Relax Into the Big You

A MAN who had recently begun a nature cure at a clinic told me his sleep had become almost non­ existent in the last few days. He also complained of feeling morbid, unhappy and deeply depressed. Yet he had been living on the most nutritious and healthy diet; no cares or circumstantial worries pressed for solution, and beautiful country­side, quiet, peaceful, lovely, surrounded him on all sides. What then had he been doing to arrive at his state of sleeplessness, tension and depression?

The answer is really quite simple. He had been RELAXING!

Dr. Guirdham, in his book COSMIC FACTORS IN DISEASE, says: ‘Many airmen, or members of submarine crews lived through their arduous experiences with­out showing nervous symptoms, only to break down when afforded rest. They had, in active warfare, the anodyne of a finite aim. When transferred to more peaceful conditions, the empti­ness with which they were confronted was more than they could endure.’

The individual, in going beyond merely a superficial relaxation, comes face to face with himself. The man at the clinic had lost the purpose of his everyday life; its duties and responsibilities were the outer discipline that held his loosely-knit personality traits in a semblance of order and co-operation.

With the removal of this discipline, however, his personality, as it was, could not easily hold together, and began to break down into another, more harmonious condition. If the process were followed through, it leads to an outer self more in alignment with the cosmic and natural patterns of life around us. But the ego cries out against the changes, holds back, and causes itself unnecessary pain.

A clash between the inner forces

 The case in question is an interesting one. The man had entered the clinic due to a heart condition, possibly of nervous origin. The healing forces, as they were released, began to change his condition to an harmonious one. In doing so, it created a clash between the inner forces as they attempted to express through into the outer ego, with its own aims, hopes and fears.

Relaxation, taken as a total therapy, has many levels. The first, and most obvious level is to allow tension in the voluntary muscles to drop away. If we tense the muscles, then allow the tension to drop, we notice the first and only real law of relaxation. Namely, relaxation is simply the absence of tension. Tension on this level represents personal effort, conscious or otherwise.

Most people can reach this level fairly easily by tensing and slowly relaxing the muscle groups a number of times. Each time, tense less, until there is simply the feeling of tension, followed by the feeling of relaxation. One should then allow the awareness to sink into the continuing feeling of letting go.

At this point, people may learn to go into the most beautiful feelings of peace and healing, or difficulties may already begin to appear, as in the clinic patient. Any unconscious or semi-conscious tensions or fears may come to the surface.

There are so many likely causes of these that it is impossible to more than hint at them. But they may to some extent be explained in the next level.

The relaxation of the physical body is the most superficial. The relaxation of the mental emotional body has a far greater significance in regard to cosmic experience. It also takes more to achieve. Yet the simple rule still applies – relaxation is the absence of tension, i.e. personal effort.

Example: A womand was trying to allow a healing process to occur and was toled to, “Do notjhing but let things happen.” As she was doing these she was asked to say what she was experiencing. She said that she was feeliiing tension in her abdomen – a sign of emerging internal difficukties. She went on to say, “I relaxed them away.” That was a sign that instead of allowing her body to discharge the tension she carried on repressing it. See Getting Rid Of

A fear of death

 Undoubtedly the most frequent and obvious fear that occurs as one touches the first real experiences of relaxation is that of death. Time and again one hears it said, ‘I felt myself slipping into something huge and vast. I have never experienced anything like that before. I felt I might not be able to come back, or, would lose myself, so I drew back.

When asked if they were in fact frightened that they were dying, the answer is invariably a simple ‘Yes’.

Such statements are enormously significant and descriptive. For they begin to describe what it is one is relaxing into. For relaxation in its deepest sense is a cosmic experience, a remembering to some extent, of our total self. And the gospels of the world unite in explaining the Bible command: ‘Be still-and know that I am God.’

Because we are seeking the greatest good in relaxation and self-surrender, we cannot expect to attain it in a few days, or without sacrifice. For in the end relaxation is the deepest type of self-sacrifice. It is because of this that so many resistances occur.

Going back to the description of the primary fear, we see that it is not a fear of extinction. The person going beyond superficial relaxation to cosmic experience realises as never before that consciousness is not limited to that of the senses, nor to the limitations of personal memory and self-awareness.

