Deep Relaxation

Doctors have found that during even a few minutes of deep relaxation there is a rapid fall in blood pressure and heart rate; muscular tension drops even below the level of relaxation during sleep, and the overtaxed nerve centers are revitalized. The whole body is reinvigorated in the shortest possible time, and many ailments, especially those due to nervous tension, may be relieved completely.

As increasing numbers of people everywhere fall ill and die due to stress-related diseases ( heart disease, stroke, stomach ulcer, gastro-intestinal disorders, arthritis, cancer, etc.) it is obvious that the ability to release tension and relax at will, if developed from early childhood, is a valuable asset throughout life. This kind of preventive health care through education in self-mastery is sadly neglected in most societies. Thus many doctors agree, “If relaxation training were taught in all schools, the world could heal itself.”


In one experiment, high blood pressure patients who regularly performed deep relaxation posture were cured not only of their high blood pressure but also of their headaches, nervousness, irritability , and insomnia. Meditation has also been shown in many experiments to have the healthful, tranquilizing effects as deep relaxation.

The first layer of the mind after the physical body is the conscious mind, which deals with the external world through the sense and motor organs. Anyone who has ever been around a small child has surely marveled at the powerful instinct which propels the child into constant interaction and play with the world around—smelling shoes, tasting rocks and mud, feeling flowers and trees, crawling and shouting, opening and closing, pulling and throwing. For the small child, newly incarnated into a physical body, is continuously and enjoy exploring the physical world through the sense and motor organs; and in the process its conscious layer of mind is rapidly developing. Maria Montessori, whose method of instruction emphasizes proper sensory-motor development, once noted the intense concentration that small children can maintain when their senses and motor organs are engaged in satisfying activity.


The conscious mind is also a layer of instinct: for when stimuli are received through the sense organs, the conscious mind is motivated by its instinctive impulses of desire or aversion to these stimuli, and then it acts to materialize that desire or aversion with the motor organs. This instinctive layer is dominant in animals, and even in human life. Most of our daily actions are propelled by desires of the conscious mind. Dragged about ceaselessly by the wild horses of the senses, the “chariot” of the mind lurches from place to place in search of pleasure.

Thus on this conscious level of instinctual desire and aversion, human beings are most similar to animals, motivated by the four basic instincts which dominate all lower creatures : food, sleep, fear and sex--- the instincts of self preservation and reproduction. One of the functions of education must be to teach the proper control of the conscious mind with its restless, instinctive desires, and for this the sense and motor organs must be properly developed.

( Copy from ABAC's Ethics Text Book)