Complete Relaxation – (Six Incredibly Awesome Mind States You Can Experience)

The first Incredibly Awesome mind state I talked about is Lucid Dreaming. Today’s post is about the second one.

I first read about complete relaxation in a book about yoga. The gist of it is that you lie down comfortably on your back, then stay completely still and systematically relax every part of your body. After a few minutes, you stop feeling your legs and arms (in a good way. Sort of like going to sleep.), and then other parts of your body. You stay in this state for some 15-30 minutes, and then slowly come back to normal life. You feel absolutely awesome. Refreshed, amazingly relaxed, full of energy and happy.

If you’re thinking this would take up too much of your time, you might ponder this koan:

Cemil was driving his car along a country road at 60 mph. He was going on holiday, and he wanted to drive as far as possible by sunset, to have a shorter journey ahead of him tomorrow. He was driving behind a bright yellow minivan, and saw it signal as it turned to a gas station. He considered refuelling too, but then he thought “No, I’m not going to stop, I want to get as far as possible by sunset.”

Two hours later, Cemil’s car started to run out of gas. He decided to slow down to a more efficient speed so that it wouldn’t run out completely. He slowed down to 40 mph, a bit later to 20, and edged along the road that way. Then, all of a sudden, he saw the bright yellow minivan come up behind him and overtake him.

At that moment, Cemil was enlightened.

Spending time with complete relaxation is like spending time refuelling your car. It’s going to make the rest of your day much happier and more effective. If you take half an hour to relax, you will get more done, not less.

I’ll also explain the science behind it. It’s not some mushy squishy spiritual stuff. The reason you stop feeling your body is all real physical phenomena – motor neurons, sensory neurons and what happens to them when you relax completely. More detail later.

I’m not saying you should try this. I don’t believe in the word should. I’m saying that it’s an awesome experience and I believe you’ll love it if you try it. It’s really easy, just read through the following instructions once, then find a quiet place for 20-30 minutes, and you’re ready!

Detailed instructions

1. Lie down comfortably on your back.
I usually do this in my bed. Don’t use a pillow, it bends your spine in a wrong way for this, and prevents you from relaxing completely. Shuffle yourself around until you find a comfortable position. Your legs should be slightly spread apart, your arms parallel to your body with palms turned slightly upward. Cover yourself with a blanket or something, because your body temperature will drop as you relax. You don’t want to start feeling cold.

2. Close your eyes and focus on your breathing.
First notice your breath going in and out. Just notice it without changing it for three full breaths (in and out). Then start slowing your breathing down, especially the outbreath. The goal is to have every outbreath last about twice as long as every inbreath. You might notice you automatically start breathing deeper. That’s a good thing.

3. Start systematically relaxing your body from the bottom up.
Start with your legs, because they contain the biggest muscles. Those are the easiest to relax. It also leaves your face, with hundreds of little muscles, till the end. Start by focusing on your toes, your sole of the foot, the muscles around your ankles, your shins, and so on. The more individual muscles you focus on, the better. Follow the relaxation upwards this way, from your legs, your torso (front and back, the back can be tricky at first), then your shoulders, neck and the head (described in point 4.). Then relax your arms from the fingers to the shoulders, then the shoulders, neck, and your head again. Your face contains lots of little hard-to-relax muscles, that’s why we relax it twice.

Repeat relaxing your whole body (starting with legs) for a second and maybe even a third time. You might notice that when you go through for the second time around, some of the muscles have contracted again. That’s normal. Gently relax them once more.

Pay special attention to the following:

• your lower back (it’s tricky to relax at first)
• your shoulders (they accumulate lots of tension during the day)
• your neck (same as the shoulders)

By the time you’re done with the third tour, you might stop feeling some of the parts of your body. How and why this works is described in more detail later on.

4. Relaxing your head and face

Start with your cheeks. Gently relax all the muscles in your cheeks. Then relax your jaw, and your tongue. Your tongue will lie down in your mouth completely relaxed. Let your jaw drop a bit, but without opening your mouth. Move along the line of your jaw, relaxing all the muscles along the way, ending behind your ears.

