Have you ever had the experience of going to consult a doctor only to be told, after he has made his diagnosis of your physical ills: "... But your main trouble is that you are much too tense. Stop driving yourself so. Try to rest more. Try to get more sleep. Relax! Deep relaxation!Let down a little ...

But if you point out to him that your nerves will not let you unwind, that when you go to bed and turn the lights out sleep will not come, that you wake in the morning as tense and weary as when finally you did drift off, the best he can do for you is to offer you a crutch. Probably a bundle of nerves himself, he will prescribe sleeping pills or tranquilizers, long walks, or a glass of warm milk at night. What he will not say, simply because he doesn't think along these lines himself, is that deep relaxation may be learned and that in learning it you begin to cope successfully with both your physical and emotional problems.

There can be no physical deep relaxation without the mental; no mental deep relaxation without the physical. This becomes self-evident as soon as you stop to think that every movement, no matter how slight, involves a nerve impulse, while every nerve impulse brings on some muscular contraction, voluntary or involuntary. If you stretch out to rest with your mind churn­ing, for instance, you will find yourself tossing restlessly; then if you force yourself to lie still, you will feel your neck muscles tensing or realize suddenly that you are clenching your teeth.

When people say they feel like crying with sheer fatigue, they mean just that: physically, they have reached a point where the only release for their weariness is an emotional purge. Afterwards, of course, they will end up completely exhausted, for nothing eats up one's energy like letting the emotions have full play.

Most of us are spendthrifts of our energy resources. We dissipate them twenty-four hours a day. Just watch yourself and the people around you. Can you sit still, quiet and at ease, for ten or even five minutes? Can you make deep relaxation? Or do you fidget, shift about, cross and re-cross your legs, drum with your fingers on the arm of your chair, rub your neck, bite your lips? In a roomful of people, is there even one who is without nervous habits? If so, he is a happy exception. Nor, mind you, does this apply to "busy-busy" persons alone. It is perfectly possible to spend a quiet day with nothing in the least urgent to do and still eat one's self up with tension. In fact boredom itself is an enemy in this respect. Think how many people with easy, routine jobs complain of being "dead tired" by the end of the day. And who of us hasn't said, at one time or another, "I haven't done a thing all day, but I'm beat."?
Unlike modern machinery, the human body was never made to cope with the stresses and strains of our civilization, with the tempo at which we live. From the moment an alarm wakes us in the morning, we begin a race with time. In order to get to work, we cover miles by car, train, bus or subway. We grab lunch in a hurry. All day long we are up against noise and pressure. And evenings are not much better, what with radio, TV, the telephone, do-it-yourself chores around the house. Moreover, the whole world around us has shrunk and is moving at an infinitely faster pace in this atomic age when planes and rockets have linked the continents and space travel is the reality of tomorrow.

At the same time an alarming barrage of illnesses termed psychogenic and psychosomatic—that is, originating in the psyche or mind—is bedevilling twentieth-century man. To mention only a few, ulcers and colitis—notorious disturbances of nervous origin and both relatively rare a generation ago— are becoming more and more frequent. Heart disease is taking an ever heavier toll of relatively young people, especially those working at high-power jobs and living on their nerves.

This is by no means coincidental. There is a direct correla­tion between the ills of our world and the ills of our body. Even those of us who have little taste for living at breakneck speed cannot completely escape the effects of the speed-up, for no man is an island and the bell tolls for all of us. So we fall heir to the minor ills of the age—nervous fatigue, nervous indiges­tion, sleep that leaves us un-refreshed, strain, irritability—all of them fertile soil for trouble later on. Yet the doctors, who understand so well where all this may lead and who can explain in principle the dangers of tensions, can suggest no better remedy than for you to "change your ways." How you are to accomplish this is, to use the popular phrase, your own deep relaxation problem.

Before we go on to a discussion of the actual techniques of Deep Relaxation, let us consider for a moment what relaxation is not. In the first place, deep relaxation is not play. Nor is it a change of pace or of occupation. Play and change are fine, of course. They do help, they are a step in the right direction. But they are not the real thing.

