Setting The Stage To Meditate

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A Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity discussion topic

Copyright 2006 by K. Ferlic,   All Rights Reserved

 
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All meditations essentially start the same way. We need to take a few moment to relax. This, of course, brings up the question, “What exactly do we mean by relaxed?” To be relaxed, both our body and our mind, is close to the point of allowing ourselves to fall asleep.

To fall asleep, we need to be free from the tension and worries of the day in both mind and body. The mental processes and especially the imagination and that aspect of our being that gets us close to the origin of our thoughts works best when the body and mind are loose. By loose we mean something beyond freedom from tension. What we refer to is much like that flexible and nonrigid body of a very young child and the spontaneity of the play of a child’s mind.

To help us to loosen up and become relaxed, the traditional method has two parts. The first is to calm the mind and this is normally done by focusing our attention and awareness on our breathing. All that needs to be done is to focus our attention and awareness on our breathing. It is to focus on the flow of air as it enters our body and leaves our body. We feel the air expanding our lungs and bring in as full a chest and diaphragm of air that we can. We hold it for a moment and slowly releasing the air, following it as it goes out of our body and feel our diaphragm gently push the air out of our lungs as completely as possible. We only need to do it a few times or until we find our mind relaxing and letting go of all those squirrels that are running around in the cage. As we focus our mind this way, we may also find that the muscles of our body begins to let go of some of the tensions that they may be carrying. After we have done that a few times, we continue to breath in this fashion and turn our mental attention to our body.

The second part is to calm the body. As a starting point to relax our body, we choose some part of the body and it doesn’t matter what we choose. At a comfortable pace, we focus our awareness on that body part and being to move our attention and awareness over our entire body releasing any tension that we may feel in any part. As we release the tension we may even find thoughts or images arises as to the nature of the cause of the tension, Or, they represent some aspect of our being that is associated with that tension. For example, start with the toes. As you continue your breathing, at a comfortable pace, bring our attention to toes. Then move up the foot into the body slowly bringing our attention and awareness to the ankle, the calves, the knees, the thighs, the hips, the genitals, the abdomen and lower back, the solar plexus and the middle back, the chest and upper back, the heart, the shoulders and the connecting back muscles, down to the upper arms, the elbows, the fore arm, the hands, the fingers, back up the arms to the neck, the jaw, the noses, around the eyes, the forehead, over to the ears, the back of the head, the top of the head.

Having relaxed the mind and body, we are then ready to move into the meditation technique of our choice. It does need to be noted, that how much of this process we need to do to relax and loosen our body and mind is unique to us and we should use what is effective for us. That is, we are both comfortable with the process and we are getting the results that we desire. For some, just sitting and choosing to relax is sufficient. For others, the conscious relaxation process described here is essential. One way to see how relaxed we are is to see how fast we can fall asleep when we are not tired from either lack of sleep or having done exhausting work. On this note, exhausting work and exercise are sometimes quite useful to help us to relax and remove body tension.

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