Relax NOW
The 7 Levels of Relaxation
Are YOU Ready to Relax?
We all now recognise that relaxation is much more than a game of tennis, a walk in the mountains or a hot bath. Although they may help. At the heart of learning to relax is the art of caring for all levels of our being – body, mind and spirit. We are also realising that we have been misled by the mythology of ‘get your body right and your mind will follow’. This is still an illusion sustained by many of today’s ‘relaxation industries’.
The truth is much more freeing – when we ‘enlighten’ our spirit (our self), then relaxation follows naturally, and our true peaceful, loving and contented nature is restored. This, in turn, is the basis of the wellness of our being and our physical health. Hence the wisdom in the saying, ‘rest does not come with sleeping, it comes with waking’!
The purpose of this online ‘relaxation resource’ is not to help you plan the specifics of your jogging timetable, design your diet or recommend holiday destinations. While we acknowledge the need to be able to relax our body the ultimate purpose is to offer you some wisdom, insights and methods to relax your mind, your intellect and YOU the spiritual being! As you do you may rediscover your own inner peace (which has been there all along), free your mind and help you to manage your energies more effectively during increasingly busy days.
Levels of Readiness
We can all benefit from being able to relax. Not just for the wellness of our being but also for the health of our body. There is now a mountain of evidence that most physical diseases have their roots in some form of mental and emotional dis-ease! But at what level do you, could you, should you, start to focus on in order to relax?
There are 7 levels of relaxation and each of us has a certain level of readiness for each. Some people just need to relax their body. They are not so interested in adjusting their personality and freeing themselves from ‘stress habits’ such as anxiety and frustration, sadness and resentment. Other people are ready to re- awaken and refine their intellect and start making better decisions and choices today, thereby creating a less ‘stress filled’ tomorrow. Some people are ready to open their heart and reduce their dependency on their emotions so that they can consciously choose their ‘feelings’ again. Then there are those who have understood that all stress and therefore all relaxation has its origins at a deeper spiritual level. They have recognized that the deepest relaxation starts with the big questions such as ‘who am I’ and who exactly is it that ‘believes’ they are stressed?
To help you discern which level is right for you there are 7 levels of stress/relaxation for your personal contemplation.
Note: Being Free of Neediness
While I will gradually add more recorded meditation commentaries it’s always best to do your own. Only then do YOU fully create the ‘insperience’ that the commentary is pointing towards. If you are always ‘needing’ a commentary from someone else it can easily become another dependency and you thereby sustain your neediness for external stimulation. Both of which defeat the purpose of this website. You are ultimately the master of your state of being.
1. Relaxed BODY
Relax HAPPINESS
“If you search for happiness in the world you are guaranteed to make yourself unhappy. Happiness can only occur when you stop searching for it.”
Level ONE – PHYSICAL
Bringing Your Body to REST
Many of your stressful thoughts and feelings are destined to finish their journey in your body. Many of us don’t realize we are stressed until we ‘feel it’ physically. We don’t notice its origins in our thoughts, and even earlier, in our intentions.
We have learned to believe that our body is all we are. So we seek ways to relax our body believing we are relaxing our ‘self’. And that’s fine. If you relax your body your mind will follow to some extent, if only because you are using your mind to relax your body.
Eventually you are likely to notice that physical relaxation is not getting to the cause of your stress, just the symptoms. Hence the huge variety of ways to deal with the symptoms at a physical level. Some of the most popular ways include walking – running – yoga – pilates – Q Jong – stretching – gym – sport – music. They can all ‘relieve’ many of the stress symptoms that build up in our body. But none can get to the cause within your consciousness.
Start with the meditation and a popular method in the links below.
Meditation Audio:
Exercise Audio:
2. Calm Mind
Relax PEACE
“You true states of being have been veiled by the beliefs and illusions you have assimilated while growing up. Especially the belief that fear and anger are ‘normal’ human emotions.”
Level TWO – MENTAL
REFRESHING the Screen of Your Mind
Most of us are now aware of the mind/body connection. Think ‘tense thoughts’ and you will feel it physically in places like your shoulder muscles, or perhaps an ache in the head. Think ‘worry thoughts’ and your stomach will send you a message asking you to stop. Think ‘fearful thoughts’ and you will notice ‘the pump’ in your chest, otherwise known as your heart, start to work overtime.
So it’s obvious that our minds need some attention. It’s unfortunate for most of us that no one ever taught us how to think. The mind’s first requirement is a benevolent master to help it to change the speed, quantity and the quality of thinking. That’s YOU! Making friends with your mind starts with the realization that you are not your mind.
