YogaTools.com

A good recliner can be a fine place to have a period of rest and relaxation. Take a mini vacation from the hustle and bustle and find a half hour or forty minutes to just consciously rest and relax. It might not be as easy as you think. Our natural restlessness and desire to be accomplishing things can definitely get in the way. But it all can wait as you lie back and sink into the chair or bed or whatever affords the greatest comfort.

Rest and relaxation have a natural course to take with certain specific experiences as a part. Arms and legs get heavy. Hands, and maybe feet, become warmer. Head cools; mind settles down and becomes quieter. A gentle paralysis renders you immobile or disinclined to move. Sleep may come or may not perhaps depending on how tired we are. This is an altered state in that it is different from what we usually experience when we are conscious and awake.

Our cats and dogs are experts at this. We mostly likely are not. Our thoughts too often tell us to keep moving, stay active, get things accomplished. That is all well and good but there is this other side to our natural functioning and to indulge it, on occasion, is to find our balance and our capacity for healing.

Yoga and meditation have a long history and yet what we have come to know in the West now as yoga is really only the tip of the iceberg and a tip that has probably formed more recently than many realize. The ancient practice of yoga was much more meditative and contemplative, characterized by a stillness and deep awareness that sometimes can seem to be sorely lacking in our current practices. The ancient practitioners (including the Buddha, probably the most famous yogi and certainly the most influential) did not spend much time doing headstands, shoulder stands, spinal twists or contortionistic backbends. Not that they were unaware of their bodies, probably quite the contrary. They just managed to align, relax and adjust themselves with such ease, grace and subtlety that no one noticed or bothered to make much of it. Perhaps the ancients did not suffer the kinds of strains, tensions and distortions that we moderns do and so did not need the blatant exertions, like those seen in modern yoga classes, to correct the milder and fewer physical flaws they experienced.

Yoga, when it is truly inspired and rightly guided, can have a very different feel and look to it from the yoga that is practiced today. What has come down to us as traditional yoga is probably an amalgam of more recent developments and influences including, surprisingly enough, English gymnastics and calisthenics. Even the yoga we call Hatha was probably developed only in the last 500 or 600 years of Indian History. The more ancient practices of yoga and meditation go back 3 or 4 thousand years and probably even predate the Aryan invasions that occurred around 1500 BC. Some Indus Valley clay seals showing men seated in what appear to be meditation postures have been unearthed at sites in pre-Aryan, Indus Valley city-states.

Perhaps there is a happy middle way of practicing yoga today that lies somewhere between the exertions of a contemporary Hatha yoga practice and the more sedentary and contemplative style of the ancients. It may be especially important for those of us known as the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1960 and now in our 40’s, 50’s and older) to look for a kind of yoga that is easy, gentle and sensible. This yoga would be a more mature practice for a more mature person. It is certainly true that what may be suitable for an 18 year old or someone in their twenties may not be right or even desirable for those of us two or three times that age. Where the 18 or 20 year old may benefit and enjoy the powerful twists, bends and balances of a vigorous practice, the 55 and 60 year olds can just as easily be injured and strained by them. There must be an easier, subtler and even more therapeutic way to practice yoga, and there is.

A yoga practice can be guided by one’s own inner body sense of tension, stiffness, strain and distortion (the kinesthetic sense). Certain key muscle groups can, when tight and short, be prime culprits in creating our stressed and distorted bodies and addressing the issue of tightness and constriction in these muscles can be a large and effective part of a more mature yoga practice. A number of simple yoga tools can greatly enhance this kind of practice. Some of these tools can be found at my commercial web site at:

YogaTools.com - Relieve Tension, Stiffness, and Physical Distortions with Yoga Tools

Today I’m going to review a great online tutorial about trigger points:

Save Yourself From Trigger Points & Myofascial Pain Syndrome!

The tutorial is the work of Paul Ingraham, a Registered Massage Therapist from Vancouver, Canada. He publishes a large website with many articles and tutorials about common aches, pains and injuries. His writing style is clear and fun, and there’s a strong emphasis on science. In addition to more than 200 free articles on every imaginable topic related to pain problems, the site offers several really detailed tutorials for about $15-20 each, and there are several free sections at the start of each of them.

The trigger points tutorial seems to cover just about every imaginable aspect of trigger point pain. When I found the tutorial, I contacted Paul because I liked his writing style. He seemed like a kindred spirit. He responded immediately, which was nice, and we ended up doing a trade: I gave him some of my tools, and he gave me some of his tutorials. Paul actually recommends some of my own yoga tools in the tutorial. He particularly likes the Zubo! He was kind enough to say some very nice things about my products, so there’s a little tit for tat going on here!

Trigger points (muscle knots) are little patches of dysfunctional, clenching muscle that cause pain, stiffness and some stranger symptoms. According to Paul’s tutorial, they “cause most of the world’s aches and pains” and they are “not a flaky diagnosis, but hard science.” The big idea of the tutorial is that patients can get a surprising amount of bang for their buck by learning something about trigger points and how to treat them. A lot of health care professionals don’t know much about them, but they are fairly treatable and common.

“It’s a perfect storm,” Paul says. “I’ve pretty much devoted my career to educating patients about trigger points because they are such a perfect combination of clinical importance and manageability. It’s this incredible combination of a common problem that you can actually do something about. Knowing something about trigger points is a valuable life skill.”

