"Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can possibly do is take a complete rest." ~ Ashleigh Brilliant Day 2: Conscious Relaxing: Opening to the present moment.
Tara: On your first day of practice, you started the process of what we call “arriving in presence.”
TALK You explored pausing and feeling the sensations of your body and becoming aware of your states of mind. Now, you might have noticed that this mindful presence is not our habitual way of being. Why is that? If you ask yourself in this moment, “What's between me and feeling happy or at ease?” just sense what comes out. And for many of us, it’s being caught in tension and stress. That’s what gets in the way of feeling at home.
When we’re preoccupied and busy, the body grows tense, and the mind becomes anxious. Thomas Merton puts it this way, “The rush and pressure of modern life are a form perhaps the most common form of contemporary violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone and everything is to succumb to the violence of our times.”
By pausing for a moment of mindful awareness, you shift from that violence into a genuinely healthy way of living. When you take time to stop the busy doing and relax your body, you find that your mind follows suit. This conscious relaxing is the next step to arriving in presence. So, let’s take a moment to consider how stress works. When we're triggered by something that seems threatening, we automatically go into fight-flight-freeze. Now, if triggers are extreme or ongoing, our nervous system becomes overloaded and locks into a continuous state of fight-flight-freeze.
What this means is that our bodies now regularly bathe in the biochemistry of stress trying to protect us from perceived dangers and our muscles are chronically tensed. You might imagine making a fist and having to keep on clenching it. You'd soon find that it would take more and more energy just to sustain that tightness. It’s exhausting to be in a continual state of stress, and it undermines the quality of our daily life. As poet John O’Donohue put it, “We're so busy managing our lives that we cover over this great mystery we're involved in.” As you know, stress also can diminish your health and shorten your life. Research shows that mindfulness practice lowers the stress hormone cortisol, helps prevent inflammation, and lowers the risk of depression and heart disease.
So, we can either be caught in stress or learn how to pause, relax our body, and begin to come home to our natural presence. The first step in relaxing is to notice our tension, our habitual suit of armor. Releasing this not just opens our body but our intelligence and empathy.
A friend who teaches pre-school told me how when a child became emotionally agitated and started acting out, she’d find herself raising her voice and using threats to try to gain control. After practicing mindfulness, her tolerance grew, and she found she could remain calm and relaxed with a child who is having a meltdown. And then, when the child could begin settling, she’d look him or her in the eye and say, “Oh, there you are.’’ Relaxing is not another doing, it’s an untangling; a resolving of tension.
One Indian yoga teacher was asked by a student, “Do I have to become Hindu to practice this yoga you teach?” and his response was, “I’m not a Hindu, I'm an un-do.” That’s what happens with conscious relaxing. We undo. Relaxing happens naturally as we bring a gentle awareness to the areas of tension in our body.
PRACTICE We’ll explore this now as we move into our second practice period. To begin our practice of conscious relaxing, settle into a comfortable posture; ideally sitting in a way that allows you to be alert and also at ease. Gently close your eyes, allowing your attention to go inward, and set your intention right from the start for a relaxed presence. As you come into stillness, let your attention rest in the breath. Let’s take a deep in-breath now, filling the chest, filling the lungs. And then slowly release - sensing a relaxing and letting go.
Now, as the breath resumes in a natural rhythm, sense that you can continue to relax with the inflow and the outflow of the breath.
Feel your body breathing, your body sitting here. Notice contact points, the pressure, and warmth where your bottom contacts the chair, the sensation of your feet on the ground. And feel that secure connection, that groundedness, that you're resting on the earth.
Now, bring a relaxed attention to your eyes and allow them to soften, letting the brows smooth and relax. Allow your jaw to be unhinged and relax the root of your tongue. You might sense a small but real smile at the lips and a smile inside the mouth. Bring your awareness inside your shoulders and let them go. You might imagine this like ice dissolving in water - and water to gas; ice to water - water to gas.
Let the hands rest in an easy, effortless way - and soften them. As you soften, you might see if you can feel your hands from the inside out - noticing the sensations - tingling, pulsing. Maybe more. Let your chest be open, feeling the sensations in the heart area - softening - letting go. Allow the belly to be loose and relaxed. You might see if you can receive your next breath in a softening belly. This breath - and now this one - and again. Relax through the entire pelvic region, releasing any holding or tightness - relaxing down through the legs, the feet. Now, open to feeling the body all at once as a field of sensation.
Sense your own calm open presence, feeling the gentle movement of the breath, witnessing the changing dance of aliveness.
If your attention becomes distracted, you notice that gently you return; come back to this feeling of aliveness in the body, a relaxed, present attention. Often when the mind wanders, the body tenses up. As you arrive back right here, you might re-relax. You can start fresh in any moment, consciously relaxing again, letting go in the shoulders - softening the hands - loosening the belly - arriving again in a calm presence - feeling the moment-to-moment experience of life living through you.
