Power of the Mind & Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Everyone knows it feels far better to be tranquil than it does to feel tense
. But how many of us understand that there is a connection between tension in the muscles and tension in the mind?
To better understand this, it is useful to be familiar with the concept of Visual Motor Rehearsal. Visual Motor Rehearsal is a psychological exercise that takes advantage of the simple fact that merely thinking about carrying out a particular exercise creates quantifiable electrical action in the muscles in the exact same locations as if a person were really doing the actual action!
The human brain and nervous system do not really know the difference between doing the exercise in your mind and doing the exercise physically. What's amazing about this is that the opposite is also true. By influencing the muscles, the mind is influenced; loosen up the muscles and the mind unwinds.
Throughout life, our experiences and our perception of our experiences build up a record of habitual responses. When anything familiar occurs, it's easier to react to it the same way we did the last time rather than stay totally aware and react to it as something brand new.
This course of action produces an unconscious auto-pilot method of operating below our conscious, reasoning mind. Every thought, emotion, and perception has a matching physiological response that is documented in electrical activity in our muscles.
When we have experiences that we perceive as stress filled, our muscles respond by contracting and producing tension. The body senses these efforts irrespective of whether they are deliberate and consciously created or totally unintentional and unconsciously produced from our cruise control mind.
These stresses, especially the ones produced by our autopilot mind, become a long-term condition or state of being, which usually lasts a life time. Each and every chronic stress in a muscle, no matter how subtle, has an equal intention connected with it; and every unconscious intention has a corresponding thought associated with it, as well.
If you have ever tried to "stop thinking" in a meditation exercise, you have most likely observed that ideas in the back of your mind just keep coming up. Many of these thoughts are the ones that are associated with the long-term tensions in your muscles.
In order to become aware of the raw data in the collective consciousness we must be able to remove these pre-programmed intentions and unconscious thoughts from our minds. At the subtle level, these automated thoughts are distracting us from observing information in the higher awareness domain and are therefore behaving as noise interference.
It requires unique training to allow us to separate environmental info from our own mental chatter. One such talent is Technical Remote Viewing (TRV).
In order to develop a natural, easy ability to get this noise out of the way without utilizing scientifically designed methods such as TRV, we need to first release the physical tensions that maintain the interfering thought processes that form in the mind.
Relaxation, and more precisely muscular relaxation, is one of the most elementary keys to quieting this internal, mental noise. One essential thing to understand is that this noise is not entirely verbal since it is made up of many of our past reactions and forgotten intentions.
Since a lot of the long-term muscular tension is supported by an oxygen deficient condition in the cells, deep breathing exercises can be a suitable and complementary activity to relaxation methods.
There is an intriguing paper released by the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology called Psi-Favorable Conditions. It is a lengthy paper, but it is highly educational concerning the subject matter at hand.
This is a brief quote from the section on Muscular Relaxation: "Relatively early investigations revealed that relaxation seemed to be a reliable characteristic of the percipient in a majority of cases of spontaneous psi (Stevenson, 1970). Reference to the importance of relaxation can be found in the writings of and about nearly all gifted sensitives or psychics (persons who can demonstrate psi repeated and with great accuracy)."
In this day and age, quite a few people have taken credit for "developing" or "discovering" the concept of connecting thoughts to muscular activity without physical movement, but the first person to quantify electrical activity in the muscles when the test subject was merely thinking of moving the muscles was Edmund Jacobson, MD, PhD. These measurements were made with a machine that recorded the electrical action from electrodes inserted into the muscles.
Later on, Bell Labs constructed a more practical and simple machine to Dr. Jacobson's specifications and it detected activity in the microvolt range by means of electrodes connected to the body. This exploration was done in the early 1930's. This is also why Dr. Jacobson is acknowledged with being the Originator of Bio-feedback.
Dr. Jacobson's work very much convinced him of the strong relationship between deep physical relaxation and psychological balance. He determined that Psychoanalysis was an unsuccessful remedy and set out to develop a process to produce deep physical relaxation in the body.
This work culminated in the development of his milestone relaxation method called Progressive Relaxation. He published a book by the same name in 1938, which was written specifically to enlighten healthcare experts of his findings. It incorporated a complete expose of his techniques, theory and other research materials.
However, four years earlier, in 1934, Dr. Jacobson authored his more popular volume entitled You Must Relax. This publication was developed to educate the general public about the health benefits of relaxation and contains directions on the primary exercises he created to produce muscular relaxation.
The exercises are a process of concentrating on specific muscle groups, tightening them into tension, holding and then releasing. When released, they are relaxed much more than they were prior to tensing them. The idea is to concentrate on particular muscles for a certain amount of days, and then move on until at some point, anybody practicing them can very easily go through the entire sequence.
I would highly recommend to everyone, even if there is no interest to cultivate psi abilities, to examine Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR).
The goal of carrying out these exercises is to relax the in-tensions and thoughts that underlie the physical tension. Additionally, ensure it is alright with your medical doctor to do these muscle-tensing exercises.
In 1950 a profoundly forward-thinking person named Harold S. Schroeppel began an in-depth and formal study of what was necessary to release human telepathic skills. In 1953, he composed a paper called The How of Telepathy in-which he laid out proof of his breakthroughs, as well as a vision of the advancement of human awareness.
In 1960, Schroeppel launched a school to instruct these techniques called the Institute for Advanced Perception. Based on 10 years of work involving thousands of voluntary test subjects, Schroeppel was able to put together a very specific course of instruction, which if employed in the intended sequence, created striking final results.
The very first lesson in this training was referred to as Effort, which was a highly effective application of the tension and relaxation exercises first recommended by Dr. Jacobson. But here, the exercise is especially developed to clear out muscle tensions and reactions in order to let a person to begin quieting the mind so they can perceive things more clearly. This seems to be the very first mind power-education course that actually made complete use of Edmund Jacobson's relaxation methods in order to create and develop psi abilities.
The following quote by Harold Schroeppel, taken from The How of Telepathy, clearly clarifies why the advantages of the relaxation exercises are so needed for the growth of advanced perception: "If you have no thought, emotion, effort, pain or confusion stored in your own body, then any thought, emotion, effort, pain, or confusion of which you are aware is someone else's."
The function of the relaxation exercises is to relieve the efforts, emotions, and pain that are located in the muscles. When this is achieved, a sense of broadened perception naturally opens up.
Harold Schroeppel taught this training at the Institute for Advanced Perception from 1960 until the late 1980's. It was called the Lessons in Advanced Perception. There are very few teachers these days that even teach the science of relaxing for the purpose of increasing psychic awareness or consciousness. A Course in Mind Power by Aaron Murakami is presently the only program that not only goes in to the necessity of calming the tension out of the muscles, it shows the science behind it, where it came out from, and its relationship to the ideomotor reaction and other personal responses that reveal psychically acquired data.
Modern day living seems to keep us busy and stressed all of the time. So much so, that we have little time to relax and appreciate life's deeper meanings. But now, the latest breakthroughs show that persistent muscle tension truly clouds the mind with unnecessary thoughts and that this automated mental action prevents greater perceptual capability.
Power of the Mind & Progressive Muscle Relaxation
By: Terry Blacksmith
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