GETTING THE BENEFITS OF RELAXATION AND CONTRACTION

Articles In This Section:

· LEARNING DEEP CONTRACTION IN YOGA

· KNOW HOW TO KEEP FIT

· DEEP CONTRACTION IS THE MOST IMPORTANT OF YOGA

· SOEM YOGA MOVES

· GETTING THE BENEFITS OF RELAXATION AND CONTRACTION

In order to get the full benefit of both the relaxation and the contraction, remember that your mental attitude is of the greatest importance. It is useless to go through the motions of exercising unless you are prepared to focus your entire attention on what you are doing. Just as, during relaxation, you must empty your mind of all distracting influences, so during the stretches you must teach yourself to dwell on their performance only, to study each action and its effects on your body, allowing yourself to relish the sensations you are experiencing. Only if you are thoroughly aware of the good you are doing yourself will the benefit of the routines stay with you. On the other hand, if you do follow the routine faithfully you will begin to acquire greater limberness and to experience both physical and mental well-being within one short week. You will sleep better, have greater vitality and your nerves will be your friends instead of traitors.

Even if you never do progress to the more complicated forms of Yoga exercise and content yourself merely with the first three steps—Dynamic Breathing, Deep Relaxation and Contraction—the benefits you will derive will astonish you. This is so because, from the very first, the emphasis here is not on building up one or another part of your body, not on one or another "angle," but on the whole being. For at all stages Yoga aims at creating a balanced mental-physical combination of improvement and growth. In the process, especially during Deep Contraction exercises, certain muscle groups and skin areas are brought into play which during ordinary physical drills remain unaffected. The skin, specially, is stretched and pulled and stimulated so that it gets the benefit of thorough cleansing and flushing. When you consider that a piece of skin the size of a postage stamp contains some three million separate cells, a yard of blood vessels, four yards of nerves and twenty-five nerve endings, not to mention hundreds of sweat and oil glands, and when you realize that ordinary exercise doesn't begin to wake up all this complex organism, you really understand why the Yoga approach is like no other—why it seems to show the way to the Fountain of Youth. Healthy, well-nourished skin will not sag nor grow sallow nor wrinkle. And even tired skin, after a little systematic Yoga stimulation, can once more acquire the firmness and glow it once had. And this is only a secondary benefit! The complex of processes which constitutes Deep Contraction has one final, most important aspect which so far we only mentioned in passing while discussing mental attitude. We have pointed out that it would be quite useless, not to say impossible, to practice true Deep Contraction while thinking of something else. This orientation inward, which becomes a must, is the first step toward a further, deeper development of your Self according to Yoga principles. For once you have learned Deep Contraction and have practiced it for a while, you are ready to go on to something still more important, something essential not only to the welfare of your body but of your entire being: You are ready to learn Concentration.