The general direction you follow in relaxing your face is starting at your cheeks, moving down to the mouth, along the jaw, behind the ears, up to your temples, towards the middle of your forehead, then down along your nose, and your eyes. Just imagine two big curly arrows on each side of your head starting from your cheeks, going behind the ears, up, and ending at your nose. That’s the direction.

After your jaw, relax the place under your ears. Then behind the ears, and back of the head. Then the ears themselves. After that, move up to your temples, and relax those. Then slowly move towards the center of your forehead, relaxing the whole forehead along the way. Then relax the top of your head. After that, relax the place between your eyes. Then your eyelids for good ten seconds. They’re tricky to relax. After them, move your attention to your eyes themselves. Relax those and the muscles controlling them for about fifteen seconds. Start at the front, then slowly move your attention all the way to the back to your eyeballs, then come to the front again.

Then relax your eyelids again. Then your nose, the muscles around the nose, and the top of your cheeks. Relax your mouth and tongue again. And voila! You’re done! You now have a completely relaxed face.

The different stages of relaxation

You’ll go from normally feeling parts of your body to not feeling them at all. There are a couple of stages in between too. They not only help you track your progress, but are quite enjoyable.

1. Heaviness

First you start feeling heaviness in parts of your body. Probably legs at first, and then arms, and then the rest.

The feeling of heaviness shows you that you are completely relaxed. The heaviness you feel is the pull of gravity on every cell of your body. It’s always there, you just normally don’t notice it because of tension in your muscles.

You could try feeling it right now. Just pick one of your arms, and relax it completely, from fingers to shoulder. Mentally go through the muscles one by one, starting with each finger, the palm, all the muscles in the forearm, the biceps, the triceps, and the muscles around your shoulder.

Go through all the muscles again. And after that focus on the gravity relentlessly pulling your arm down towards the ground. Give it about half a minute at first.

If you can’t feel the heaviness just yet, don’t worry about it. It’s hard to relax the muscles really well at first, let alone feel the heaviness.

There’s also an easier way to feel this. Next time you’re taking a bath, at the end, let the water run out while you simply lie there. You will already be warm and completely relaxed. As the water level slowly descends, the parts of your body that emerge above the water will feel incredibly heavy. This is exactly the feeling I’m talking about. (btw. ever since I read about this trick, I always do it when taking a bath. It’s fun!)

2. Warmth

Some time after the heaviness, you’ll also feel warmth in your body. You will likely start feeling it in your arms or legs first. This feeling of warmth is because your blood vessels are dilating. Your body has realized you’re not going anywhere, and it’s starting to enjoy the deep relaxation. You will wake up really refreshed and full of energy after this.

3. No feeling at all

This is the pinnacle. The motor neurons in your body have shut down, and now the sensory neurons reacting to touch are also shutting down. Your body has gone from standby mode (where you could jump up in a fraction of a second in case a sabre toothed tiger appeared in your bedroom doorway) into complete relaxation (where it would take you a second or two to get up).

It’s like your body has shut down for a reboot. It’s also why you will feel full of energy and totally awesome afterwards. You’re literally starting a new day as far as your body is concerned.

Oh, by the way, don’t worry if you still feel some bits of your body. It happens to me too. We’re not monks in some Tibetan temple, going partway is good enough for us. It’s also fun when I start feeling a remote part of my body because of some small movement I did. For example I could be feeling my foot… and nothing else until my torso. It’s like the foot is floating in mid-air. Fun stuff!

Odds and Ends about complete relaxation

Here are just a few bits and pieces that I didn’t fit in along the way.

1. If your mind starts to wander

You’re lying down, relaxing. You go through your whole body once. Then you go through it again, but the second time around, your mind starts to wander. You find it a bit hard to keep focus on the relaxation.

If this happens, don’t worry. Just let your mind wander. Chances are, it can use some rest too. If you just let it wander, it will come back to you in about 10-15 minutes, and when it does, you might notice that meanwhile you stopped feeling some parts of your body. Awesome!

When your mind starts to wander, that’s its own way of relaxing. After this, you will not only have a relaxed and alert body, but also the mind!

Enjoy the relaxation. And if you’re going to try this (or any of the other “incredibly awesome mind states”), leave a comment or drop me an e-mail at vlad.dolezal at the gmail. I’d like to know.

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