The best way to learn how to relax is to exaggerate the feelings of tension and relaxation, and start to learn what really happens to you when you’re relaxed. Once you’ve learned what the qualities of relaxation are for you, you can use those qualities as techniques to create relaxation. That is, after all, what most relaxation techniques are: we observe people when they’re deeply relaxed, and note what happens to them in this state (to their breathing, for example), then, if we ask someone who’s tense to use a breathing pattern similar to the one we observed in the deeply relaxed person, then that tense person becomes more relaxed. Simple.
So let’s exaggerate those feelings first. And this in itself could become your daily (and very useful) practice. Start with your hand. Make a fist. Clench it really tightly for a few seconds. Then release and let your hand be completely soft and relaxed.
Notice what you feel: how your hand feels. Then go around your body doing the same thing: tense the muscles in your forearm, then relax… tense your biceps, then relax, etc.
Lie down somewhere dark and have a go. Or stay exactly where you are now and have a go. Tense that part, then relax. And, after you’ve gone through the whole body, or when you get bored, just lie or sit there and relax. What do you feel like when you’re relaxed? Note the answers down if you want.
Your feelings, sensations, and experience of relaxation will be different in some ways to other people. And do get a sense of your own before you read the list that I’m about to give you. Otherwise you might start swiping sensations that aren’t yours.
So this is the kind of thing that happens to people when they relax deeply:
Their breathing changes and becomes slower and deeper.
They feel softer, heavier, and sometimes warmer.
Their thoughts start to drift, like when they’re about to go to sleep.
They might feel a tingling sensation in their body.
They might see colors and visions.
They become more attuned to sounds.
They feel a sense of peace and tranquility.
Worries seem to recede.
They feel very present to what’s going on.
Nice.
So what are the predominant things that you found and experienced? Because you can then use them as a technique for becoming relaxed whenever you so desire.
I, for example, become very tuned into sounds when I’m deeply relaxed: I hear every sound, I love every sound, every sound makes me feel comfortable and at home. So a technique for me, if I want to relax, is to stop and listen to the sounds around me. If I tune in now to the sounds I get: the tapping of the keys on the keyboard; the hum of the heating system; warming the towel rail that I’m leaning against; the noises of someone moving around in an adjacent room; the birds outside chirruping… deeper… the hum of this laptop; a distant whirring, maybe a farm vehicle; a very subtle clattering, maybe from some part of the heating system; the rumbling of my empty stomach. And, yes, I feel more relaxed now. Lovely.
In that way, you develop your own relaxation techniques.
BUT WHY RELAX?
Apart from the fact that it simply feels nicer to be relaxed than to be tense, why relax? Well, it’s good for you for one. Western medicine recognizes that stress and tension are harmful to the body (when we’re stressed, one of the things that happens in our bodies is that we release the hormones epinephrine (or adrenalin) and cortisol which, though occasionally useful in short bursts, are very harmful when released and circulated over extended periods of time). Though these mind–body effects are being elaborated by scientists all the time (and do read Dr. David Hamilton’s It’s the Thought That Counts and other books for the latest science in this area), we’ve sensed that stress, anxiety, and fear have an effect on the body (‘bloody hell, you nearly gave me a heart attack’). A doctor (of medicine), Dr. Kenneth Heaton, recently identified passages in Shakespeare (writing 400 years ago) that pointed to his perception of the mind–body link. He found that symptoms with roots in the psyche, including vertigo, breathlessness, fatigue, faint feelings, and cold feelings are all common in Shakespeare’s works and argues that modern doctors, who are ‘reluctant to attribute physical symptoms to emotional disturbance, resulting in delayed diagnosis, over-investigation, and inappropriate treatment’ should read more Shakespeare.
But it’s in Eastern medicine where this mind–body (–spirit) link is central, and where relaxation is part of the recognized therapy for illness. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), for example, the flow of qi or energy in the body is the critical thing. At a simplistic level, it’s observed that energy moves around the body, and through the organs in ‘meridians’ – the energetic equivalent of our blood circulatory system. If this energy flows through the meridians and organs in a balanced and harmonious way, then we are well. But when the energy becomes blocked or stagnant, illness can set in.
So how does the energy get blocked? By physical or emotional tension – and the two are intertwined. So if you’re very angry, this disrupts the flow of energy in your body (in TCM it would be said that the liver is affected). It’s clear to us all that if you become very angry there is both an emotional and a physical effect (you become red and overheated for example, you even ‘see red’). The same is true of being very stressed: we see it has an emotional effect, but also that it has a very profound physical effect, too, as our whole body becomes more tense and rigid – yes, that’s it, start rubbing your neck. In Eastern medicine, these tensions create the blocks that lead to illness.
So, to reverse the process toward illness we have to release the blocks, and to do so, we have to release the tension (emotional and physical) in the body (i.e., you have to relax). And just by relaxing deeply, you can allow the energy to flow more so that healing can and will happen.
