Roads to Relaxation

Mike George offers visualisation and meditation as pathways back to a more relaxed lifestyle. (Extracted from the book Learn to Relax)

Personal Mythologies

When we are children, our developing picture of self is determined by what we hear about ourselves: "What a beautiful girl,” or “He is very shy.” The culture of home is the foundation of our self-image. Our parents’ and friends’ comments about us form the first labels that we give ourselves, and help to provide the basis for our outlook and behaviour.

As a result, we each have an internal committee of voices. Whenever we want to try something new or difficult, we subliminally recall the legacy of opinions: “Don’t do that, you might hurt yourself,” “I wouldn’t try anything so ambitious,” and so on. Such simple statements fashion our expectations of ourselves, and can make us fear the consequences of our action.

We not only listen to such voices; we also embellish them. We create myths about ourselves that explain our behaviour. A parental comment such as “He’s very shy” can become “My parents favoured my brother and neglected me, so I have always been very shy.” Or, “She finds it very hard to make friends” becomes “I can’t form relationships because my parents always quarrelled.” We use our mythologies to gain sympathy and affection: as reasons to opt out of projects that we find daunting; and to explain our failures. But our anthology of mythical excuses serves only to perpetuate self-doubt.

To be totally honest about ourselves, avoiding the temptation to mythologize, is difficult, but it is the only route to self-understanding. Self-knowledge lies deep within, at our "centre". Meditation is the one route there, stilling the mind to let us focus on our inner needs and unabridged. Visualisation exercises, such as the one below, can also help free the mind of illusion and encourage clear insights into positive aspects of the self.

A Voyage to the Centre of the Self

Personal understanding lies far beneath the surface of the self, a great distance from the clamouring voices of labels and personal mythologies. We might call this place our “centre”, the true core of who we are. This visualisation will help you to locate your own place of truth.

• 1. Sit comfortably in a quiet room. Close your eyes and breathe deeply for a few moments. Concentrate on stilling your mind.
• 2. Imagine that you are floating in a warm ocean. Sunlight falls on your shoulders. You drift without effort.
• 3. Now you are gently swimming beneath the ocean surface, feeling increasingly calmed by the water’s caresses. Just beneath you, the wreck of a galleon is visible. This is the outer shell of your psyche.
• 4. As you approach, you see that the ship’s woodwork has rotted. You swim in through an opening. The further into the galleon you swim, the cleaner and brighter the water becomes.
• 5. At the centre of the ship, unspoilt, lies a chest of precious objects, each one an aspect of your true self. Spend time re-discovering yourself. Pick up each object and reflect on its meaning. A coin might represent your honesty, a chalice your generosity. Swim back to the surface, relaxed in the knowledge of your worth.

Inner Space

There is nothing mysterious or difficult about meditation. Many people believe that they would be unable to practise the art, because it would require the dedication and spirituality of an Eastern ascetic. Anything that we perceive as difficult, may of course, turn out to be difficult, in a self-fulfilling prophecy. But meditation is really a sophisticated version of something that many of us do quite naturally from time to time – that is, become lost in thought. If we applied ourselves to the discipline, we would undoubtedly because as spiritually effective as a Buddhist monk. However, we can achieve beneficial levels of relaxation without going that far.

Like a desktop, the mind can become strewn with so much information and detritus that we are unable to find our way to the bottom of the disorder and so function effectively. We clutter our minds with experiences, worries, regret, negative self-images, memories, actions, reactions, emotions, analyses, hopes and fears – all in a protean stream of consciousness. Every time we do or say anything, or have anything done or said to us, we add another distraction, and our true self gets buried deeper and deeper.

Meditation is intended not to stop us thinking altogether (this really would be extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible), but to help us to order the confusion. Through meditation we can begin to focus upon constructive thoughts, and start to discover positive images and ideas of ourselves. When we become lost in thought, we tend to day dream about a better future; or we might reflect upon a problem in order to prompt a range of possible solutions. Meditation aims to do the same thing, but in a more purposeful way: it maintains its focus on the subject, whereas a daydream might wander off along a random target. By relaxing our minds through meditation, we can clear our desks and experience a renewed sense of self. This will bring with it identity, clarity and freedom, in a cascade of revelationary thinking.

Knowing who we really are is at the heart of our potential for contentment. If that esense of our identity is based on other people’s opinions, or on the pressures that others place upon us, then our self-esteem runs out of our control, rising or falling at the will or whim of others, like a thread of mercury in a thermometer.

Meditation can gently steer us away from this emotional dependency to put us back in charge of our own lives. By helping to restore a true relationship with ourselves, it gives us a firm footing on which to establish strong and equitable relationships with other people.

Such is our addiction to action, we may find ourselves saying that we don’t have time for inward reflection – or that it is self-indulgent. We feel that we will lose our dignified sense of purpose if we are not constantly doing – helping, building, improving, moving forward. However, these are precisely the circumstances when our real needs become obscured, blurred by our own momentum. Time spent organising our inner self is time gained for clarity and fulfilment.

Many of us hardly spend a single minute thinking about ourselves – or if we do, our thoughts may tend to be selfishly calculating. Meditation is unselfish, as its aims are to be better, or purify ourselves so that we may live happier, healthier lives, which impact upon all those around us.

As a first step towards meditation, practise the exercise which follows – a basic visualisation, in which the mind imagines a vivid inward journey. Words or syllables may be used in meditation (a mantra may be chanted to still the mind), but there are definite benefits in using visual techniques, which may more readily solve the problem of what the mind should do if it is not to flit randomly over our preoccupations.

Meditation has been practised for thousands of years in Eastern cultures. It has take taken different forms, but its essence remains the same – to find inner peace so that our adventures in the world are calm, contented and purposeful.

A Five-step Meditation

• 1. Withdraw energy mentally from everything around you – not to reject or resist, but to turn your attention inwards. You might think of how a tortoise withdraws into its shell to detach itself from the outside world, but carrying the experience of the world with it inside its shelter.
• 2. Create a point of consciousness. Focus on the centre of your forehead. Think of this point as a radiant star. This will transmit positive energy, making you feel good about yourself.
• 3. Affirm the positive energy through positive thoughts and images about yourself, such as “I am a conscious being, “or “I am a peaceful soul.”
• 4. Focus your energy on peace and let this become the object of your meditation. As you focus, you will give peace life, turning a thought into a feeling.
• 5. Experience this feeling by “watering” it with your full attention. This is the beginning of self-realisation through meditation.

Extracted from Learn to Relax by Mike George. Published by Duncan Beard Publishing in the UK and Chronicle in the USA. See Relax Resources/Room 5 in this website.

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