Thus the tired businessman out for a day of golf, the home gardener, the knitter, the Sunday painter, are all people who indulge in pleasant hobbies in order to get away from other routines, but they are merely substituting one form of activity for another. The same holds true for the avid reader, the Hi-Fi enthusiast, the TV fan. Each finds a degree of respite in doing what he enjoys, but each remains occupied. The mind keeps ticking away, the muscles remain at work. Even listening to music with the eyes closed requires a certain expenditure of energy! Very definitely, recreation cannot be considered true, complete deep relaxation .

Quite possibly one reason why we Americans find it so diffi­cult to take time out for "doing nothing" is that for genera­tions it has been drilled into us that idleness was a cardinal sin. Our Puritan ancestors were firmly convinced that not a mo­ment of the waking day must be wasted, for didn't the devil provide work for idle fingers? So if you have a hangover of childhood guilt on the subject, here is an idea worth exploring: Consider how much more alert you become after a few min­utes of true relaxation—how much more you are able to ac­complish in your working time as well as your playtime, if you bring to it a free, clear, deeply rested mind. If you learn to rest, you can work that much better.

Once in a rare while someone does stumble on the secret of deep relaxation without being taught. Napoleon is said to have been a master of deep relaxation; he could actually sleep on horseback, with his eyes open—which simply meant he could withdraw from his surroundings and relax at will. Five or ten minutes later he could rouse himself, as refreshed as if he had slept for hours. Consequently he was tireless and got along on no more than four or five hours' actual sleep a night.

Franklin D. Roosevelt had that same capacity. Churchill has deep relaxation capacity. During the most trying war years, when there was no time for rest, both of these men would switch off their energy at its source, give it a chance to replenish itself—and the whole world became the gainer. Most of us are not so skillful. Ani­mals, on the other hand, possess the secret of complete relax­ation from the day they are born. Not even contact with civilized man causes them to lose it.

As we have already mentioned, the Yogis, observing this difference between man and beast, began thousands of years ago to learn from it. They related the animal's total relaxation in sleep, in rest and especially during hibernation—that trance-like sleep or state of suspended animation which lasts the winter and makes it unnecessary to forage for food while none is available—to a capacity for retaining youth and vigor. Wisely they based a great many of their own deep relaxation practices on what they learned.

In fact, most of the Yoga exercises and postures, or asanas, derive from study of animal life. Many are even named for ani­mals—the Cobra pose, the Lion pose. As for Deep Relaxation, during which you will learn to "let go" as many muscles as possible and as many thoughts as possible so that both brain and body may rest to the very core of your being, this is done in the most ancient of all basic Yoga postures, Savasana, which in Sanskrit means the "Death Pose." Fortunately, however, Savasana does not relate to death; only to hibernation, which has to do with prolongation of life.
As you embark on your first Deep Relaxation exercises, try to bear in mind that the object of what you will do is to quiet your nerves and rest your body by ridding yourself of all conscious tension and contraction. Perhaps you want to overcome that lethal habit, worry. Perhaps your problem is lack of vitality, fatigue, or poor concentration. You may be wearing yourself out by remaining constantly on the go and must learn to give yourself moments of respite; or you may need the respite because you never seem to gather enough en­ergy for getting started on whatever it is you mean to do.

Tension is your big problem. Tension is the enemy of achievement. "Easy does it" is not a meaningless saying—it is a basic truth whose meaning we too often ignore. Whether you happen to be an artist hoping to paint a masterpiece, an athlete on the way toward a championship or just an average human being who would like to live to the full potential of his capa­city, you are much more likely to achieve your goal if you don't try too hard.

True, to learn to deep relax completely takes practice, and can­not be mastered in one easy lesson. But you will certainly learn how if you are willing to try. Moreover, from the very beginning, even while you are still unable to let go deep relaxation completely, you will begin to feel the benefits of what you are doing. And this, in turn, will make for more success: you will have started a benign instead of a vicious circle. Soon your nervous system will become like a complicated network of highly charged electric wires with the current turned off: no hum, no sparks, no vibrations, while the batteries that are the mainspring of energy recharge themselves.

We have mentioned that there are over four hundred muscles on each side of the human body—no fewer than twenty in the forearm alone. Most of the time we are not even conscious of using half of them. Moreover, we use them in groups and many of the small ones are beyond the range of our conscious feeling. Certainly we do not tense them consciously, nor would we know how to let go of them consciously.