It seems that, in our modern society at least, our tendency is toward over-working, over-stretching, and over-stressing. So, to maintain or recapture our full health, we need to work with relaxation. We need to recognize how important being relaxed is. And it’s key, too, to enjoy being relaxed. The moment you realize that you’d like nothing else than to sit still for a few minutes and breathe deeply, or lie down and feel the energy flowing through your hands, then you know you’re on the right track as far as relaxation goes.
Is there a catch? Well, there is actually. No matter how good you become at relaxing, no matter how effective and sophisticated your techniques are, you’ll still struggle if you don’t address the source of your stress and tension. You know in those cowboy movies when the cowboys look up from their camp toward the surrounding hills and see some Indians on horses appearing. Well, fine, with their guns and expertise, the cowboys will have no problem, they can just shoot the Indians as they ride toward them howling and wielding their machetes. But as they watch, more Indians appear. Then some more… and still more… until the horizon is full of furious Indians. And the cowboys know their guns are nothing in the face of these numbers. So they prepare for a massacre. If you don’t sort out the source of stress, it just keeps popping up and appearing in different forms and in greater numbers. In the end, your great breathing techniques are nothing in the face of the incoming army of stress. And you get massacred.
That’s why F**k It Therapy works so well. If we combine learning how to relax and making the movement from tension into relaxation a part of our lives, at the same time as saying F**k It to the key stressors in our lives, we have a winning formula. Sure, there will always be things that stress us out. I will argue later that we don’t necessarily want to lose those either. The key, though, is disabling many of the things that needlessly stress us out (because they’re actually not that important). That’s why it’s important to use F**k It to break through those walls of ‘meaning’ (when we’re attached to too much), to say F**k It and be less serious, to say F**k It to the story we tell about ourselves and life out there.
F**k It, you see, is the ultimate relaxation technique, because it allows us to relax around
the MEANING of things: ‘F**k It, it’s not THAT important.’ Just saying ‘F**k It’ naturally relaxes us. Just saying ‘F**k It’ is likely to slow and deepen our breathing, make the body feel warmer and heavier, relax those tense muscles, and so on. Use F**k It and your specific, personalized relaxation techniques and you have a winning, magic formula.
You have, against the apparent enemy of stress, invented the equivalent of an atomic bomb.
Please pay (less) attention
A very cool Chinese Qigong master, Dr. Bisong Guo, said one day (with a lovely, strong Chinese accent):
‘You see, only 20 percent of you needs to be present in any situation. The other 80 percent is not needed.’
I love this. In the present spiritual trend of full presence and total consciousness, she was suggesting to switch off 80 percent of you – not just relaxation, but 80 percent absence.
What did she mean? She meant that it might be possible to live successfully by only engaging 20 percent of our attention in what we are doing. The rest can remain free, not focused, not concentrating on what is going on. Doesn’t that sound liberating?
But is this really possible? Can you actually be productive, hold down a job, be reliable, while engaging only 20 percent of your attention?
Can you talk to people without them feeling you’re not that interested if you are there only 20 percent?
Well, try it. No better way to find out.
When John was still working as a creative in London, he used to do this in meetings (and I saw him do it many times). He used to sit there and relax, slightly defocused, interested enough, but with no specific interest, while the others were arguing back and forth about big and small things (mainly small). They would usually struggle to reach a solution that satisfied everyone. All the time, John relaxed and kind of meditated without saying much. After a while, usually toward the end of the meeting as people were still struggling along, he would get an idea about the situation and calmly share it.
And everyone quieted down, listened, agreed he was a genius, and did what he suggested.
1 Based on the US game show Family Feud created by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, which ran 1976–85.
2 To show one’s buttocks (known as your ‘bottom’ or ‘bum’ in the UK) in a public place and an all-round crowd-pleaser in the UK, particularly when the buttocks belong to a football player or other celebrity.
ENERGIZE IT
The energy thing I’ve just been talking about isn’t much good as a theory. In fact, it’s much worse as a theory than the other theories most of us live quite happily with every day. And most of what we ‘know’ about anything is a theory, if you think about it. A theory is an explanation of something that is correct until a better theory comes along to replace it. The current theory that most of us subscribe to is that we’re solid, separate beings made up of bones, flesh, organs, and pumping blood, interacting with a mainly solid and separate reality, all pinned to the ground by a force called ‘gravity,’ on a planet called Earth that’s spinning at about 1,000 mph (depending on where you’re standing) on an orbit around a hot thing called the sun, in a universe that is just one of billions of universes, and probably connected to infinite parallel universes via worm holes. Okay, so I’ve wandered off at the end from what most of us subscribe to, but it’s what many cosmologists and astrophysicists subscribe to. Despite all that: the picture we have of what we are; of what we are in relation to everything around us; what this planet and universe are… it’s all a theory.
