relaxation

quote of the month

“It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.”
Antoine de Saint Exupéry

When he wrote these words the legendary aviator and author of the children’s classic, The Little Prince, was talking about the evolution of flying machines, but they apply equally to meditation.

One of the traditional terms for meditation is “bhāvanā” which means “cultivation,” “producing,” or “developing.” We use that term when we talk about lovingkindness meditation, for example: mettā bhāvanā. And this can give us the impression that meditation is something we do. But essentially meditation is about not doing. It’s about letting go of all effort that interferes with our well-being and that hinders our being in harmony with ourselves and others.

Where we’re headed in meditation — our “goal” if you want to use that language — is a state of natural ease and awareness. Resting in natural ease and awareness is not something you can “do.” It’s something that emerges as we let go of unnecessary effort. By way of an everyday analogy, sometimes when we’re tense we unconsciously make a fist. The muscles in our hands tighten, and so our hands ball up. Tightening your muscles is doing something. It’s an example of unnecessary effort. What we call “relaxing” isn’t doing something. It happens when we cease to do something that isn’t necessary and isn’t helpful. When our hand is not doing anything it is naturally open and relaxed.

Meditation involves ceasing to do things that aren’t necessary or helpful. It’s about becoming naturally open and relaxed.

Every time we let go of distracted thinking and let our awareness settle down into the body, we’re letting go of unnecessary activity that makes us unhappy. That’s what distracted thinking is: unnecessary activity that makes us unhappy.

When we let go of unnecessary thinking, we start to become happier. Happiness isn’t something we do. It’s something that starts to happen naturally when we stop pummeling the nervous system with thoughts of worrying, wanting, disliking, and doubting. When the nervous system is at rest — when we’re at peace with ourselves — we feel happy and balanced.

We often talk in terms of “bringing our awareness back” to the breathing or to the body, but actually our awareness has never left the breathing or the body. Our nervous system doesn’t stop functioning when we’re not paying attention to something. So even if we aren’t consciously aware of the body or the breathing, nerves are still carrying sensations up to the brain. This is happening in every moment. We’re never really bringing our attention back anywhere: we’re simply letting go of focusing unnecessarily on something else. As soon as you start to let go of unnecessarily and unhelpfully focusing on your thinking, sensations from the body (which are always there) are noticed. Your attention brings itself back to the body, by no longer excluding it from conscious awareness.

As we spend more time in the body, pleasant feelings of relaxation and aliveness begin to emerge. Again, this isn’t something that we do. It’s something that simply arises as the body responds to being noticed, and as we stop flooding it with stress hormones.

I’m not making the argument that we shouldn’t ever do anything in meditation. For a long time it’s inevitable that we’re going to have a feeling we’re doing something. There are times we might want to direct our thoughts — for example when we’re cultivating compassion and we direct the mind toward suffering, or when we’re cultivating appreciation and turn the mind toward things that are good.

But the more there’s a quality of allowing, the more alive and vital our meditation practice is likely to be. Allowing brings with it openness and receptivity, and those things enrich our experience; sensations and connections we hadn’t noticed before become evident, and there’s a sense of joyful discovery. The more we think in terms of “doing,” the narrower our focus becomes. And this kills joy.

So I suggest that you think less in terms of doing and more in terms of letting go and allowing. Think less in terms of “meditating” and more in terms of simply sitting and allowing what is unnecessary and unhelpful to fall away, revealing joy, beauty, and presence. And as we allow this to continue, day after day, moment after moment, we let go of everything that diminishes our wellbeing, until there is nothing more to remove.

The eyes have it

May 2, 2017

As you’re reading these words, begin to notice your breathing. Don’t change anything, just letting your body breathe naturally.

Notice where the breathing is taking place. How much of the movement is in the chest, and how much is in the abdomen?
Notice the rate of your breathing.
Notice how deep or shallow your breathing is.
Notice how you feel.

Now continue to notice these things, but with one change:

For a minute or two, stop focusing on the individual words, but relax your gaze and allow yourself to take in the whole screen, and then everything around the screen, right up to the periphery of your visual field.

Now that you’re back …

You probably noticed that when you were focusing on reading your breathing was shallower, mostly confined to the chest, and relatively fast, and that by contrast, when you were taking in the whole scene your breathing was deeper, involved the abdomen much more, and slowed down. You probably felt more relaxed, calmer, and happier compared to when your eyes were narrowly focused.

