THE SELF-MANAGEMENT OF ANXIETY: HOW TO DO THE EXERCISES-ACHIEVING RELAXATION OF THE BODY
Posted on April 29, 2009, under Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid.
We sit in an armchair or we lie down on a couch flat on our back. Our eyes are comfortably closed. We think to ourselves:
It is good to relax.
Relaxing is natural.
It is the natural way to calm and ease.
Achieving Relaxation of the Body-We bring our body into relaxation by allowing the tension to go from our muscles. When we are in normal health there is always a certain degree of muscle tension. This is necessary to prevent our limbs flopping about in uncontrolled fashion and straining the joints. But when we are tense and anxious, this normal tension of the muscles is increased. So we start the relaxation by allowing our muscles to let go. As we do this we keep ourselves aware of the relaxation. In fact this conscious awareness of the relaxed and easy feeling is a very important part of all our exercises.
It is best to start with the big muscles of the thighs and arms because it is easiest to feel the relaxation in them.
You can test this now, as you are sitting reading this book. Just let your hand rest on your thigh. Now go to straighten your leg, but do not move it. With your hand you will feel the muscles of your thigh contract. Then you allow the muscles to let go, and with your hand you feel them relax. Now do the same thing without your hand on your thigh. You are still aware of the muscles first contracting and then letting go. Sometimes, just at first, it is hard to capture this feeling of letting go. But if you do this two or three times you will soon come to feel it.
We can now start on our exercises. We present these ideas to our mind:
We think of our legs, the muscles of our legs.—We allow them to let go.—We can feel them relax.—We really feel it.—The muscles of our legs let go.—They let go so that all we feel of our legs is the weight of them on the floor.—They are heavy and comfortable—the natural weight of our legs.—We feel this easy comfortable relaxation come all through us.—We feel it in our body.—Our arms are heavy on the side of the chair.—They are so relaxed we just feel the weight of them.—The natural weight of them.—Natural.—It is all natural.—Natural to let ourselves relax, and our mind learns to be calm and at ease again.—We feel the relaxation more and more.—It grows on us.—Our arms are so relaxed they hardly seem to belong to us.—Our whole body is relaxed.—We feel ourselves sitting in the chair.—Sinking into the chair.—We feel it in the face.—The muscles of our face relax with it.—Our jaw is loose.—It is so relaxed, so loose that our lips part.—We feel it in the muscles around our eyes.—We feel the muscles of our face smooth out with the relaxation.—It is in our forehead.—At the sides of our forehead, we feel it there deeply.
These are ideas which we present to our mind. We do not just say them over, or repeat the thoughts to ourselves. It is much more than that. These ideas all concern feeling. We have the idea in our mind, and at the same time we bring ourselves to experience the appropriate feeling. This is something very different from reading a paragraph and understanding it. Our exercises do not involve the critical faculties of our intellect. In the exercises it is a matter of presenting the idea to the mind, of receiving it, and experiencing it. We in fact experience both the feeling and the act. Thus the muscles of our legs let go, and we feel them let go. But the relationship of the act and the feeling is more complicated than this. For instance, the opposite is also true. We feel relaxed, and we are relaxed. Here the sensation precedes the act. What we aim for is an integrated experience in feeling and doing. Expressed like this, it would seem to be something difficult, and hard to attain. But it is not. It is natural and easy. Feeling and doing in this context are essentially simple and primitive. It is intellectual criticism of ideas which is complicated, and this has no part at all in our exercises. We merely have the simple idea in our mind; then we experience the simple feeling and the simple act that goes with it. We have the idea of our muscles relaxing. Then we experience it—really experience it—without the intervention of critical thought.
We need to repeat this exercise a number of times, and the feeling of relaxation becomes more and more a reality. But in repeating it—remember—there is no hurry, no rush; the whole thing is leisurely, easy, natural.
The sequence of the parts of the exercise follow quite naturally, so that they are easy enough to remember: the relaxation of the legs, the body, the arms, the face and the different parts of the face.
Remember that it does not all come at once. If at first you can capture just some of the feelings, the others will soon follow. Try to experience the sensation of weight in the legs as the muscles relax and let go, so that the legs seem heavy on the floor. The feeling of the face smoothing out as the facial muscles relax is another part of the exercise which comes quite easily. This is felt in the relaxation of the muscles around the eyes, and is enhanced by the letting go of the muscles of the jaw and the parting of the lips.
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