Relaxation Techniques

Relaxation can help to relieve the symptoms of stress. It can help you calm down and take a step back from a stressful situation.

Although the cause of the anxiety won’t disappear, you will probably feel more able to deal with it once you've released the tension in your body and cleared your thoughts. 

All relaxation techniques combine breathing more deeply with relaxing the muscles. 

Don't worry if you find it difficult to relax at first. It's a skill that needs to be learned and it will come with practice.

Yoga and tai chi are both good forms of exercise that may help to improve breathing and relaxation.

Relaxed breathing

Practise deep breathing at a regular time and in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Loosen or remove any tight clothes you have on, such as shoes or jackets. Make yourself feel completely comfortable. 

Sit in a comfy chair which supports your head or lie on the floor or a bed. Place your arms on the chair arms, or flat on the floor or bed, a little bit away from the side of your body with the palms up. If you’re lying down, stretch out your legs, keeping them hip-width apart or slightly wider. If you’re sitting on a chair, don’t cross your legs.

Good relaxation always starts with focusing on your breathing. The way to do it is to breathe in and out slowly and in a regular rhythm as this will help you to calm down.

• Fill up the whole of your lungs with air, without forcing. Imagine you're filling up a bottle, so that your lungs fill from the bottom.
• Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.
• Breathe in slowly and regularly counting from one to five (don’t worry if you can’t reach five at first).
• Then let the breath escape slowly, counting from one to five.
• Keep doing this until you feel calm. Breathe without pausing or holding your breath.

Practise this relaxed breathing for three to five minutes, two to three times a day (or whenever you feel stressed).

Deep muscle relaxation

This technique takes around 20 minutes. It stretches different muscles in turn and then relaxes them, to release tension from the body and relax your mind.

Find a warm, quiet place with no distractions. Get completely comfortable, either sitting or lying down. Close your eyes and begin by focusing on your breathing; breathing slowly and deeply, as described above.

If you have pain in certain muscles, or if there are muscles that you find it difficult to focus on, spend more time on relaxing other parts. 

You may want to play some soothing music to help relaxation. As with all relaxation techniques, deep muscle relaxation will require a bit of practice before you start feeling its benefits.

For each exercise, hold the stretch for a few seconds, then relax. Repeat it a couple of times. It’s useful to keep to the same order as you work through the muscle groups:

• Face: push the eyebrows together, as though frowning, then release.
• Neck: gently tilt the head forwards, pushing chin down towards chest, then slowly lift again.
• Shoulders: pull them up towards the ears (shrug), then relax them down towards the feet.
• Chest: breathe slowly and deeply into the diaphragm (below your bottom rib) so that you're using the whole of the lungs. Then breathe slowly out, allowing the belly to deflate as all the air is exhaled.
• Arms: stretch the arms away from the body, reach, then relax.
• Legs: push the toes away from the body, then pull them towards body, then relax.
• Wrists and hands: stretch the wrist by pulling the hand up towards you, and stretch out the fingers and thumbs, then relax.

Spend some time lying quietly after your relaxation with your eyes closed. When you feel ready, stretch and get up slowly.

Source: NHS

Rebooting Your Mind

All our mobile phones today have a lot of apps in them. Most of these apps are automatically opened whenever we connect our phones to wifi internet. When this happens, you will noticed that suddenly you have lots of notifications from all different apps informing you about current news or simply asking your permission for updates. Suddenly your phone has all these tasks that need to be completed and its performance slows down dramatically. Sometimes it may even hanged if it ran out of memory.

Our mind is a bit like our phones. Sometimes we find that a lot of thoughts appear out of a sudden in our mind as if we have switched on our minds' wifi reception and we are receiving all these information from all directions. There are both positive and negative thoughts appear at the same time. During times like these, we find ourselves powerless and seemingly unable to get anything done. It is as if the end of the world and we can't do anything about it. So how can we overcome this problem? Before we try to solve the problem of our minds, let's see how we troubleshoot the slow performance of our mobile phones first.

When your phones are overloaded with tasks to complete, there are basically three simple steps you can take. First open up the task manager and end all those apps that you don't need it at the moment. Then you can try clear your phones' RAM memory. If the above two steps fail, you can always reboot your phones. You will find that when all these unnecessary apps are closed, your phones perform faster and much more efficient.

