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A simple path to relaxation. Who doesn't want to be relaxed? What won't we do for it? We will pay a lot of hard-earned money on flight tickets and expensive resorts just to get away from our normal life and relax. We will submerge ourselves in boiling bubbling water, let people manipulate our muscles, use candles, drugs, music, and who knows what else just to relax, to forget about our troubles and smile a bit. So what if I tell you that we are completely missing the point by doing all of these things just to relax? Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that all of that is bad for you, or not necessary. What I am saying is that all of these 'therapies' are pointless in the matter of relaxation. Such therapies are all good ways to spend time, to be together with friends or lovers, and maybe, on a good day, they are also a way for a temporary local relaxation. But these activities are not a solution, and we find over and over again that the tension comes back and we very soon forget all about being relaxed. We find ourselves back in heavy traffic, in front of the annoying boss or kids or waiter, but there will be no hot water to soak our troubles away. We look for solutions from outside, but these are not really effective or permanent in solving the problems from the outside world as we perceive and experience it. Our outside reality is unable to solve itself. These methods or therapies, as you already know, are only a treat after a long day (or even year) of being tense. They are not a solution for the day (or year) that comes after. But don't worry there is a solution! Or maybe not! Yes, I know it is a little bit confusing, but sometimes the truth is. In the next few paragraphs I will try to explain what I mean by this statement (and don't worry, I promise the following paragraphs will not be as pessimistic as the introduction  - they will be very optimistic). There is a way to become more relaxed and it is very easy - it doesn't involve any pain, loss of money, or 7 years in Tibet! Actually, it is so easy and under our noses that this is exactly the problem. Again I may seem confusing, so let us just begin. Understanding the problem. The way I see it, those so called 'relaxation solutions' and therapies will not really help us to relax because they are not really relaxing - they just give us an illusion of relaxation because in their nature they are happen in a relaxed environment (because we arranged it), and therefore in the same moment they make us think that we are relaxed or becoming relaxed. These therapies to help us relax are just illusions because life is not one big Jacuzzi and not one long vacation on the beach.
A wise man once told me I shouldn't try to be happy in a temple in the Himalaya, but in a 1 bedroom apartment downtown with two children and a mortgage. And you will probably say 'of course, but at least it help us relax for a little while' and I would say no - it helps us lie to our selves that it did. Real relaxation is not about a sunny beach and a beer. It is about being stuck in a traffic jam, running late, trying to renew your insurance on the phone having waited on hold for 40 minutes, to be then hung up on just as you see a passing scooter swiping past your mirror and... to smile! And when the girl from the insurance company answers on your second attempt, real relaxation is to be nice to her, telling her 'good morning'. A real relaxation is an inner thing, it suppose to follow us where ever we go and to be part of our permanent reality and not an outside temporary environment which we created in order to make us think we can be like that all the time, we won't unless it will be part of us, an inner understanding that will help us stay relax all the time or at least most of it (without a need for candles, a spliff or pink floyd). And this where I get to the point of the 'maybe no solution', and by saying that I mean that we, and when I say we I mean the western society or all of us who were born and razed in the west, we are screwed! We are screwed because we were growned and educated from age 0 in a very tensed environment where everybody were running nervous around us and had no time and had to be quick. We grow up in a society which believes that the right way is not with a guitar on the grass but with a laptop on the subway or on the plane on the way and up the steps without a break. Many of us lived (and still are) in big cities (and even small) which never stops, full of traffic and pollution and people who are so nervous they forgot to look in each other eyes. We saw it and felt it since we were babies, it is burn in us and we are programmed to act like this. Some of us got it a bit and some of us (mostly men) got it a lot and it might never change. I am not saying there is no hope I am just saying you should let go of this solution idea. Trying to fight it will only add more tension to your life and you don't want that. Letting go of it means that for the meanwhile you should forget about trying to relax and to forgive yourself for not being relaxed. We will discus it later on again. For now just let go. The way I see it every problem in life should come in 3 steps - awareness, frustration and improvement. On the first step - the awareness we are starting to recognize that there is a problem, it might been there for a long time before but we didn't see it, didn't want to know about it. In the awareness stage we come to a point where we admit to our self that we have a problem. After a while, after we played with it in our mind and looked on this problem from different angles and times we usually are trying to make the first attempt to solve it. If it a serious problem, we probably don't succeed. Than comes the second step - frustration. We don't like not to succeed, and when it repeats it self time after time (usually we try to solve problems more than once, sometimes hundreds of times, years) we become more and more despair of it, feeling the failure burns in our bones. In the case