And now for the actual techniques of Deep Relaxation, the step-by-step approaches:

Since routine is always helpful in acquiring good habits, do try, whenever possible, to do your deep relaxing exercises at ap­proximately the same time each day. Early morning or late evening, for instance, might be a desirable time for several reasons: Early morning deep relaxation helps insure a good, serene day; a late evening period is a good preamble to a restful night's sleep. On the other hand, you might be one of those people who need to replenish their energies at the end of the working day. In deciding what is best for you, your guide should al­ways be your own ease and comfort. Any sense of "must," of pressure, should be avoided.
Until you have become so adept at relaxing that you can, like Napoleon, shut out the world around you at any time and any place, your period of deep relaxation should be taken away from other people, in a room where you are alone, with the door closed. You will need quiet so as not to be distracted. If you are a city dweller you doubtless cannot avoid a certain amount of traffic noise, but try to control what sounds you can, since conversation, the radio, the ticking of a clock can be most distracting. Keep disturbance at a minimum.

Your clothes should be comfortable, too. In fact, the less you have on the better: Make certain you are not annoyed by a tight belt, a stiff collar, a girdle, a brassiere. Anything that might make you unduly conscious of being physically con­fined should be avoided. On the other hand you must not feel cold. Be sure there are no drafts in the room—it is impossible to relax properly while chilly.

The best possible position for deep relaxation, as you may have guessed, is the Savasana, the Death Pose. And the best place is the floor. Lie flat on your back, using a rug or folded blanket to protect yourself from the cold boards. If for some reason it is impossible for you to use the floor, then choose a hard bed, preferably one with a bed board. A soft bed will never be completely satisfactory, for as it sags under your weight, certain muscles will inevitably tense up. Moreover, a soft bed might lull you to sleep, and sleep is not what you are after at the moment.

You will probably not feel entirely comfortable when you first try lying like this: The floor will feel too hard, you will find yourself tempted to shift positions. But this you must not do, for in order to relax muscle by muscle it is important to lie quite still. Just remember that every body movement, every shift, however slight, means a tensing of one or another group of muscles. To avoid this, make sure that you are lying com­fortably, with your weight fairly evenly distributed.

Once settled, take a few deep breaths from the diaphragm, as you have learned in the previous chapter; then allow your­self to breathe normally again. The next step is to get ac­quainted with the feel of your muscles so that you may better control them. Pretend you have just swallowed a tracer sub­stance, and that your muscles are channels through which you are watching it flow.
Now send an order along one of these channels. Move an arm, stretch a leg. Stretch hard, making all the muscles along the way contract—and study what is happening. You will feel muscles quite far removed from the area with which you are experimenting contract in sympathy. If you clench your fist, for instance, you will feel contractions all the way up your arm and into your shoulder. If you flex your toes, ripples of movement will tense the muscles of your thigh.

Now hold the stretch a moment, while you trace your sen­sations in detail. Memorize them: next time you give your arm an order, you will be able to check whether or not it is being followed. And now let go. Repeat the process limb by limb, until you have a nodding acquaintance with the various groups of muscles through your body.

Now start the stretching all over again, but this time in slow motion. Build the stretch up, slowly, like a cat arching its back. In the meantime let that imaginary tracer substance show you, as clearly as possible, every muscle you have put into play. Observe and note your sensations for future reference. Hold the pose until you are thoroughly aware of what is hap­pening. Then, once more in slow motion, let go.

It is this letting-go process that is the actual mechanism of true deep relaxation. Think of yourself as a puppet without any strings to hold it up any longer—could anything be more limp? That is the stage you are trying to reach—relaxation so complete that you lose all feeling of alertness. This is your deep relaxation goal.

As has already been said, you are not likely to achieve such a state on your first attempt, nor even the second. Most people make better progress in the end if, instead of trying to relax the entire body at once, they concentrate on some one part. Start, for instance, with an arm. Pretend it is a length of old rope. Let the shoulder fall inert, heavy, on the floor. Let the rest follow, all the way down the arm, until inertia has traveled through elbow, forearm, wrist and palm and the fingers feel like the rope's limp, raveled ends.

After you have done this deep relaxation exercise several times, start concentrating on your legs. See if you can make your neck and spine feel like so much jelly. After a while relaxation will become a habit and you will no longer need to think of specific areas; you will have learned to relax the entire body as a coordinated unit. When that time comes, you will have learned to rest as you have never rested in your whole life; you will discover a totally new sense of well-being, alertness and serenity.