We can do the same to our minds. Instead of keep all these worries in our heads, focus on those that we could do something about it right now. Don't worry too much about the future because it is uncertain. Only concentrate on the things that we have control right now. Start taking action instead of remaining in your mental worrying state. Once you start doing something, you would have much clearer vision of the overall picture and it doesn't appear to be so gloomy and doom after all. After one task is completed, we simply forget about it and move on to the next task just like how we end the apps in our phones. Soon, more and more tasks will be completed and our minds are now not so crowded with thoughts. 

If after taking some actions you still find yourself worry sick and remain in a negative state, then you should 'reboot' your mind by retreating to meditation. Choose a quiet place where you won't be disturbed for at least half an hour and start meditating. Think of nothing as your main goal is to seek peace in your mind. To say that you are seeking peace is less accurate because you should be free from doing anything at all and looking for peace is an exercise in itself. So just let things be for the next half an hour and simply enjoy the peace and quietness that you would experience. After that half an hour, you will find your mind completely refresh as if it has been massaged by invisible hands.

So next time when you try to improve the performance of your phone, don't forget about your mind.

Birds Can Help You Meditate

Some might think that meditation is so simple, you just sit there closing your eyes and do nothing. If it is so easy, then we won't have so many stressful people around, don't we? 

Much to the contrary, meditation is indeed very challenging especially to beginners. I remember that when I first tried to meditate, I couldn't achieve any peace of mind throughout the duration at all. My mind would kept wandering off and focus all the plans, problems and worries I had at the time. I found myself even more stressful after the meditation. Fortunately through persistence practice and a lot of patience, I'm glad that I'm now able to meditate for an hour without any problem. 

It is like when you first try to ride a bicycle, you kept falling but you stood up and try again. Eventually you can now ride a bicycle without having to worry about whether you should put your leg on the peddle first or balancing yourself by steering the handle and so on. The same goes for meditation, you need to continuously practice it to do it better and better by gradually letting go of everything that is troubling your mind. Remember that you are gaining back your personal space 100% back to yourself when you meditate. Ideally no one should disturb you during the process so that you could fully be absorbed into the moment.

If you still can't get into deep meditation, then there is still one more technique you can use which I just discovered this morning. I woke up at 6.30am and meditated on my bed. I got into the meditative state quite fast today probably because of the quiet environment in the morning. Then I noticed that the birds outside my apartment were chirping. It was probably their version of morning rush hour going to work. However, their chirping frenzies produced such beautiful sounds to my ear that I found myself completely surrounded by this fresh and harmonious melody. In fact they are still doing it now while I am writing this post although in lesser amount as most of them must have taken off somewhere hunting for breakfast. It was indeed music to my ears. I didn't think of anything at that time when I meditated, I just totally focus on those beautiful sounds and enjoy the moment. 

Thank you birds for making my meditation went so smoothly today!

Meditation Is Good For You

We rush to work each morning, sitting in the office for 8 hours with a quick lunch in between, we then rush again to catch the public transport in peak hours going home. By the time we finish dinner and washing the dishes, we have hardly any energy left in our bodies. 

During winter season like now in Australia, we have the tendencies of going straight to bed after dinner. We thought that we are getting rest by sleeping early but the next morning when we wake up we feel even more tired and sometimes headache as well. Does this ever happen to you before?

That is because even though in our sleep our mind actually does not get it's deserved rest as we may still have worries from our workplace, relationships and financial matters etc. If we bring with us worries to our beds, our minds actually cannot rest at all. 

This is exactly why meditation is so helpful today in helping people cope with stress in their life. The ultimate objective of meditation is to keep your mind still. Ajahn Brahm has said that if you want to strengthen your body, you exercise it and if you want to make your mind stronger, keep in still. It is really the opposite that you do with the mind as compare to the body. I used to think that thinking will make me wiser and strengthen my mind but it is not the case because we tend to have lots of unskillful thinking pattern most of the time. These unskillful and sometimes unhealthy thoughts do not make our mind stronger, they give us worries instead. Most of us focus on negative thoughts and prolong thinking pattern like this will lead us into depression. It is in fact a very dangerous thing to do.

During meditation, your aim is to calm down your mind. Sitting in an upright position, you adjust your body to a comfortable position for you. Closing your eyes will cut off all the distraction around you and you will be able to enter into meditative state more easily. Use the Buddhist approach of mindfulness to notice any discomfort in your body. If there is any pain in the body, acknowledge it instead of trying to ignore it. Acknowledge the pain and just let it be without ever trying to fight it. That is because the more you fight it the worse it is going to get. 