Here are some things you can practice which may help you to refresh and guide your mind. Gradually your mental creation, your thinking, will become a little less stressful and a lot more relaxing. A little less shallow and a lot deeper. A little less speedy and a lot more like a slow moving river, gently flowing, sometimes still, sometimes deep, but always moving in the direction you would want it to.
Meditation Audio:
Exercise Audio:
3. Clear INTELLECT
Relax LOVE
“Fear is love distorted by attachment. If there is sorrow when you apparently lose an object or a ‘loved one’ it means they were your attached one. Unconditional love has no object.”
Level THREE – INTELLECT
REAWAKENING Your Third Eye
Do you ever think or say things like, “It’s just not clear for me”… “But I don’t understand!”… “Why do they do that?” … “This is terrible, what’s going on?”. These are all reactive moments when we kick up the dust of our own emotions and temporarily blind the eye of our own intellect. Otherwise known as the ‘third eye’. We sabotage our own clarity of perception when we become emotional. It skews our interpretations and diminishes our ability to discern accurate meaning, usually without being aware that we do so.
It often happens in moments when coolness is required in order to understand the other. It stops us being able to create a quiet compassion towards the suffering of others. Over time our intellect, our third eye, tired of all the ‘emotional dust’, stays partially shut at best and totally closed at worst. It’s as if we are asleep, unable to make accurate assessments, sound evaluations and effective decisions.
The level of your clarity usually correlates with the degree of openness/closedness of your intellect. We are all being invited to reawaken our intellect and restore that clarity. That means no longer just believing what you are told. It means challenging your own beliefs and no longer allowing old belief systems to shape your perceptions and choices. This requires some time spent in quiet contemplation, in conscious reflection.
Meditation Audio:
Exercise Audio:
4. Tranquil PERSONA
Relax JOY
“True joyfulness is quiet. A quiet joyfulness arises when you stop expecting the world to make you feel anything. It doesn’t. You do, because you are the world!”
Level FOUR – PERSONALITY
RECREATING Your Persona
When we fully realise that we create our own moments of unrelaxation it becomes clear that being stressed is just a habit. It’s a habit we have created and sustained over time. The stress is contained in our response to the other or to the event. It is not made by them.
That means that it can be uncreated or destroyed. All our habits, traits and tendencies are like a matrix that forms our personality. Hence all the talk so many years ago about Type A and Type B personalities. However, the first step in banishing the stress habit from your personality is to realize that ‘you’ are not your personality. It’s a bit like a touch screen of a computer or tablet. The screen is dark and dormant and it looks like nothing is there. But the moment you touch the screen it springs to life as it lights up and is filled with images and words.
Similarly, when we ‘react’ automatically to someone doing or saying something it means we are being ruled by our previously created and recorded personality traits. Their actions or words seem to touch and trigger something in the matrix of traits and habits of our personality in a way that we ‘light up’ (react) with stressful thoughts and emotions. Here is a simple model to understand how you work as a conscious being.
The Creation of Your Persona
You create a thought in your mind. You evaluate the quality of that thought using your intellect. You then decide to act and bring that thought through into behaviour. The behaviour and the feeling as you acted are both recorded as memories. Some time later the memory is triggered. Out of the memory arises the original thought and emotion, but in a slightly different form. Again you use your intellect to evaluate the thought, make another decision then act on that decision. Then, one fateful day, you bypass the ‘evaluation function’ of the intellect and go straight from thought to action and a habit is born. This is how you create all the habits and tendencies that make up your personality. Simples …as the ad says!
Your ‘persona’ is what the ancient Greeks referred to as your ‘mask’. Once you ‘see’ how you create your many personas, your many masks, you realise you can ‘uncreate’ them. Which means you can change your personality anytime. Actors do it almost all the time – it’s their job! So it’s no big deal.
Meditation Audio:
Exercise Audio:
5. Loving HEART
Relax CONTROL
“Trying to control something or someone is just the impulsive reaction of someone who is searching for security. You cannot control anyone else or anything else. There is no need.”
Level FIVE – HEART
RESTORING the Mastery of Your Feelings
Not everyone is ready to start feeling their feelings…fully! This is usually because many of our feelings are unpleasant emotions that we either avoid or mask with some pleasurable, externally sourced stimulations. We go to the movies, eat tasty foods, we talk about others and we accumulate ‘stuff’, thereby avoiding fully feeling our stressful feelings. To be stress free at the feeling level requires the realisation that all the ‘stress emotions’ (that we feel) are a) created by our self within our consciousness and b) are ‘caused’ by the self becoming attached to something or someone.
