Relaxation – Key to Healing
by Gordon Artrias Rosenberg
We each have within us a natural ability to relax, but most of us forget. We live in stressful times; perhaps more stressful than ever. Stress, and its harmful effects on body and mind, is said to be a major cause in as much as 90% of all illness! This seems reason enough to learn how to relax and control the effects of stress and tension.
Relaxation may be the key to the entire healing process. If you aren’t relaxed, the body isn’t able to sense itself enough to be healthy. When you relax, the body can heal itself, or at least it can allow healing to happen, in conjunction with other healing modalities. Whatever you’re doing for your body now, it will be very supportive if you learn to relax. When you relax, your body has a chance to function efficiently and in a healthy way, as it was intended to function.
When we relax deeply, we let go of places where we’ve held unwanted energies or emotions, we rid ourselves of chronic tension and stress, and we get in touch with places where we need to heal on a very deep level. Why don’t we all just be relaxed then, if it’s so good for us? Usually, because we’ve taken on such negative conditioning from our stressful environment that we don’t even remember how to relax our bodies and minds deeply. We carry so much tension and stress in our bodies that we can’t get in touch with places that need to release these harmful conditions. We have to learn to relax all over again, before we can sense our bodies enough to let go of anything.
How do we accumulate such potentially harmful energy in our bodies? Often, we take on other people’s stresses and emotions. We hold this fear, grief, pain, etc. deep in our bodies. We carry it around with us, not knowing the cause or the solution. These things become imbedded in our bodies as memories, thoughts, beliefs about ourselves, emotional stress, and other forms of distress. All this negativity stays stuck inside, until we do something to release it, or until it makes us sick. If we’re to be healthy, we must learn to release this negativity before it takes a major toll on us.
How can you get in touch with your body enough to discover and release these harmful conditions? There are many ways to learn to relax the body, including lots of forms of exercise, meditation, yoga, tai chi, etc. My particular focus is the area of deep relaxation techniques. This area has gotten considerable attention in recent decades, getting a major boost from books such as Dr. Herbert Benson’s “The Relaxation Response” and Dr. Bernie Siegel’s “Love, Medicine and Miracles”, Dr. Emmett Miller’s wonderful “Letting Go Of Stress” tape series, and many, many others. As a culture, we’re finally seeing the obvious connection between relaxation and better health. We’re realizing that relaxation is much more than ‘crashing’ on the couch watching tv. And we’re learning how realization itself is a wonderful antidote to pain and illness.