When people say that they are afraid of dying, it is not meant in the sense of the materialist who describes death as total cessation of awareness and self. The thing they are touching is so vast that their fear is really’ that of being lost, like a drop of water lost in the mighty ocean. It is the ego, the I, fearing it will not be able to hold on to its own sense of being, but will be swallowed up in the hugeness.

Physical symptoms of fear

Apart from the actual feeling of fear, certain physical symptoms often accompany this stage. One of the commonest is the rapid beating of the heart. This is sometimes quite frightening in itself, as the heart in some people beats thunderously. Naturally, unless warned otherwise, one may suspect that the heart is weakened. But as Kipling says, ‘It is fear, little brother, it is fear.

In other cases, it is the solar plexus that beats like a heart, and palpitates heavily. It can in fact be almost any part of the body that responds to the slightly frightening excitement touching a new dimension of experience. We may also attempt to block the further development of our contact, due to the expansion of awareness and the sensitivity it brings.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich has probably revealed more details of the way human beings block cosmic contact than any other published writer dealing with clinical therapeutics.

In his book ‘Discovery of the Orgone’ (cosmic energy) he calls these blockages ‘muscle-armouring’. In his experiments he was able to measure the flow of cosmic energy around the human body. It flowed up the spine to the head, then down the front of the body. It could there be expressed as the feelings and emotions of giving and surrender behind the sexual act. Or it is expressed and felt as the flow of sensation and emotion in any part of the body.

When we feel a tingling vibrating sensation mounting the spine while listening to stirring music, we are actually experiencing an influx or rapid movement of cosmic energy in our body. This can be blocked in any part of its flow by muscular emotional tension.

The blocked flow of this energy, which acting upon the processes of our body is the basis for human consciousness and emotions, becomes disease and illness. The release of this flow in deep relaxation is the release of the healing force-cosmic contact.

Some of the classical blockages that Dr. Reich discovered in developing his particular therapy were tension at the brow causing wrinkled forehead; clenched teeth due to holding back of emotions; shallow breathing; shoulders held back like a soldier; tense abdomen restraining sexual feelings and normal ‘belly’ feelings; this blocks natural bowel movements causing constipation, tension and pains in neck and sometimes in arms, etc.

In regard to some of the more common human ailments, psycho­therapy and relaxation clinicians have discovered psychological tensions underlying many of them. These attitudes of thought and emotion are blockages or tensions in the inner self, the mental and emotional body, causing physical ills. In one’s search for happiness and harmony, one comes to terms with these through facing oneself.

In the box are listed a few of these ailments with their associ­ated mental emotional conditions. These mentotional (i.e. mental-emotional) conditions, if met, sometimes resolve the ailment.

The mentotional attitudes mentioned are simply a few of the many, sometimes becoming fairly obvious as we face ourselves. Also, there is no one method of dissolving them to find the natural flow of our relationship with the cosmic.

The method of dropping physical tension mentioned is enormously beneficial to start with. A use­ful technique for getting at the mentotional attitudes is as follows: having practised the foregoing technique until you become aware both of body tensions during the day, and also inner feelings while at rest, start becoming aware of your facial condition. To begin with do this only while relaxing. 

 

ACIDOSIS – INVERTED ANGERANAEMIA – ANXIETY AND FEARARTHRITIS – OVER CONSCIENTIOUS-EMOTIONAL CONFLICTS ASTHMA – INABILITY TO “BREATHE” IN PRESENT ENVIRONMENT – BREATHLESS THROUGH SHOCK CATARRH – FRUSTRATION DIABETES – TENSE-INSTABILITY HAEMORRHOIDS – IDEAS OF SELF-GUILT HEADACHES – UNWILLINGNESS TO FACE COMING SITUATION INSOMNIA – UNRESOLVED CONFLICTS LIVER – SENSITIVENESS TO CRITICISM-RESENTMENT-PREJUDICE STIFF NECK – OVER – IDEALISTIC-ATTEMPTS TO REACH TOO HIGH- FEAR OF FAILURE NEURASTHENIA – INABILITY TO ACCEPT DEFEAT SCIATICA – FRUSTRATED AGGRESSION VERTIGO – CONFUSION

At first, practise expressing on your face the attitudes and emotions of anxiety, fear, stubborn­ness, crying, laughing, praying, etc. After expressing each feeling on the face, try to allow the face to become quite blank and free of any of them. (I underline any because although positive thinking achieves much good, it can become as obsessional and as blocking to the ever-moving cosmic force as any negative thoughts!) 

