Relax

“Relaxation is a hot product in the dimension of 3rd millennium human. We watch violence and stress in movies to let the body relax… We burn with ambition, seek to become someone other than who we are, strive to possess, control, convert or educate one another and work endlessly to keep our imagined enemies at bay – so that we can relax – later. What happens when we actually begin to relax?... Every experiential journey into the depths of who we are begins, continues and ends with relaxation… Relaxation is about surrender, about softening and opening. It’s about an agreement to be here, in physical form. Yet the first symptom of increasing relaxation is often pain…Yet we are more than just bodies. We are also composed of energetic contractions of feelings and emotions… It is only through relaxing equally into the areas of comfort and discomfort that the unfolding of the psyche can take place – telling its woes, signaling its pain, and moving still deeper to rest. The degree to which we are able to relax through the body is an unbounded, direct route to universal peace. Here are four pointers to deepening the art of relaxation:

1.Don’t Delay Relaxation. Now is the time to relax, because there is simply no other time…We’re programmed to believe in crude either-or fixtures. When there is anger, we can’t relax; while we’re in debt, we can’t relax… This dualistic notion of relaxation is building an inner bomb of stress, which if it can’t explode will start to solidify in layers of deep depression. Relaxation is a practice that can happen each and every time you experience anything. Warm wind on the face, relax the body…Someone is screaming at you? Relax within the screaming…Relaxation is possible together with every single moment of experience. We only lose it because of the way we’re programmed. Home comes with us everywhere. We never need throw ourselves out.

2.You’re breathing anyway, so relax in it. The breath is a wonderful barometer of our state of stress and distress…By bringing our attention to the flow of our breathing – together with whatever else is happening in any moment – we are signaling to our breathing that it is possible to relax (because someone is home). The art is not necessarily to interfere with our breathing (however disturbed it is), but to notice it. Then, to push just a little bit more on the outbreath…When we blow out the exhale, allowing the inhale to take care of itself, the breath will gradually regulate to increasing naturalness. What’s genius about this practice of perpetual mindfulness throughout our day-to-day life is that the more we practice it, the more it gets built in to our system… It even continues during the periods of our sleep – which is the period of deepest relaxation when all our systems get refreshed, healed and rejuvenated.

3.Don’t get distracted by pain. When we have been for a while in stress of depression, we have built a habit of avoiding any kind of suffering out of deep aversion to the greater suffering of trauma…The key to relaxation is that it is primarily a relaxation out of the programs of mind… When we are walking through a depression for example, and meet that sense of depression even in the space where our feet touch the earth, the challenge is to relax with softness and curiosity into the pain and discomfort of that. When our body is swept with tiredness, relax into the sensation of tiredness. This relaxation into the suffering of what is, means we open more deeply, into the perception of what else is here: a humming bird; the life in the grass, the clouds patterning the sky.

4.Agree to relax beyond the separate self. The belief in a separate self … is at source of most of our stress, depression, anxiety and rage… Respect our own borders (and those of others), but allow a relaxation beyond them. The border remains, but the relaxation continues, from the ground up. It is a terrible fallacy about the nature of boundaries that we believe that they should bind the limits of our perception and in this, justify a constant renewal of stress. The strongest boundary we can put between ourselves and others is one founded in the core of our own physical relaxation. As long as this relaxation is allowed as a continuum, we even get the freedom to adjust our boundaries according to need, if and when we choose.

Relaxation is the greatest gift we can give ourselves, and the greatest gift we can offer the world…Try it. We’d love to hear how it goes.”

by Georgi Y. Johnson

http://perception.inner-growth.org/georgi-bart/