Relaxation is a necessary beginning!

Why do relaxation?

Well, it’s a precursor to meditation. It also helps to achieve a state of mindfulness. Is it actually necessary? Can we not just go straight into deep meditation by just doing the directly meditation related practices?

I used to go to a Buddhist meditation group where prior to sitting in the meditation room, we did a relaxation exercise together. We also used a body scan technique. The idea was to calm down the thoughts, emotions, and attention in order to dilute anxiety and stress.

Relaxation though is not about stopping any of this anxiety or stress or tension, and we don’t need to do this either. Stress. and Anxiety are quite normal.

When we were cavemen or women, we needed the anxiety and fear,as we needed to be worried about survival from the wild animals and aggressive other humans. We carried on with this fight or flight normality into a current day techno-heavy life.

However, now we may not need to feel the same way, as you don’t need lots of tension or anxiety which becomes negative to our body/mind well-being. The emotions/thoughts often just double up the actual problem the caused them in the first place. Again, we are not removing anything – yet. Just managing by dilution and defusion. (Relaxation is initially the diluting).

So we have to learn to relax as we have to learn to move down into a whole body experience, to calm all the tension and stress/anxiety that we are carrying unnecessarily,  and which prevents us from moving to a mindfulness or meditative state. (Mindfulness is the Defusion).

The Body Scan part is where we sit and move through the body with a visualization and an activity. This is to tense and then relax muscles, starting at our feet and moving up to the face and the head. We are tensing and then relaxing muscles as we do this following the guided instruction and pace. This was a group where we had a leader who read out the guide to taker us through that body scan, which was helpful. In this case you will be doing it yourself, but you could access something online that you can follow.

Diffusion is spreading out the anxiety, tension and stress. Not into the whole body/mind or especially the nervous system, as in the relaxation process. Its getting the negative, irritating, or unhelpful experience to go around the body into an area that is somewhat separate. Like into an aura or sponge, or an area contained within a shield. (More about shields soon). Not completely separated, because again we are not getting rid of anything. You’re just simply getting into a mindful pose/position. You can see what’s going on and allow what’s going on to be present, without the over stimulation and reactivity of attention, which is causing stress and anxiety. You become the witness of it all. You see it, but you have less direct ownership. Then you can also better understand what is going in your reactivity, emotions, thoughts and experience. (There are exercises using metaphors to enhance this). I do however seek to direct the activity descriptions here towards a spiritually related purpose. Its gearing up for Self-Realisation. Not management of depression or anxiety. (For instance). Otherwise we are just using some basic therapeutic techniques.

Going back to that Buddhist group, I found that when I participated in the pre-meditation exercise, then I could attain a mindfulness status. Then I could, in the meditation room, go straight into mindlessness!

Then I was meditating properly as is necessary for the Self-Realisation process.

I have outlined and discussed in a recent previous blogs, (no 22). the steps leading to relaxation that lead into diffusion, but I will refresh some of the elements next, and turn to defusion also.