When we’re focusing our gaze narrowly, the sympathetic nervous system is active. The sympathetic nervous system is part of the autonomic nervous system that’s responsible for fight or flight. It looks for threats and prepares us for responding to them. Unfortunately we tend to have our sympathetic nervous systems active too much, flooding the body with stress hormones and finding ourselves in a chronic state of overstimulation. No sooner have we finished paying attention to one thing, we actively seek out something else to focus on. We get stuck in a hyper-vigilant and anxious cycle of sympathetic activity.

Relax our gaze prompts the parasympathetic nervous system to become more active instead. The parasympathetic is the branch of the autonomic nervous system that brings us back to calm, rest, and balance. This exercise helps us to consciously trigger a parasympathetic response so that we can break the cycle of permanent vigilance, and allow ourselves to relax.

This exercise brings about quite a rapid change. And it’s not difficult to do. It just requires changing the way we’re relating to our eyes — relaxing our gaze and letting the eyes be less tightly focused.

Now you probably can’t read or surf the internet with this mode of vision, but you can take breaks, hold conversations, attend meetings, walk down the street, or drive a vehicle.

And one other thing you can do with this relaxed gaze is to meditate. In fact, this is one way I often encourage people to go into meditation, in order to help their practice be more effective. Here’s one example, and here’s another.

One interesting thing is that the way we focus with the eyes affects how we focus with the mind. When our eyes are in sympathetic mode — narrowly focused — we’ll tend to focus on one thing with the mind. So when we’re being mindful of our breathing, then we’ll tend only to focus on one small part of the experience of breathing. This usually isn’t enough to keep the mind interested and in fact it leads to a form of sensory deprivation. And so the mind creates thoughts to fill the information vacuum.

Our narrow focus of attention, which is like a flashlight, tends to switch over to noticing thoughts, which are generally far more emotionally compelling than the physical sensations of our breathing. And so we end up in the all-too-familiar cycle of paying attention to the breathing, getting distracted repeatedly, and having to bring the flashlight of our attention back to the breathing over and over again.

When the eyes are more relaxed in meditation, we’re able to take in the whole “scene” of our breathing. This is a far richer experience, not just because there are more sensations to pay attention to, but because we can see the connections between various sensations. For example we can see how sensations in the abdomen relate to sensations in the nostrils, and how those relate to the sensations in the back. Our experience is revealed as dynamic, interconnected, and even sensual.

Thoughts will still arise, but since our attention is less like a flashlight, throwing out a narrow beam, and more like an oil lamp, casting light in all directions, we can be aware of our breathing and our thoughts at the same time. Thus, we can simply allow thoughts to pass through our awareness, without getting caught up in them. Suddenly, meditation becomes much easier.

So this is a simple change, but one that allows us to radically change our experience in meditation, and in life.

British Airways starts meditation initiative on flights

April 16, 2015

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NY Daily News: British Airways will promote meditation techniques on its new transatlantic flights as part of a bigger focus on passenger well-being.

A collaboration with the Mindfulness Institute, the new initiative will launch on BA’s new services between San Francisco and London.

As well as instructional fliers, the Mindfulness for Travel series will include a series of specially created on-board videos designed to help people relax at each stage of a journey — pre-flight, mid-flight and arrival.

Sean Doyle, Americas Executive Vice President, British Airways, said, “At British Airways we …

A “mantra” for the out-breath: “Release, rest, reveal”

October 10, 2014

Here’s a meditation tip for you to try. It came to me when I was on retreat a couple of weeks ago. One morning, on the first meditation of the day, I found that my mind was all over the place.

I really needed to calm down my racing thoughts, but I had a hunch that the more I “tried” to do something about them, the more I was going to create more disturbance. In Buddhism we sometimes talk about this as being the task of “catching a feather on a fan,” because more effort equals more disturbance, while a gentle and sensitive effort will get the job done.

As I paid attention to the sense of my body letting go on each out-breath, I heard three words accompanying the exhalations. Breathing out, I’d hear “Release.” Breathing out, I’d hear “Rest.” Breathing out, I’d hear “Reveal.”

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Each of the words had a different effect. “Release” would direct my mind to the sense of natural relaxation that takes place every time we breathe out. Focusing like this on the physical release that takes place when we exhale helps the body to relax more deeply.