Attachment just means that we have lost our sense of self in something that we are not. It happens within our consciousness, within our mind, often subconsciously. We watch the movie, bring the movie into our mind and then lose our self in the story and in the characters…in our mind.
Every day we lose our self in other people, objects and even just ideas. These are moments of attachment. Then, when something happens to what we are attached to, we create a disturbance in our consciousness called ‘emotion’, which we feel. This is unnatural because whenever we react emotionally it means we are ‘trapped in’ the idea or image of something/someone in our minds. It’s a signal that says we are not free. Whereas our true nature, our true state, is one of love and freedom. By the way, love is not an emotion. That in itself requires investigation and a deeper understanding of the difference between emotions, feelings and states of being.
Being stress free means being non-attached. Not so easy after a lifetime of learning to confuse attachment with love, after a lifetime of learning to strive for acquisition, accumulation and achievement, which all become forms of ‘attachment’
Meditation Audio:
Exercise Audio:
6. Gentle NATURE
Relax MIND
“The mind is a function of consciousness, not the brain. You create it and destroy it many times each day. It’s how and where you give form to your thoughts.”
Level SIX – NATURE
Reconnection with What You Really Are
You Really Are
“Houston we have a problem”, people have come to believe their beliefs are true!
We all seem to assimilate some common beliefs such as; stress is natural; being angry is natural; it’s human nature to be fearful; it’s natures way to cry sometimes; we are all born to suffer so suffering is…natural’. These are beliefs that ensure we tolerate our self created stress for as long as possible. Very often for so long that it becomes too late to …stop it!
But, as many are now realising, belief isn’t the truth. In reality the presence of sadness or fear are signs we have lost connection with our true nature which is joyful and loving. The presence of anger is a sign we have lost our connection with our inner peace. But simply understanding the theory of this is not enough. Actually reconnecting with our true peaceful and loving nature is only possible when we start to go beyond words and ideas.
Hence the ancient practice of meditation, during which you will become aware of your true underlying, abiding nature, which is peaceful and loving and joyful. The more you reconnect with your true nature i.e. your ‘trueness’, the less your beliefs (attachments again) will have power over you. Including the belief that love and joy are just other emotions.
Then, when you come back out into the world of action and interaction, you bring with you that ‘natural’ calmness, that ‘natural’ intention of caring and that ‘natural’ attitude of acceptance.
Meditation Audio:
Exercise Audio:
7. Radiant BEING
Relax NO ONE
“You are not an object or a personality or an idea.
You are not the ‘story of my life’ that you keep running in your head. You are no one and no thing. That allows you be nothing and ‘everything’. Relax. All is well.”
Level SEVEN – SPIRITUAL
REALISING Who You ARE and Will Always Be
It requires a deep interest in understanding why you think and feel the way you do before you can realise that all stress and all unhappiness, all your emotional disturbances, arise from one simple mistake. It’s a mistake we all share. It happens when you base your sense of identity on something you are not.
To cut a long description short, you and I are essentially ‘no one’ other than a being who is conscious of being. To put it another way you and I are simply the ‘I’ that says, “I am”. That’s all. As soon as you put something after ‘I am’ then some kind of suffering is guaranteed, simply because you are identifying your self with something you are not. Whatever you put after I am, whether it’s a name, a nationality, a position or a profession, an ideology, it’s not you.
In essence the moment you react emotionally to anything or anyone it’s a sign you have lost your sense of self in something or someone you are not. Even in an argument you are attached to, and identifying with, a belief. Or when you react emotionally to a vase falling and breaking it means, in that moment, your sense of self is lost in the ‘image’ of the vase. In other words you might as well say, “I am a vase”. So it takes a little while to see and realise all the various ways in which we induce our own self forgetfulness. And therefore the stress that must follow.
Here is a meditation that may take you to that state of awareness where you truly know you are simply the ‘I’ that says ‘I am’ and nothing more.
Meditation Audio:
Exercise Audio:
Relax SELF
Be patient. Be gentle. Be kind. Be quiet. Be curious. And you will be your self …again.
The 7 Levels of Relaxation
Level ONE – PHYSICAL
Relaxing Your Body
Level TWO – MENTAL
REFRESHING the Screen of Your Mind
Level THREE – INTELLECT
REAWAKENING and Opening Your Third Eye
Level FOUR – PERSONALITY
RECREATING Your Persona
Level FIVE – HEART
RESTORING the Mastery of Your Feelings
Level SIX – NATURE
RECONNECTION with your True Nature
Level SEVEN – SPIRIT
REALISING WHO you Are and Will Always Be!