Chapter 2 - How to Relax

 

Relaxing your muscles may not be easy.  In the same way as you get accustomed to the smell of garlic on your breath and no longer notice it, your mind can filter out sensations such as the way your body feels right now.  It can also do this with chronic tension and pain, even pain too intense for you to stand.  In fact, chronic tension hurts a lot.  Try holding your arms out without moving them for a very long time and you’ll start to feel the tension --- it’ll hurt.

 

Our subconscious minds hide chronic tension from our conscious minds.  That’s one way of keeping us from relaxing those muscles, and thus keeping us from making emotional responses or getting into emotional situations that we long-ago decided were dangerous.  So a person might have some muscles that are always tense, but they don't notice the tension because it seems natural to them.  Even though they’re not consciously aware of the tension and pain, the pain decreases the joy they feel from being alive.

 

One way to rid yourself of these tensions and pains requires you to first become aware of them. This is done by paying attention to the sensations you feel.  Bring them back to your conscious mind.  You can notice sustained tension because it hurts.  If you detect some pain/tension, you may think it’s natural or necessary --- it’s not.  Relaxed muscles feel good. 

 

It’s best to start with your head and work from there.  Start by focusing on a particular area, such as your eyes.  Take a few minutes to notice how your eyes feel.  Just feel them.  Notice all the sensations pleasant or unpleasant.  Don’t try to fix them right now.  You may notice some pain or discomfort in your eyes. 

 

Try to relax them to decrease or get rid of the pain.  It may feel “embarrassing”, “arrogant”, “uppity”, or any sort of uncomfortable feeling.  That’s your subconscious telling you that you’re doing things it considers dangerous.  That is, you’re changing your habitual ways of suppressing your natural emotions. 

 

Once you have some success in decreasing any pain you’ve found, focus on some of the nearby muscles for a few seconds, such as your forehead.  Again, relax any tense muscles as best you can.  Then go to your eyebrows for a few seconds, then the bridge of your nose for a few seconds.

 

Note that the bridge of your nose is a focal point and a pressure point where several muscle groups meet.  To relax this area, the surrounding areas must all be relaxed.  Please note:  muscles don't slam back to the relaxed position instantaneously, they take a few seconds to slowly relax.

 

Once you notice a tension, you may find that it's been tense so long that you don't know how to relax the muscle at first.  You may have to experiment by tensing and relaxing the muscle to find out which direction the relaxed position is.  This may not be easy, but you'll gradually figure out where the relaxed position is.  

 

In the early going, you'll find that the muscles you've relaxed don't stay relaxed for more than a minute or two --- sometimes only a few seconds.  As you become more conscious of them, you'll be able to relax them faster and keep them relaxed longer.  Ultimately, you can overcome the tendency to tense up.  Even after you've achieved this stage, you must remain aware of your body.  After all, you had those habits since your early childhood.  They were ingrained in your approach to dealing with the world.  They may still come back if you let them, especially if your subconscious sees what it deems a scary situation or if you are at a turning point in your life.

 

Meditation is a mental exercise which helps a person to relax.  I started meditating about 20 many years ago.  A few months after I began meditating, I noticed that my body would start to relax as soon as I started to meditate.  This was obviously a conditioned reflex, and it provided some insight into a way to improve the benefits.  So I added an additional 15 minute period after I finished meditating during which I concentrated on relaxing my muscles.  I began by first by trying to relax my eyes.  After I had relaxed them, I expanded to the muscles around my eyes, then my forehead, then my eyebrows, then the focal point at the bridge of my nose. This is a difficult area to relax, because it is a focal point of many muscles groups and many locked-in emotions.  It's very important to go in sequence, because the muscles work together.  For example, a tense muscle in your neck may give you a headache. 

 

Muscles tend to work in groups.  To be most effective in relaxing them, you should start at the eyes or top of the head.  Once you can relax the top half of your head, go the mouth and bottom half of the head.  Then the neck and the muscles of your back, where your neck connects to it.  These are critical muscles and are normally very tense. From there I proceed to my chest, beginning with upper band across the top few inches.  I then proceed down my chest to my diaphragm. I then return to the top of my head, neck, arms (hands first, then upwards from there), face, neck, esophagus down to my stomach, shoulders, back, legs (feet first, then upwards), and pelvis.

 

Note that your mouth, throat, the esophagus, and your stomach all act as a group, so relax them in that order.  When relaxing your arms or legs, start at the hand or foot and slowly work in.  This order isn’t set in stone.  If you find a particular sequence that works for you, stick with it.        

