Relaxation in Meditation

Hello, my name is Michelle, and welcome to episode 13 on Relaxation in Meditation.

This episode is an invitation to relax and come into attunement with your body, with your embodied sensorial experience.

And so we'll be learning through our experience, our embodied experience.

We're not learning to relax through thinking.

So, instead of our usual silent meditation at the opening. In this episode, I will guide a 20-minute deep relaxation guided meditation to help us establish an embodied experience of relaxed sitting meditation. But the guided meditation will come in the second half of this episode.

Defining Relaxation
Before I start the guided meditation, I want to share the significance of relaxation in meditation. And relaxation in meditation basically means the end of trying to do anything.

And at the same time, relaxation in meditation is not passive. It doesn't mean falling into rumination or into unconscious patterns.

It doesn't mean falling asleep, but instead, it's about becoming awakened.

It's a kind of relaxation that is fully awakened and present. Fully Being.

So the invitation is, if you feel tired during relaxation in meditation, it means that you are actually tired in reality, and you need to rest or sleep.

So please don't practice deep relaxation meditation when you're feeling tired, because meditation is not the time or place to sleep. It's about awakening to present moment experience.

So I'd also like to say a bit about the purpose of relaxation in meditation.

What we want to do in meditation is prevent the thinking discursive mind from hijacking our presence in the moment. So to stop that happening, we use our awareness of our physical body to help us stay present and aware.

Through deep relaxation, we tune into and amplify our sensorial experience of the body.

And by that, I mean, we bring our sensorial faculty, our sensation faculty, into the foreground of our field of awareness, so that the thinking discursive ruminating mind starts to recede into the background.

So in meditation, we tune in to our body through holding our attention on our sensorial embodied experience in the present moment.

Because most people are in their heads, in their minds most of the time. The thinking, ruminating mind hijacks one's attention and energy. And so it goes.

Usually, our self-consciousness in our mind is constantly running. The so-called non-stop radio.

Nonstop imagining, daydreaming, thinking, planning, remembering.

Undoing Ego
But when we start to relax, our energy, our psychic energy, starts to sink downwards, from the head downwards, through the body into the ground, and into that which is deeper and wider, and freer than the surface individual identity.

That's so concerned with itself. But freedom in meditation can't be experienced by trying to get rid of ego identity. It can only be done through relaxing the mind's grip on the ego.

So in meditation, we are relaxing and not focusing on ourself or judging our experience.

Meditation is undoing the tight knot of ego self-consciousness.

Undoing through relaxation, and experiencing what is deeper and wider than the individual. But without trying to get rid of yourself, that's not the method of releasing one's grip on the self. Simply relaxing is enough.

And when we allow ourselves to relax in this way, it's called ego death, death of the individual mind that's concerned with itself.