It’s a theory to me (and probably you, too) that your bones are alive inside, that you have hormones pumping out from various points in your body controlling various functions, that you have a network of nerves sending information back to the brain. It’s a theory, because I personally have no evidence that any of this is true. I’ve only seen dead bones that look solid and inanimate to me. I’ve never seen, touched, or tasted a drop of hormone (not human to my knowledge, anyway, I suppose I’m tasting hormones all the time in the meat I eat). As for nerves, I’ve never seen a nerve. Who knows if that’s why I ‘feel’ stuff. Ah, John, but that’s simply because you’re ignorant in those areas. If you’d had medical training you would ‘know’ these things to be true. Sure, I may well have apparent evidence for my theories. But even then, they would still be theories until new evidence came along. It’s just more difficult to be open to new evidence if your understanding of a theory is very solid.
For now, it’s worth getting a little sense of the fact that you’re living with many (for you, at least) unproven theories. And even those theories that you can prove personally (‘I am solid and separate and what I’m holding in my hands here is solid and separate’) are still only theories waiting for new evidence to come along.
But we accept most of the theories because illustrious (usually Western) scientists give them to us. And the idea of energy flowing around the body is not part of that illustrious body of Western science. So it’s more difficult to accept this idea as a theory (until more Western scientists manage to get their brainy heads around it and then tell us how it works). But it’s not just that. It’s not just that the concept of energy is literally a foreign concept to those of us brought up in a post-Newtonian world of the physical sciences. The concept of energy is, by definition, difficult to grasp, because it is invisible, all-pervasive, and constantly changing. It’s hard to pin down in many ways. And thus it defies most attempts to pin it down. Like God, really. And maybe it and Him are the same thing after all.
So let’s jump out of the land of theory and concepts, and just experience.
I’ll tell you my journey into the experience of energy. As a young man, having left university and working in my first job, I was not a well man. I had a number of allergies that manifested in a variety of symptoms. At times I was very sick and had trouble just getting everyday things done. I felt ill most of the time and was tired all the time. I recognized that stress was making me worse because when I was happy and relaxed, I was relatively better, and when I was unhappy and stressed, I was sicker.
So I set out to learn how to relax. I bought a relaxation tape: a double cassette set, in fact (‘tape’ and ‘cassette’ here refer to an antique audio playback system). And I would lie on the bed and press ‘play.’ And the exercise I was taken through was the one I took you through in Relax It: a ‘progressive relaxation.’ (I know other relaxation exercises but, after more than 20 years of doing this stuff, including training as a hypnotherapist, there’s nothing quite like exaggerating the difference between ‘tension’ and ‘relaxation’ to teach you how to relax.)
I would lie there then, being taken through the different parts of my body, tensing and then relaxing. After a while, my whole body would have been tensed and relaxed, and I would then feel totally relaxed. And it really worked for me. I did move from a general state of tension (mainly because of my illness) to a relaxed state. And I could then carry that relaxed state out into the world with me.
After a few days of doing this, I started to notice that the feeling of relaxation (after the exaggerated tension) had a particular, peculiar quality to it: it was, for want of a better word, a ‘tingling’ sensation. And the word ‘tingling’ doesn’t do what I was feeling complete justice, but let’s leave it at that for now. So, as I tensed, then relaxed, I’d know I was relaxed when I could feel that tingling.
After a couple more days, I didn’t have to play the tape: I would lie down and, even without tensing a muscle now, I would imagine, progressively, each part of my body relaxing and starting to tingle. I would relax my hand and feel it tingling, then my arm, etc.
A couple of days later, I could just lie down and imagine ‘scanning’ my body, almost like a laser and, as I did so, this tingling sensation would appear. After just a few minutes, my whole body would be soft, deeply relaxed, and tingling.
After another few days I realized I didn’t have to be lying down to do this. So I’d be sitting at work, or on a bus, or eating at home
, and I’d do a quick ‘scan’ of my body, and begin to feel the tingling all over. I’m doing it now.
I loved the tingling feeling. The feeling amazed me. I couldn’t believe I’d never consciously felt it before (it must have always been there, I’d just never noticed it). I would go back to trying to experience the feeling whenever I could. I loved the feeling AND I would feel better (i.e., my symptoms would diminish).
A couple of months later I was invited to a Tai Chi class. I went and was most surprised to hear someone talking about this qi or ‘energy’ thing that you could feel in your body as a kind of tingling sensation. I was amazed that there were exercises you could do (in Tai Chi and the related discipline Qigong) to help this energy spread and flow. And I’ve been fascinated by energy and all the associated arts ever since. I’ve practiced Tai Chi and Qigong (and other energy arts) over the years, but it never really departs, for me, from my initial experience and love of this feeling of energy in my body. I’m relaxing now, sitting here early in the morning in a hotel lobby in Milan, and I relax and I feel this energy everywhere. I LOVE it. I never seem to become tired of this particular lover, even though she’s with me always. She’s all over me, in a good sense, and I spend a lot of intimate time with her, but I never grow tired of her. I never feel I fully understand her, actually, and maybe that’s part of it… if I ever feel like I’m beginning to understand her, she shows me another side of herself that defies my original understanding.
So, would you like to experience some of this energy, too?
Yes, of course you would. We’ll teach you some very simple and very powerful exercises. So powerful, in fact, that they still make up a significant part of my practice more than 20 years after I first learned them.
PLAYING MY ENERGY ACCORDION
F**k It Therapy Page 12