we are dealing here this stage has even a double responsibility because this stage adds a lot of tense into our life. We try to relax but don't succeed and it make us angry, we don't like not to succeed and we get nervous we might never will. This is just feeding the problem more. As well, being pushed to the corner like that by us make us want even more to solve the problem. Sometimes the frustration become so strong and major in our life that it is actually critical for us to solve the issue, which bring us to the third step - improvement. Most problems come at some point to some solution. It might not completely answer it or won't be total but it will be an improvement nothing is perfect right? The questions are how close to perfection can we get, and how long will it take us? To answer that I will go back to the first step of solving a problem - awareness, because from there we can choose a different path which will take us to a beautiful place of relaxation. Awareness. What is it? Awareness is knowing. Awareness is concentration in reality or part of it. It is to give attention. It could be to anything and we are aware of things all the time. You might be aware now to this article or to the noise outside or to the fact that you have to go somewhere soon, but the most important awareness you should have is to yourself, feeling yourself in a present moment is mostly important for personal development, Actually critical, some of us got a lot of it and some of us got none but we all can (and really should) try to improve it and grow it all the time. It will help us see things as they are and therefore will help us to really deal with them. It will also be a very beautiful and true reason to live this life. I mean, you all probably thought once or twice what is the purpose of our life? What the hell are we doing here? I will not try to answer it but I will just say that in the meanwhile (while we are trying to find divine answers to the universe) there is a developing creature in our hands which really like to be happy and complete but being stopped and smacked by reality so many times that it gave up a bit, yes, this beautiful creature is us and we have an amazing tool in this life to help our self grow and develop - the self awareness. They are many ways to develop awareness and self awareness and I will discuss them later. One great way is to meditate, they are a few methods of meditation and I will explain and guide for some of them later on. But now you might freak out a bit, asking yourself am I aware of myself or not? It is a very good question because it holds a paradox in it, means - How would I will be aware to myself if I am not aware to the fact that I am not aware to myself? By being not aware I will never know I am not aware (I won't be aware of it) right? The fool don't know he is a fool because he is too fool, he is probably sure he is a genius right? Well I have good news for you! You are not a fool! You know how I know? Because of the simple fact that you are reading this right now, not only that but you looked for the subject and found something which interested you. That means you already have awareness in you which made you see a problem. You are already in good hands of yourself! The only thing you did wrong (or just not right) is that you didn't focus that awareness of yours to the right direction because as we said before being aware to the fact that we are not relaxed and not being able to solve it just make us more nervous. So, what is this awareness good
for? How would it help us anyway? By focusing it on our body. I will try to make it more simple, in order to improve our relaxation in life we should forget about trying to relax and start being aware to our body. Yes, our body. This machine made of blood and fat and bones which move us around and express us and collect information and energy for us. This beautiful machine holds a lot of answers in it; it tells us a lot of stories about ourselves and could help us improve our inner life in many ways. In this article we are discussing relaxation so we are going to leave the rest. In the next few paragraphs I will explain how our body has everything to do with relaxing our mind and how you can use it to become more relax, it is really easy and all it takes from you is the will to do it. Tense in the body. As I said before, we are screwed! The western world destroyed our soft souls with pressure and fast lanes. For years on years we had being taught that the right way is the quick way, the way we compress as much as more into as much as less and than stuck it in a sandwich on our way to work. We learned that strong is better, tuff is beautiful (and manly), big muscles are sexy and not eating is good for us, we learned to be tensed. But not only us learned that, also our body been traumatized by the cold fast world. It learned that in order to be beautiful it has to be fit, men's body learned they must be tuff, strong and stiff in order to look like a man body and women's body learned they must torture there self with anger in order to look sexy and beautiful. Our bodies suffered with us all a long the way. Slowly slowly, our bodies developed movements which were copies or illusions of what is right, or, how a body suppose to act in the western world, and what our bodies learned out there on the street, in our homes from our family, from TV and school is that the body in the western world suppose to be tensed. As an example I will tell you a short story from my own (and maybe of every other man in western society today). A few years ago I started being aware to a pain in my back. This pain was returning in the same specific point - right under my right shoulder and it drove me crazy! I could not figure out why it happens, coming back in different times and different occasions without any pattern or logic. It took me a couple of years to realize the reason, and it