Once your body is comfortable, you may want to focus on your breathing. Simply notice it as the air enter into your body through your nose as well as the air coming out of your body. Imagine breathing like the wave in the ocean. Ajahn Brahm teaches us to think about breathing in peace (or any other positive thing such as happiness) and exhaling out letting go (or stress, worries etc). Concentrate on this for at least 15 minutes and you will enter into a deeper state of meditation. 30 minutes meditation is a good start for beginners as it is not too long and enough to relax the tension in the mind. It is indeed a very relaxing experience and there was once I felt the tingling sensation in my brain as if it has been massaged for 30 minutes. 

We have to practice it everyday if we want to reap the maximum benefit out of it. Just like your body, we don't get fit by just going to the gym once a week for an hour, you have to at least work out 3 times a week and 2 hours each time in the gym to see any apparent result. So meditate regularly and may we all enjoy a life free of worries and good health.

Buddhism Saves My Life

I was a typical Malaysian Chinese raised up in the tradition of Taoist and Buddhist culture. I have always thought that older people blindly follow tradition without questioning. Practice such as burning paper offerings in the form of clothes, shoes, cars, mobile phones and iPad (lately) never appeal to me. I always thought them to be superstitious and doesn't make sense. I mean if you burn an iPad for the dead, don't you also have to burn the charger for them?

I have never consider myself to be religious simply because I couldn't comprehend its relevancy at the time. It was not until I suffered from a life threatening illness that I begin to comprehend the importance of having faith in our life. I still don't believe in superstition. Instead I've found a religion that finally makes sense to me - it is Buddhism.

I was a completely healthy man that exercised regularly. I worked out in gym for the most part of my 30s and I still carried dumbbell on a regularly up until last year. I didn't have any major sickness except for the common cold that is quite usual in the tropics. Then suddenly on the year that I turned 40, I suffered from panic attack out of the blue. Doctor in Raffles Hospital has diagnosed me as having cumulative stress in life and gave me medication which were more like tranquilizer to calm me down because I would get stressed out for no obvious reason. Then my relatives would bring me to see a Taoist medium who diagnosed me in his own way as having being cursed by someone who apparently wanted me to suffer.

Both the modern and traditional diagnosis gave me their own kind of remedy - doctor would give me medication while the Taoist master gave 'holy water' which has been chanted upon. I must admit that both did help me initially but just for a short while. 

Every now and then I would get agitated and my mind started 'roaming' freely. And when there were too much thinking I might get panic attack which would then required me to take medication given by the doctor. I said to myself that this couldn't go on like this forever, I need help. I asked the local GP to refer me to a psychiatrist. 

I know that I wasn't crazy but I had no choice at that time as I still need to go to work everyday and my condition was affecting my performance at the office. So went to see the psychiatrist but the receptionist treated me as if I am a crazy person. The psychiatrist gave me anti-depressant which not only didn't help but worsen my condition.

It was then that my previous employer in Malaysia sent me messages through Whatsapp and told me that there is this monk called Ajahn Brahm whose retreat is in Perth. I have migrated to Perth at that time and started to look up for this person. Many of his talks have been uploaded onto Youtube, I downloaded a few and started listening to them. My mood was calming down as I listen to the talk and I could sense that it has the healing effect on me. I researched further and found out that he is giving talks every Friday evening at a monastery north of Perth. I went there one Friday without hesitation.

It was already 7.30pm when I got to the place and there were just so many people packed inside the main hall. I found a spot to sit on and observed my surroundings. There is a big golden statue of Buddha sitting in front of me. Although there were many people in the hall, the atmosphere was quiet and peaceful. Then came in Ajahn Brahm and he conducted a 30 minutes guided meditation. This was the very first time I ever attended a guided meditation session. I followed his verbal instructions with my eyes closed. It was difficult to settle my mind initially but I was able to do that quite smoothly after about 10 minutes. I felt peace, compassion and Buddha's love for the first time in my life. I felt like crying not because of sadness but to shed tears of joy. The feeling that the world is indeed a wonderful place and our own problems are so trivial compare to the compassion of the Buddha.

Buddhism taught me that we are in charge of our life. Most of our sufferings come from our mind. And if we could keep the mind still through meditation, then we could live a relatively happy life.

I haven't recovered 100% from my anxiety disorder but I am progressing well. Now, if I ever get upset on something I would just meditate for 30 minutes and it is the best medication one can ever have. I am happy that I found Buddhism before it was too late for me. In fact I'm so grateful that I started this blog today to record my experiences with the religion. I hope that others could find it useful to help them with their lives.