 

After the relaxation, which is 15-20 minutes, I sometimes massage my facial muscles as if to prevent wrinkles.  With my eyes closed, I also move my eyes 4 times horizontally, then 4 times vertically, and then 4 times along both diagonals.  Then I roll my eyes 3 or 4 times in a circle while visualizing a clock or circular metal bar of some kind about 30' directly above and below me, then roll my eyes 3 or 4 times the opposite way.  Don't let anyone watch, because they'll see the whites of your eyes with no pupils.  They hate that.  Lastly, when I finish, I may briefly massage my facial muscles, and perhaps my neck, arms, and legs.

 

Note that this relaxation stuff will probably take a while to get really good at.  You’ll make more & more progress along the way, but it may take months or even years to really get a handle on it.    

 

Below is some information on how your body works and ways to relax.  Using this information could make your life a lot more fun.

 

Basic Physiology. 

 

Your mind and body work as a unit.  When you feel an emotion, various muscles in your body respond.  Examples would be sadness and crying, anger and high blood pressure, nervousness and sweaty palms, etc.  The corollary is that making your muscles move in certain ways will induce corresponding emotions.  People often do this to themselves as a pattern of responses to various situations.  For example, they may tense up and make themselves nervous in anticipation of talking to an authority figure.

 

Being relaxed feels good.  For example, when you get a good massage your muscles will relax. That's why people like massages.  When your muscles relax, your mind will relax too.  If your body is working precisely as designed, the only muscles that are tense are those you're using at the time.

 

Potential Problems.

 

Many of our day-to-day physical/emotional responses are reasonable, such as being sad and crying when a relative dies.  However, some are responses we learned as children.  Now that we're adults, using the same behaviors as we did in childhood may no longer be optimum in some situations.  An example would be not crying when you're really sad (many men will hold it back).

 

The problem is that your body doesn't function as well when you divert emotions in different ways than the way nature intended (your "design specifications").  If you're angry and want to hit someone, you may tense up your arm to suppress the emotion.  This prevents the emotion from being released as designed.  The result is you don't get the emotional release your body needs to relax again.  As a child, you may have found that hitting dad was not wise, so you learned to suppress the anger.  Today, your arms may be constantly tense as a way to avoid ever feeling too much anger.  Here's the problem:  when you protect yourself against your own emotions, you not only avoid the bad emotions, you also avoid the good emotions.  Your subconscious may keep yourself in a relatively dull, unexciting emotional state as much as possible to avoid feeling emotions which your body considers dangerous.  This also prevents your body from reaching the relaxed state that is so pleasant as to be euphoric.  The result is you're not as happy as you could be.   

 

Recommendations.  

 

So, what can we do?  Well, there are lots of solutions.  The thing they all have in common is they help you relax.  Here are some recommendations.

 

Massage.  You can massage yourself or get others to do it.  There are books on massage at the library.  On many people, the back of the neck and top of the shoulders are tense (hard to the touch).  These areas and the face, particularly the forehead, are good areas to work on.

 

Learn to detect tense muscles.  When you're sitting at your desk or whatever, become conscious of what the various muscles are doing (legs, arms, eyes, face, back of neck and shoulders).  Most likely, many are tense when they could be resting.  If so, it sometimes takes a strong effort to make them relax.  At first, you may not be able to figure out how to do it because you've forgotten where the relaxed position is.  Even after you relax them, they'll have a tendency to tense up again as soon as you stop consciously relaxing.

 

Jogging.  Running distances in excess of 5 miles (40 minutes) helps.  

 

Exercise.  Things like Yoga and various exercises designed to loosen up your muscles can be very beneficial. 

 

Study the Alexander Technique (books at the library).  It points out bad habits many people have in using their musculature and proper ways to use your muscles.

 

Attitude.   There's a story about three beggars.  One had a bowl of rice; the other two each had half a bowl.  The one with the full bowl was happy.  One of the beggars with half a bowl was upset because the first beggar had more than him.  The other beggar with half a bowl was happy because he had half a bowl.  

 

There's a really important point about attitudes and happiness here.  You'll be happy if you appreciate what you have, rather than resent or regret what you could have.  It's a simple attitude adjustment.  It will take you less than five minutes to reorient your thinking to this method.  The shock is, it works and it's as real as any of the things that make you happy.  Just concentrate on all the good things you have. The key phrase here is "Accentuate the Positive".  This works and can change your life.  (The old phrase "Every cloud has a silver lining." is along the same lines.  It’s completely true, although many people choose to focus on negative aspects, rather than accept the positive aspects. )