Achieving full-body relaxation

This is a guide on using meditation to achieve full-body relaxation (FBR), which helps with muscle recovery and tension as well as stress relief. Meditating also comes with other benefits, such as increased mental and body awareness and more control of one's thoughts. It's a common misconception that meditating is putting yourself into a state of mental emptiness where no thoughts should enter your mind, and that turns a lot of people off because that sounds nearly impossible. While some forms of meditation do involve silencing the inner monologue, that's not the basis of meditation. 

Meditation is simply an inward focusing of one's attention which involves thinking about thoughts (also known as metacognition) and concentrating on the internal parts of our body. 

Most of our sense of feeling is related to the outside of our body as our skin reacts to touch, but we can also feel inside our body to some degree, including our heart rate, muscle tension, blood flow, and gastrointestinal movement and pressure, among other sensations like balance. This guide aims to improve your internal awareness and control of muscle contraction. 

Step One - Find a quiet, comfortable place

You want to be without distraction. If you have a candle that calms you, light it.

Step Two - Lay down

Be like the (Pixabay sourced) cat. To achieve FBR, every muscle in your body will be limp, so get in a position where you'll be comfortable and experience no muscle strain. 

Step Three - Close your eyes and breathe deeply and slowly 

Take breaths that are comfortable; don't force your lungs to their maximum volume. Think about your breathing and about how it feels both physically and as a pattern that your body requires. Find the pattern that feels the most natural. This only needs to be done for a few breaths, no more than a couple minutes.

Step Four - Tell your body to relax

Begin an inner monologue about relaxing your body, which can be as simple as repeating the word "relax" in your head while thinking about the effect spreading throughout your body like a stream of water. 

Step Five - Target specific muscle groups 

If just telling your body to relax was sufficient, I wouldn't be writing this guide. The muscle contraction that we're addressing comes from hours of continuous use, like typing from an office chair for eight hours, stocking shelves, or walking up and down stairs all day. When muscles are put under strain without intermittent periods of rest, they become stuck in a semi-contracted state, and this is known as muscle tension. Once tension sets in, just resting isn't enough to relieve it. Usually sleep and massage do the trick, but the process can go faster with meditation.

Here's where the real work is done. You'll want to direct your internal focus to all the smaller regions and muscle groups of your body. If you've never done this, it only takes a little practice before it feels natural. Start with your ears. As you concentrate on your ears, you might notice increased hearing, you might hear/feel your heart beat and an increased warmth, and you might start to hear a high-pitched ring. It will go away as you direct your attention elsewhere. So send your mind to all of your major muscle groups and force each of them to relax. Imagine your shoulders, your neck, back, chest, stomach, groin, legs, knees, arms, and wrists. Make them all completely relax. Sometimes you might need to do a small flex to get a more accurate feel of the muscle before relaxing it. Your breathing should be slow and relaxed. 

Step Six - Maintain 

After you've relaxed everything manually, do another scan of your body with your internal focus; you might begin to feel warm waves or pulses, which is your blood circulating throughout your body. You may also notice that some of your muscles have begun to contract/flex slightly, and so you'll need to make them relax again and then run continual checks over your body for other rogue muscles. Do this until you feel your muscles staying limp. Enjoy this state for a few moments.

Step Seven - Move a bit

Don't get up, but open your eyes, breathe normally, and move your limbs and lift and contract them in no specific manner. You only need to do this for a few seconds.

Step Eight - Return to relaxation

Close your eyes, take a couple slow breaths, and tell your entire body to relax again. It should happen more quickly and easily this time, and doing it now helps reinforce your mental control. Remain there for as long as you like/can afford.

That's it. You can now freely walk about the cabin.

Hopefully you feel more relaxed, calm, and comfortable after experiencing FBR. The benefits become more noticeable with regular practice, and relaxing the body and mind is the first step to achieving more introspective forms of meditation that involve more examination of the self.

Please try this and comment with your experiences, and also upvote and follow for more content like this.