The word “rest” encouraged my mind to let go. As I breathed out, my mind settled into a natural sense of ease, non-striving, kindness, and acceptance.

As I hears the word “reveal,” I experienced a sense of openness to whatever was arising in that moment, whether in the mind or the body. There was a gentle sense of attentiveness and mindfulness — a balance of receptivity and active observation.

These three words, cycling though my mind, gave me a series of little reminders, each as long as an out-breath: let go in the body; let go in the mind; notice and accept whatever’s arising.

Very quickly, my thoughts slowed down. That process started almost the moment that I started saying these three words.

After a little while I found I didn’t need to “hear” the words as thoughts. I could let the mind be silent. My thoughts had substantially died away, and yet even without the verbal reminder, on successive out-breaths I was still relaxing, resting the mind, and allowing my experience to reveal itself to me. And whenever my thoughts started to reappear, I was free to reintroduce the thoughts once more.

Do feel free to try this, and even to adapt it to your own needs. See what doesn’t work, and what does. Meditation is “open source,” and you can adapt it in the light of your own experience.

These are the three things the out-breath teaches us: Releasing all that’s unhelpful. Resting in calmness. Revealing the rich simplicity of our experience.

Ancient meditation technique sharpens cognitive skills

August 14, 2014

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Liat Clark, Wired: Different types of meditation illicit different types of physiological response, and can vastly improve cognitive skills.

A team from the National University of Singapore (NUS) explored four types of meditation practiced by Buddhists, from two main branches of the tradition, Vajrayana (Deity and Rig-pa) and Theravada (Shamatha and Vipassana). From each tradition, one style of meditation was designed to relax and another to arouse the senses.

The Singapore team points out in a paper published in PLOS ONE that prior research has focused on Theravada meditation mainly, and its ability to induce relaxation and heighten alertness. Coauthors Maria Kozhevnikov and …

Relaxing into your sit

March 18, 2013

Brendan Lawlor

I often forget the importance of physical relaxation at the start of a sit. Softening the eyes, relaxing the jaw, and letting that relaxation run downwards through the rest of my muscles. Today I was more attentive to this process and found myself running through it several times during the course of the Metta Bhavana (development of lovingkindness). The physical relaxation triggers a softness of attitude in general and feels like what Pema Chodron describes as “taking off the armour”.

After the eyes and the jaw, I used the outbreath to relax the chest and abdomen, imagining the same wave of relaxation I felt in my face now moving down the front of my body. Then the shoulders and arms. Then the back. The outbreath has a lot to offer. Again there is something softening in its effect.

I live in a city by the sea so most of my sits are against the backdrop of traffic noise and seagulls. Once my body has relaxed, and with my eyes already closed, I allowed the sounds to come and go, and pay particular attention to the sounds giving way to silence – even just momentarily. It occurred to me recently that the silence into which birds, cars, people and all the other sources of sound return to is the same vast, unified pool of silence. And I try to relax my mind into this idea, and ask it to neither hold on to, or push away, anything it hears.

Physical relaxation is not a one-way street. When grasping or aversion arises when I’m meditating (as it did today) my body told me what my mind had failed to notice. I found my eyes, jaw and shoulders had all tightened up again. So I ran through the relaxation routine a number of times. In this way, my body acts as a dashboard: letting me see indirectly what’s happening under the hood, and allowing me to take corrective action.

Relaxation, the out-breath and a return to silence seem to me to be physical correlates of surrender and acceptance, and I plan to use this dashboard as a matter of habit before each meditation, and during, as required. On a general note, the regularity of sits during this 100 day challenge allows me to feed the understandings gained during one sit back into the next, and build up a practice that is based on my own observations as well as the advice of others.

Relaxing is stressful for some

November 19, 2012

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Tia Ghose, LiveScience: Deep breaths, yoga, a lazy day at the beach: While some may find those activities soothing, their mere mention can set other people’s nerves on edge.

Now, a new method may help therapists measure just how much relaxing stresses people out. The new tool, which will be presented Saturday (Nov. 16) at the annual convention of the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, should help therapists know when to say “breathe in…” and when to steer clear of relaxation techniques.

“For a lot of different anxiety disorders, we use relaxation as a treatment,” said Christina Lumberto, a psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati. “But for the people who don’t like that, it’s not a helpful treatment.”

