You Can Conquer Cancer: The ground-breaking self-help manual including nutrition, meditation and lifestyle management techniques. Ian Gawler
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by doing our relaxation exercises when we go to bed. When you get into bed at night, spend five minutes, perhaps ten, doing your relaxation. This is important. If you have muscular tension when you get into bed, your body is like a spring and you will spend half the night unwinding. Researchers have observed people sleeping and documented the muscles of tense people struggling to unwind. In a series of jerks and twists, the body tries to get itself relaxed. For some people this can take most of the night and so they wake up without having much profitable relaxed sleep. So do spend a few minutes before you go to sleep and practice the progressive muscle relaxation exercise. As you get that good relaxed feeling all through, you will find that you can put yourself to sleep. You could well find that you need less sleep than you used to, as well as waking feeling the better for it.
In chronic stress situations, however, while sleep may provide some relief, it changes very little. We wake up with the same problems and responses that accompanied us to sleep. We need to look further.
Exercise
Exercise is well worth considering. In the right amounts, it helps to relax physical tension by tiring the muscles and so creating a natural form of relaxation. Also, it certainly invigorates and makes the body feel better, as well as being well proven to relieve depression, promote well-being and aid the healing process generally. Exercise warrants being a feature of our healing program and more detail on the best forms of exercise for recovery comes in the next chapter.
Hobbies and Holidays
These can be very pleasant diversions. They also provide an opportunity to relax, to release and to let go a little. They can certainly aid our general level of well-being. They are well worth considering, but frequently they produce little change in our overall situation.
Meditation and Deep Relaxation
The practice of meditation has the potential to produce the most profound and effective levels of deep relaxation. Another reason the specific meditation technique we recommend for healing works so well is that it starts with deep physical relaxation. Then, relaxing the mind enhances the effect.
However, let us be clear about this. While meditating once or even three times a day is clearly beneficial, if we get up from our meditation and spend the rest of the day just as tense and uptight as ever, the benefits will be relatively small. What we need is to take the relaxation, along with the calm and clear mind, from the meditation into our daily life.
This is most important. The relaxation we feel during our formal meditation periods needs to become a way of life for us. We need to aim to be as relaxed as possible because except when we are faced with an immediate threat, relaxation is our hallmark of the balance we seek.
This is not to say we will be sluggish or lethargic. On the contrary, we will react quickly and be sharp and alert but, like the cat, be relaxed at the same time. There are a number of ways to achieve this.
Integrating Relaxation into Daily Life
The Automatic Flow-On Effect
As you begin meditating, you will notice the calm you feel during your formal sessions of practice remains with you for a short while after. Meditating regularly in this way throughout the day enhances this effect, so that one session’s benefits soon begin to flow on to the next. This is why it is useful to spread a number of meditation sessions throughout the day. While initially you will seem to have good and bad sessions, soon you will notice a cumulative effect that means you get more benefit from each experience of meditation.
This effect can be increased still further by improving the quality of the meditation and by becoming more aware of relaxation throughout the day.
Speeding Up the Process of Relaxation
Initially, as we learn to relax and meditate, the progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) is a very helpful technique. Using the physical act of contracting muscles and letting them go leads to a very reliable experience of relaxation and helps us to appreciate what it feels like to be deeply relaxed. But we can then progress and learn to relax more quickly and, in fact, more deeply. Here is how we do it.
The next step is to experience the same level of relaxation we did through using the full PMR, only this time we do so without physically contracting the muscles. We simplify and speed up the process. So now, we focus our attention on the muscles in each area of the body, and using the same sequence as we did with the PMR, this time we feel those muscles relaxing without having contracted them first. Once we have mastered this step and can feel that same deeply relaxed body we felt with the first technique, we go even further.
Now we learn to relax the legs as one unit, rather than the feet, then the calves and the thighs. We learn to relax the torso as another “block,” and then the head and neck. Ultimately, it is like we can sit to meditate, bring our attention to our bodies, and, almost like throwing a switch, feel the whole body relax as one unit. Now we have arrived at that ultimate point where we do not even need to spend time relaxing individual areas. We can just sit down and feel a wave of relaxation move throughout the body, producing that total, deep calm.
However, there is no hurry to speed up the procedure. We need to feel confident at each phase before advancing. The accent is on ease. No effort, no striving, just a natural progression to a faster, easier way. Again, the point to emphasize is that we arrive at the end point where the body will be deeply relaxed and so will the mind. If we do need to employ the PMR exercise to achieve this, we do so. If we can relax just as effectively but more quickly, we do so.
Using Discomfort to Deepen Relaxation
Once we begin to develop the capacity to relax at will, we are ready to use a more uncomfortable starting position. What, more discomfort? Yes, just a little at a time. Why? Well, a measured element of discomfort makes the physical relaxation a little harder to achieve and this makes us focus more on what we are doing. Undoubtedly, this in turn heightens the effect of the meditation. It is like when you go to the gym, work out, and develop your physical muscles. Here, we develop our “relaxation” muscles. You really do need to try this, the results will be obvious.
The suggestion is that if you began learning to relax and meditate in an armchair, once the technique is working well, try it in an armless chair. The change is very little, but I am sure you will notice a different effect. Once you are comfortable with that and it has become easy and effortless, go on to trying it on a stool. Harder still, but still fairly easy and, again, a greater benefit. Then you could go on to experiment with sitting cross-legged on the floor, or going outdoors. In the open air the sounds and smells increase the potential distractions while adding to the naturalness of it.
In my own situation, I generally meditate sitting cross-legged on the floor or on a chair in the morning and at lunchtime. My back can often be tired after a day on one leg, so frequently I lie on a hard surface in the evening, as this allows it to relax better. I notice that lying down produces more benefit in terms of relaxing my body, but there is no doubt sitting cross-legged produces a better overall effect, particularly when it comes to the mind.
Using Imagery to Focus Relaxation—The Radiant Light Imagery Exercise
We will be examining the benefits and techniques of imagery in chapters 8 and 9; however, when it comes to deepening our relaxation and meditation, there is a particular form of imagery that is easy to learn and can be of great benefit. This is what we call the “radiant light” imagery exercise. This is an “extra” technique worth experimenting with. If you warm to it and find it helpful, continue on with it; if not, simply move on to the next step. What you may discover is that this exercise has the added advantage of leading on to a heightened body awareness. Using this technique you will be in better touch with your body and more responsive to its messages. Similarly you will be able to control it better.
To practice this technique takes around thirty minutes. It can be done in any position, but I find this particular exercise does work best if you lie down on a hard surface. The floor is ideal. Choose a carpeted area, or place a blanket underneath yourself to begin with. Lie flat on your back, hands loosely by your sides. Legs should be out straight, just