Once you have mastered the basic approaches, you will start developing a definite sequence, a routine for deep relaxation. It has been found that the most effective way to relax is to begin at the top and work down: Relax the head first— let go the face muscles, the jaw muscles, the eyeballs, the lips, the tongue. Pretend a slow current of water is flowing through you, cleansing your body of tension. Let it flow through your neck, down the shoulders into the arms, down the chest into the abdomen, down your spine and through your buttocks, your thighs, knees, calves and into your legs, trickling out finally through your toes. In the end, your body will have no more tone than the body of a rag doll.

But even after you have grown quite adept at doing all this, you will discover from time to time that muscle-groups are tensing up once more or that you simply have passed some by. They must be relaxed again, of course. Moreover, after you first feel yourself relax all over, you will find you are capable of repeating the process on a deeper level—it is as though you had walked into a very quiet, deep forest, rested awhile, then walked on to where the trees are denser still and the silence deeper. In the end you will be on the very verge of drowsi­ness, of total inertia, your mind virtually at a standstill. When you have reached that stage, you will be resting in every cell of your body.

Students usually ask how long the daily period of deep relaxation should last. There can be no hard and fast rule for this, especially since time-span varies with quality: the deeper the degree of relaxation, the more benefit you derive from it and the less time you need. At first plan on fifteen minutes or even half an hour a day. Later on you will find even a ten-minute period beneficial. You will also discover that a few minutes' deep relaxation just as you are on the verge of getting tired but are not yet headed toward exhaustion is a wise rule. It will revitalize you, giving you second wind, whenever during the day your energies are flagging.

As for the correct time at which to terminate the deep relaxation exercise— your own body will tell you when it is ready to get back into action. Remember, however, never to get up hastily or jerkily, or you will be undoing the benefits of the asana, The proper way to end a period of Deep Relaxation is to work your way down the muscles of the body one final time; but now you must reverse the process: Instead of relaxing, restore tone control to each muscle group. Contract or stretch it, then go on to another group until you have tensed them all. Conclude with one final, luxurious, cat-like stretch.

Much later, after these deep relaxation techniques have become automatic and you have mastered greater control of your mental proc­esses as well, you will be able to relax with people around you. You will be able to practice relaxation sitting down. And while this latter routine can never completely take the place of Deep Relaxation in the Death Pose, since no matter how comfort­ably seated you may be the very act of sitting up involves a certain amount of tension of spine and neck muscles, it still is an invaluable adjunct to resting. Once you have learned to divorce yourself at will from the world of action around you, merely sitting still a few moments with the eyes closed and the mind more or less a blank can be a wonderful weapon against nervous fatigue and exhaustion.
A great many persons make the mistake of assuming that if a period of deep relaxation is good, an equivalent amount of time spent napping must be better. As a matter of scientific fact, the opposite is true. Sleep, whether at night or during catnaps, is a fine way to rest the body. But it is the rare man or woman who relaxes thoroughly in sleep. Most of us toss and turn, and so continue tensing our muscles all night long.

Deep Relaxation, on the other hand, since it is based on im­mobility, ensures total rest. It is a conscious, willed process, controlled by the mind which, in turn, relaxes thoroughly as the muscles begin to sag. In sleep we are likely to be fatigued by the dreams which plague our subconscious, for we all do dream, whether or not we remember our dreams. But resting while awake, after having emptied the mind of worrisome thoughts, means reaching a state of true mental repose. Thus a half hour of deepest relaxation can refresh an exhausted per­son as hours of fitful sleep never would.

This is how the Yogis sum it all up:

Peaceful repose is derived in two ways: from Ananda, the bliss of sleep, which comes to everyone in a healthy state; and from Samadhi, or deep relaxation. And the difference between the two is that in the former there is a veil of ignorance, whereas in the latter there is no veil: therefore, Samadhi is superior to Ananda.

Moreover, to master Deep Relaxation is the first step to­ward the more advanced stages of Yoga practice, Concentra­tion and Meditation. And the difference between them is that in deep relaxation the mind is made passive and you allow thoughts to flow in; whereas in Concentration and Meditation the mind is made to fix upon some central point and shut out all thoughts but the one upon which the attention is turned by choice. However, these higher stages cannot be achieved without first passing through the first one.

Deep Relaxation, then, is the first step toward serenity of spirit and health of body.

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here...