In the 1980s, psychologists first noticed that some people doing relaxation exercises would actually get quite anxious.

“At first, you do see decreased heart rate, decreased breathing, things that indicate relaxation,” Lumberto told LiveScience. “After they have achieved a relaxed state, all of a sudden everything just spikes back up.”

Because so many modern anxiety treatments use mind-body relaxation techniques such as meditation, Lumberto and her colleagues wanted to identify patients for whom these techniques might backfire. [7 Reasons You Should Meditate]

They created a 21-point questionnaire and tested it on 300 undergraduate students. The survey asks people to rate, on a scale of 0 to 5, how much they agree with statements like, “It scares me when my breathing becomes deeper;” and, “I hate getting massages because of the feeling it creates when my muscles relax.”

The questionnaire captures the myriad reasons why people might have trouble winding down, from feeling lazy to an intense fear of being out of control.

“Some people don’t like to relax because of the physical changes, the sensations of their muscles relaxing,” she said. “Other people will say they don’t like relaxing because they’re actually worried about whether or not they’re relaxing correctly.”

People who fear calming techniques may be more sensitive to changes in their normal physical state, such as changes in heart rate or blood pressure, regardless of whether they’re due to relaxation or to anxiety, Lumberto said.

The relaxation-phobic tend to be more anxious in general, she said. (Oddly, those who fear relaxation are also more prone to asthma, Lumberto’s past research has found.)

Instead of diving into meditation, the relaxation-averse may need to dip their toes in first, using a technique called exposure therapy, which is more commonly used to conquer fears of wide-open spaces or spider phobia, she said.

Of course, just because you dislike yoga or lounging on the beach doesn’t mean you have a problem.

“The point where it becomes problematic is if it really gets in the way of living your life,” Lumberto said.

Meditation or Drugs: The Downside of Cannabis

August 31, 2012

Vishvapani

New research shows that teenage cannabis use causes lasting damage. As well as the physiological damage, Buddhism suggests that drugs are about avoiding experience rather than engaging with mindfully with it

Some of the parents I know with teenage children who use cannabis are fairly relaxed about what’s happening. ‘It isn’t doing any harm’, one tells me. ‘Alcohol’s much worse.’ Others would really like their children to stop but are at their wits end. It’s OK, they say, but not in the house, not on weekdays, or only after you’ve done your homework.

I don’t envy them and no doubt the scientific study reported this week will fuel their worries. It finds that, true to the stoner stereotype, cannabis users have problems with memory, attention and processing information. Most worryingly, the IQs of people who start using cannabis before eighteen drop by an average eight percent, and the damage persists even if they later stop.

The cannabis users I know usually want to chill out, escape stress and access a state of mellow relaxation. Some say it’s natural: a herb, not a drug and an alternative to harried modern living. In fact, some believe, it’s rather like meditation. However, Buddhism has five main ethical precepts and the last is ‘abstaining from intoxicants’. This isn’t a rigorous prohibition, and Buddhists aren’t always strictly teetotal or drug-free. It’s a ‘principle of training’, as we say, that encourages people to avoid drink and drugs because they ‘cloud the mind’ and cause ‘heedlessness’.

The positive counterpart of the precept is the practice of mindfulness: the capacity to be fully present and attentive to whatever’s happening in our experience. In other words, Buddhism posits a choice in our mental lives between avoiding what’s happening if it’s difficult or troubling; and acknowledging or even accepting it.

People who use drugs to circumvent serious emotional difficulties are choosing avoidance, and the work of therapists is helping them to find alternatives to escaping their problems. But the Buddhist perspective is also relevant to those for whom smoking cannabis is just an enjoyable way to relax and be with friends.

This has become increasingly acceptable because it seems harmless. However, the new research suggests that, in the case of teenage cannabis use, that’s far from the truth. If the research withstands scrutiny, laissez faire attitudes will have to change. But alongside the physiological dangers are the emotional and psychological effects of drug use. The fundamental choice we all face is whether to inhabit a haze filled by dope smoke or some other form of sedative, intoxicant, entertainment or distraction; or to engage with our lives wholeheartedly, with all their frustrations and all their beauty.

This was broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day slot on 29/08/2012. UK readers can listen to the audio here

Five tips for National Relaxation Day

August 14, 2012