the back to the back of the neck, over the head to the face and down through the throat and chest. This route is known as the ‘microcosmic orbit’ or loop. Moving your mind round it in an upward direction along the spine, over the head and in a downward direction down the midline of the front of the body, which in turn causes your energy to move likewise, is one of the most powerful metaphysical tools at your disposal. It is this, in fact, that is …
the internal revolution
If you go deep enough into meditation or altered mind-states and you know what to look out for, you’ll notice, at the deepest level of your being, a flow of what the Taoists call ‘prenatal energy’ in constant motion up the back of your spine, over your head and down the midline of the front of your body. It is this flow that causes all the constituent parts of the self to hold together in a meaningful enough shape for you to recognize yourself as a discrete entity, from the most profound to the most superficial level of being. At the superficial end of the scale, all you need do to recognize yourself as an entity is to look in the mirror, but the force that holds you together in one piece in order that you may position yourself in front of the mirror in the first place is this ‘prenatal energy’. Even when you drop your body and die, say the Taoists, it will still be this flow that will hold you together in spirit form enough to recognize yourself – though of course this may be merely conjecture and does it matter anyway? However, what does matter is the huge significance of this fundamental force, which when consciously joined with lends you the manifesting power of the golden immortals (gods).
As soon as you learn to join your consciousness with it, you can manifest anything you want with ease. It would be tempting to waffle on about it for pages but it will be far more useful, from both our points of view, to get you started doing it immediately and subsequently to explain how to use it specifically for manifesting what you want. That way you can see how it works for yourself and it ceases to be merely an intellectual consideration. So, if that’s OK with you, seat yourself comfortably so your weight is fairly evenly distributed between both buttocks and your spinal column is pretty much perpendicular to the horizontal. Run a scan over the aforementioned relaxation trigger points, starting with your solar plexus, allowing your breathing to settle into a smooth, even pattern. Relax your anal sphincter muscles and pelvis, lengthen and release the back of your neck, relax your face, your throat and chest, and feel your limbs soften all the way to your fingers and toes.
Now, as you inhale, visualize, imagine; visualize yourself imagining; imagine yourself visualizing; or simply feel the breath float up your spine from between your legs, through the back of your neck and up to the crown of your head. Now exhale and feel the breath float back down the front through your face, throat, chest, solar plexus, lower abdomen and pubic bone, to end up between your legs, ready to rise up the spine again.
If at first you find it hard to get your mind round the loop in time with the breath, simply move your awareness slowly round the loop while breathing naturally. Remember, this is only a device to join your consciousness with the prenatal flow that is occuring anyway. You’re not trying to instigate