The thing that really jumps out at me about Paul’s trigger point tutorial is the fairly mind-boggling amount of research he has done. It’s pretty incredible. It’s obvious that he does his homework. It’s obvious that he’s been doing it for many years.

And yet it’s not a boring or academic document. He keeps it surprisingly light and fun while simultaneously explaining a lot of physiology and pathology.

The link to Paul’s tutorial is the Save Yourself site on my blogroll.

I am rereading Herbert Benson’s book, The Relaxation Response, a book that originally appeared in 1975 and has sold upwards of four million copies worldwide. What might have sparked so much interest in this book is the fact that it was based on scientific research, done by a Harvard doctor and researcher, into the nature of relaxation. Relaxation is a natural capacity we all have. It is as natural to rest and to relax deeply as it is to be tensed and stressed.

But, while tension and stress we often know so well, where is that capacity for real rest and relaxation? By studying people who practiced Transcendental Meditation, and then looking into other kinds of meditation, contemplation or relaxation techniques, Benson developed a simplified system that contained the essential elements he thought necessary for relaxation. Those essential elements number four and I call them the “Four Pillars of Relaxation.”

1/ Peace and Quiet. We need a quiet place. We also need some free time, free from the usually demands that are made on us. But undisturbed free time is often hard to come by. In our busy and hectic lives it can almost be impossible, during most of the day, to find any real open, undisturbed, free time for pure rest and relaxation. And even if we found 10 or 15 minutes of that kind of time, we probably would spend it thinking about all the things that need to be done or attended to. I like to say that relaxing is the easiest thing to do in the world and the hardest. What could be easier than to do nothing, to rest and relax? And what could be harder?

2/ Mental Focus. We need to rein in our thoughts but in a very gentle and mild way. A word or phrase constantly repeated and returned to in our thoughts is recommended. Even viewing an external object or listening to a pleasant and repetitive sound can help focus our minds. Too much mental activity precludes much relaxation. Our minds are likely to race around, dash here and there, and we need to bring some order and focus to this kind of functioning. So learning to gently focus and to concentrate the mind is often necessary when learning to relax. But eventually, once some skill is attained in this art and practice of relaxation, there is no further need to hold onto anything in your mind. With relaxation it naturally tends to quiet down and go peacefully along for the ride.

3/ A Passive Attitude. Benson suggests that this might be the most important of the requirements for relaxation. This is a sense of surrender. We surrender to that natural capacity we have to rest and relax. Surrender to the fatigue and the sense of tension. Let fatigue and tension have its way with you. Don’t fight it. Give in. Desire, drive, ambition get in the back seat for awhile and remain quiet. We are going nowhere and doing nothing for a half-hour or more and that is all there is to it.

4/ A Comfortable Position. Staying still and being in a comfortable position helps us to relax. Lying on your back in bed or in a soft and supportive reclining chair may be the best and most conducive positions for relaxation. Feel the softness and support beneath and enjoy the feeling. Sink into the bed; feel glued to the chair. That sense of heaviness, the weight of your body against the bed or chair, overwhelms and for a little while you can hardly move and certainly don’t want to. This is ease like you never knew before. You may fall asleep and I know no rules against it, but you may just as likely stay conscious and awake and enjoy the feelings of peace and ease and rest.

This is the Relaxation Response and the four pillars that support it. It is our perfectly natural antidote to stress, tension, and arousal. And more than any pill or medical procedure it can redeem and save our lives.

A few sentences from a friend and then a reply:

I think many intellectuals have wrecked their brains/minds also. You should invent a ‘roller’ for the brain/mind and teach people how to relax that muscle.
~Don

I think that stage comes eventually as the body learns to relax and release. Part of the program is the stretching, lengthening, and massaging of tight, short muscles and creating better alignment of the joints. You could call that the hatha yoga. It is a mildly vigorous activity. But coming out of that kind of practice is also the ability to rest and relax, to overcome stress, agitation, worry, frenetic activity, restlessness. In terms of the autonomic nervous system you are moving away from sympathetic control towards the parasympathetic. If the ancient Indians (in India) knew more about our science of physiology, they likely would have expressed it this way. You are uncovering a natural capacity for rest, ease, and peacefulness (but perhaps have to dismantle something to get there).

On a very fundamental level, the level of autonomic nerves, our functioning is a pendulum swinging between activity and rest. There is a balance to be struck, but for many of us the pendulum is impeded in one direction or another. My interest is when it is impeded towards rest and relaxation. We call that being stressed. The symptoms are tension, aches, pains, agitation, restlessness, emotional upset, the feeling of being aroused, anxious, tired, or disturbed. We might be prone to sickness because eventually our immune system weakens and breaks down after periods of prolonged stress. We probably lose the awareness that there is a natural state of rest and relaxation to enjoy, we forget that the potential and the capacity for rest, relaxation and healing is also part of our make up. The demands of work, parenting, leading a responsible life take their toll and certainly make it difficult to find the time or the inclination for rest and relaxation. But it is the indulgence of that natural capacity (for rest and relaxation) that many of us need to experience in order to bring some balance back into our lives.
~Allan