Relaxation as Spiritual Awakening
A simple exercise to get a felt sense of spiritual awakening. Also practical for moments of intensity and stress.
Tense your right arm. Clench your fist, engage your forearm and bicep. Squeeze tightly.
Now slowly, consciously release that tension. Put all your awareness on the feeling of relaxation. Go slow enough to hone in on what release feels like. Do it a few times. Try different parts of your body. The key is to understand somatically what relaxation feels like.
Now keep going in that direction. Once all the muscles are completely relaxed, keep going. What would it feel like to continue deeper? A relaxation of subtle tensions you’ve been holding subconsciously. Emotional tension. Energetic tension. What’s beyond that? How far can you go?
Close your eyes. Focus on the feeling of relaxation and opening. See how deep you can take it. Pay particular attention to your solar plexus - many people carry deep emotional or energetic tension there. See if you can relax it. Open it. Expand it.
Do this well and you may start to feel something like bungee jumping or a steep rollercoaster. Your stomach dropping in free fall. You are in free fall. The good news: there is no ground.
Keep breathing. Keep relaxing. Keep expanding. Keep opening.
This is a practical exercise for stress at work or in relationships. But it’s more than that. This feeling of openness is the direction of spiritual awakening.
The more open and expanded your felt sense, the larger your identification of self. The more contracted and tense, the more you identify with your human vessel. The notion of a “self” is a primal contraction - a coalescing of the particle-waves of reality into an individuated illusion.
I haven’t found an end to this direction of practice. Perhaps the ultimate destination is enlightenment.