is because many years before, while I was still just young child I looked around me to see how men are looking. I knew I am a man (or at least going to be) and wished to learn how men act and look, like any other child I asked to copy. So I looked around and saw my dad and my uncles, I saw bigger kids in school and action heroes on TV and they were all big, muscular and with wide shoulders. I looked and looked but could not see a man which is appreciate by society as a "real man" who wasn't strong and tuff. All TV shows were full of successful men who were high, muscular and with wide strong shoulders. No skinny kid like me was saving the world at that time. So of course I understood what I have to do - In order to be a real man I must be like them - strong, tuff with muscles, wide chase and strong wide shoulders, and than I started with the exactly opposite process of the one I will talk about soon... First came the shoulders. "I need strong shoulders" I thought to my self, So on one day and without almost noticing I started holding my shoulders tied. At beginning it was hard, my muscles weren't strong enough yet and I was dropping my shoulders a lot, forgetting about the mission... But it was important to me - I had to be a real man so I insisted, kept on picking them up, stiffing the muscle around them, looking tuff... Slowly it stopped hurting, my
muscle were strong enough to hold my shoulders tied for as long as I liked, it became an automated thing - holding my shoulders like that. Very soon I even forgot about my decision to do it, the new movement in my shoulders became a part of me. The reason it hurt me only on the right side is hiding in the fact that I am left handed and my entire left side of my body is stronger therefore it get less tired and the left back muscles hurt less. This is just one clear example how can a person and society around him change his body movement in a way which will create permeate tense in it. This theory can go much more complexed and talk about the relationships the body (and it pains) has with our mind and soul. It can go all the way to the fact that many tensed organs in our body are actually signing us on inner issues we have. In our case now I will try to keep it simpler than that but will be happy to answer any question if anyone has. Back to my story, that was only the beginning of course, many things became stiff after that. Legs and arms lower back, stomach and chase. The stress devil was partying! The relaxation was crying in the closet! I was a western man! All of this is nice, you probably say, but what it has to do my mind relaxation, inner relaxation? It has everything to do with it!!! From body to mind. After being aware of the fact that we has organs in our body which are in permet stress, tensed all the time. We should practice on relaxing them. It will take time. It is hard to relax an organ which wasn't relaxed for most of it life. You will relax it and it will return to be stressed, again you will relax and again stress... Remind you something? The frustration step! Yay! Well nobody promised it is going to be easy... But I can promise you one thing - after the second step always comes (If you don't give up) the third step - improvement. They are methods and techniques to practice body awareness and body relaxation; you can learn them and improve your control on your body. To some people it takes very quick and for some a little bit more, it dispense on how much damage has been done (how many years of unawareness) and how open are you to make changes/ With the ability to relax your body you will receive to great gifts: The first - Your body will be relaxed... You will spend less energy in general and on every action you will do, your body will feel more comfortable and many body pains will despair, back pains will reduce with shoulders release, headache and even migraine will despair after releasing hard neck or jar, digestion problems might be solved just by releasing stomach muscles who thought many years ago that by pushing in they will look more beautiful... Sounds amazing right? Well believe it or not this is the less important gift! The second - by learning and practicing to relax your body's organs you are actually practicing to relax your mind. The command that your brain send to your organ in order to relax it (hey leg stop jumping!) is the same command it send to itself when you are trying to relax. Trying to relax a tied shoulders or a twisted jar is exactly the same as trying to relax a mind. Sounds weird? I know, that is because you are used to think of body and mind as two different things, stop thinking like that, they are combined together and holds answers and each other secrets and one of those secrets is
that relaxing a leg of a mind, a shoulder or a soul is the same. By being aware to your body and to it tenses, you will slowly start to release it by just using your mind and by doing that, you will teach and practice your mind how to relax. It is a circle of influence that completes our mind and body into one. By improving our ability to relax body organs we are also improving our ability to relax our mind, because it is exactly the same ability. It is easier to start from our body where we can see the tense and actually feel it as a specific feeling in a physical point; it is easier to start practicing relaxing that. Then we can take this tool we developed and use it inside, where the stress feeling is general and much more abstract. There are ways and techniques to do so, mostly working on improving awareness. They are simple, you can do it, all you need is to want to. Visit my site for more information, therapy techniques, awareness exercises and relaxation practices.
[http://www.k-atarim.com/relaxit/relax-inside.html]
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==== ==== RELAX YOURSELF WITH GUIDED MEDITATION: http://www.nullrefer.com/aHR0cDovLzFkNGJmZTU5bmptbjVtNmhxa3NjaDUyejM0LmhvcC5jbGlja 2JhbmsubmV0Lw==.shtml ==== ====