When we walk the path of life you direct that we forget to enjoy and savor the journey. The same can be said of the journey through our inner world. We must be relaxed to benefit from its positive effects. Relaxation techniques are similar to those of meditation, and with them you can take full advantage of the practice of meditation.

If you have ever tried to relax when you were tense or upset, the simple expression relaxation will make you laugh, because relaxing is not an easy thing, and even less so when you need it. Our attitude towards life is significantly expressed in the phrase try to relax. Relaxation is not something you do by trying, but by making it possible.

Relaxation is not an active process; tension, on the other hand, is active. Tension is created, we create it, when a muscle or a group of muscles try to do something and other muscles try to avoid it. Tension comes and goes from the body, forming uncomfortable and stressful patterns, and the body is caught in the middle, trying to respond to both types of commands, like a child whose parents disagree. To relax, it is enough to stop maintaining tension, to stop favoring it, to release it.

One of the advantages of meditation is that, since attention is outside the thoughts or feelings that usually maintain tension, and since feelings harmonize with thoughts, induces relaxation naturally. The mind does not send messages to the body telling it to maintain stress. Bodies are generally sensitive, they only maintain tension when ordered, or when they have been told so many times, over such a long period of time, to maintain it, that they have forgotten to release it.

There are essential differences between relaxation and meditation. Although in meditation there is naturally a relaxation, by using a relaxation technique our intention is exclusively to liberate. We meditate seated, with the spine straight, because that helps us to keep our attention, and, instead, we perform a large number of relaxation techniques stretched, to release all muscles.

There will be those who think that relaxation should be easy, if it is only a matter of releasing. However, many times we have such a habit of habitual tension that the muscles have forgotten how to let go and have to learn it again. Most of us have constant muscle tensions, whether they are good for something or not.

Many people, for example, find it hard to believe that the shoulder muscles have to be as loose as any other relaxed muscle, that they don't have to be hard and cuddly at all. They usually only have to hold shirts or dresses, which does not require as much muscle power as we dedicate to it. An infinite number of people keep certain muscles of the jaw, or others located along the spine, permanently in tension. And many of us have our own selection of muscles that we practically never leave in relaxation.

Rare are the people who know how to release, how to relax the groups of muscles that maintain a habitual tension. Over time, meditation almost always produces good relaxation, but we can accentuate its positive effects by learning to relax properly.

When you have built that ideal resting place, relax mentally and think you are there. Don't try to imagine more details, experience the feeling of being in that special place. It will probably seem that every time you practice this exercise, the surroundings become clearer and in your mind you see more detailed and lived. Imagination improves with practice.

If thoughts are things, and they are, this time has been in this site, conceived specifically to be the best place for you to relax in peace and beauty. The yogis maintain that, if a person concentrates well and has conceived and defined his site well, he has been there, physically and mentally.

A lot of Hugs..