 

Having done this, see whether the face is still expressing an emotion or idea that has become frozen on it. Drop it all away, not only from the face, but from the whole body.

Having expressed several ideas so far, it is now necessary to look at them again. Every apparent truth in life has an opposite that is equally true. We have seen that tension can become sickness and disease; a means of putting us Out of phase with the cosmic forces.

Yet tension is a necessity. Tension is a natural product of activity, and activity expresses these opposites excellently. It puts out and takes in, both giving and receiving. It contracts and relaxes, moves and rests, on and on.

 

The middle path

 

Just as tension and relaxation are the necessary opposites of life for the third, the middle path to be realised, so too the emotions we feel are normal reactions to our life experience. The inharmony, the disease, only occurs when we become trapped in any of the things we feel or do.

It comes when we take tension, relaxation, joy and fear, and hold on to them, and carry them out of their proper context in life. The fish can safely leap out of water in the joy of exhilarated movement, but it dies if it remains out for too long. In our everyday life we, too, may stray from our natural element – the cosmic harmony – but we, too, suffer the consequence if we remain out of harmony too long.

Relaxation, in its fullest sense, is not simply a matter of lying still, of becoming surrendered: it is not merely a matter of sitting quietly for a few minutes each day. Relaxation is also action which is in harmony with what we can feel of our total self.

We must attempt to act in accord with our deepest feelings. Our whole day ideally should be a casting of ourselves upon the cosmic ocean of force, so that our activities are the product of resonance between ourself and cosmic activity. Our moments of quiet become periods of conscious bathing in the deep waters; a climax of the loving affair between ourself and life. 

 

The moments of quiet

 

It should not be a striving to realise God or the cosmic. These are realised, and seen all around us in our friends and family, in the life of our planet. We need only hold a child close to be holding God to our bosom. Our moments of quiet should be rather like a gentle kiss between the known and the unknown, the seen and            the unseen, the realised with the yet to come.

There is only one life expressing through us all. In our relaxation and moments of quiet, this is slowly realised simply as a realisation of the world of form which comes to us by opening our eyes. In the book THE CENTAUR, by Algernon Blackwood, the storyteller speaks the same words:

‘Death and grave, indeed, had lost their victory. For in the of wider consciousness beyond this transient physical phase he saw all loved ones joined and safe, as separate words up-gathered each to each in the parent sentence that explains them. The sentence in the para­graph, the paragraph in the whole grand story all achieved and so at length into the eternal library of God that consummates the whole.’

In the one life we approach in relaxation, we are all thoughts in the mind of God, or as Blackwood has suggested, words in the one great ‘Book of Life’. As such, when we relax, some of us may see and feel near those we love whom we had thought dead. We do not find them by time and space, but rather as deep and lovely parts of our self-our greater self-that has lain unconscious yet alive, and has now risen to our awareness once again.

Relaxing means remembering

 

To relax is not simply to become inert or to surrender, it is also the courage of action in cosmic accord. The art of relaxation is the art of being strong enough to be ourselves, in the greatest sense of the word.

It is also the art of remembering. Life already has all the answers. It created us, and all about us. It but remains for us to remember who and what we are: to bring to light what we already know. Our homesickness will drive us on. For we yearn to find again our eternal home in the cosmic deeps, to return into our natural harmony.

Dr. Reich, although opposed by his contemporaries; society, and even his own scientific training, yet pressed on to discover one of the most hopeful of all his findings. No matter how sick, physically or mentally, his patients were, he was able to demonstrate that beneath the tangle and rubbish they had accumulated, there lay a happy, healthy being. No matter how neurotic his patients, by facing them with their own attitudes and blocks, and helping them to drop them, he released in them their own state of harmony.

If you are struggling in the morass of your own mind and emotions, and can see no way out-pray and wait quietly, for in the one life, help is already trying to come in.