Progressive relaxation and the art of stress reduction

I had learnt about progressive relaxation during my Tai Chi lessons. It was close to sunset on a wintry evening, and the one odd dozen of us were starting our first Tai Chi class with Saurabh Godbole a student of Sensei Sandeep Desai. The venue was Chittaranjan Vatika, adjacent to the BKS Iyengar Yoga Institute in Model Colony, Pune. We started with progressive relaxation, but I doubt if I really got the hang of it that day. Post 5 minutes of progressive relaxation, we moved on to Form 1 of Tai Chi and spent the next hour or so going over the fluid moves of Tai Chi.

I had to give up Tai Chi eventually when I moved to the US for an overseas assignment, and later on due to the untimely demise of Saurabh, the very possibility of taking up Tai Chi again was denied to me. However, I was able to delve deeper into progressive relaxation and other relaxation techniques and subsequently into zazen.

Relaxation techniques work on the premise that there is a symbiotic link between the mental and the physical. When we are under mental stress, we tend to clench our muscles; and by tensing our muscles we make our mental stress much worse. The act of frowning can make one palpably sad, and the pretense of being unwell to get away from workload at office can make one actually sick. But is the reverse also true? Can one treat physical ailments headaches, ulcers and high blood pressure through mind induced relaxation? Can a state of well being be consciously induced? If so, how does it work?

The technique essentially is quite simple, and can be learnt by almost anyone. This technique as with most meditation techniques works best, if one sits in an upright position with a straight back. Following steps can be followed to get the hang of the technique.

Take a comfortable position sitting straight on a chair. Close your eyes and induce a general feeling of well being and relaxation. Now make a tight fist with your right hand, tensing the muscles in your wrist and forearm as you do. Hold tight for about 5 seconds and try to feel the tension emanating from the muscles. Then unclench your fist letting the tension drain from your forearm, wrist and fingers. Note the difference between how your arm felt when it was tense, and how it feels now.

Next repeat the exercise with your left hand, keeping the right hand relaxed. Tense it, and keep the tension on for 5 seconds, and then watch the tension flow out of it. Repeat the exercise with all the major muscles groups of the body. Start with the neck and shoulders, which along with the stomach are probably the most tense parts of the body. Tense the neck muscles and relax them. Next move to the shoulders and tense and relax them. Make a frown and scowl as hard as you can. Then, as you relax feel the tension drain out of eyes, cheeks and lips. As the body parts are progressively relaxed you will notice the tension drain away, and your entire body will feel more at peace.

Keep your breathing deep and rhythmic. While inhaling, feel that the breath originates from the stomach and the diaphragm expands upon inhalation. While exhalation, ensure that the exhalation is longer than the  inhalation. With each exhalation feel that you are sinking into the stomach, deeper and deeper and a greater peace, calm and relaxation are taking hold of you. This will induce an even greater feeling of relaxation which might even facilitate you in the act of falling asleep. If, however you do not wish to fall asleep conclude the exercise by slowly counting to 4, become more alert of your surroundings and wake up from the deep feeling of relaxation. Carry this sense of peace and calmness into your mundane activities.

The advantage of progressive relaxation lies in the fact that it does not require much paraphernalia and it can be done even in a public place, on a bus, in a garden or, sitting at one's desk in office, as long as one is careful to not fall asleep. The entire exercise can be completed within a few minutes and can induce a deep sense of well being within one.

The original sin

Ken Wilber provides evidence in Up from Eden of language in its rudimentary form originating around 50,000 to 80,000 years ago. This might have been the trigger which led to a shift away from nomadic existence and formation of settlements. Agriculture (or monoculture) might have been invented 10,000 years ago and it rapidly led to the beginning of what we refer to as civilization. In its essence, agriculture was the process of converting all available resources into food for humans. Forested land is cleared of trees and animals and all cultivable land is then used to grow crops that will be consumed by humans. Needless to say, it was a very effective way of production of food, and humans who had hitherto numbered in the thousands rapidly started expanding. When we look back at the beginnings of our sorry species and try to understand how we landed in this soup, invention of agriculture looks like an inflection point. The seeds of our current plight were sown in that very first success of the human species – the invention of agriculture which has been referred to by Prof. Jared Diamond as the first mistake.

As long as there was no excess, there was no lack either. When humans were hunter gatherers, food was procured on a regular basis, there was no provision for hoarding and there was no private wealth. All of this was to change with the advent of settlements and invention of agriculture. The first and the most significant marker of change in the human condition was a new found understanding of a psychological concept of time. All non-human species live in the present. For them present is the only time that exists even though they may learn from past incidents to modify their behavior, where it might be needed to save themselves from predators. However, animals certainly do not obsess about the past and they do not spend the majority of their time trying to form strategies or to learn lessons from their past.

Humans must have started moving away from the idyllic uroboric state sometime around 80,000 BC when they started developing rudimentary languages, and they might have evolved to a state where they became aware of their surroundings and created a sense of separation between themselves and their environment. This sense of separation made them conscious of their mortality which brought with it an understanding of psychological time. Moving out of Now, and gaining an understanding of time was the only way in which humans could have planned for the future. And planning for the future was necessary for agriculture to take hold. 

Agriculture or animal rearing are activities which require effort whose result is apparent only after a span of several months, and as such these are activities which are radically different from hunting. Hunting was instant gratification, where one did not need much communication or strategizing to carry it out. But a complex activity like agriculture would involve multiple actions – sowing, watering, harvesting and coordinated effort which was not possible without precise memory tools that could come only with language. For, even if an individual could discover and remember these actions using only images and subtle memory, how would he communicate it to other humans and secure their cooperation?

It is apparent that the invention of languages and start of agriculture had a causal link between them. Like all successful human endeavors, agriculture spread across human societies. For the first time in the human history of 3 million years, it was possible for a small minority of humans to produce food for the entire settlement, which left non-farmers with enough time at their disposal to invent other useful things. This time was spent in activities like metallurgy, and the metals thus mined were eventually turned into weapons. While weapons of hunter gatherers were rocks, stones, branches of trees and animal bones, civilized humans developed more lethal weapons whose sole purpose was to wage war on other humans. Swords and bows and arrows resulted from this freed up time, and soon our ancestors were able to put these to good use.

As agriculture flourished we became victims of our own success. While in 3 million years of our existence, there was no instance of crowding, and our population increased only at a glacial rate without the added advantage of agriculture (it is estimated that the global human population was only about 10 million at the beginning of Neolithic age), there came a rapid expansion in human populations of those settlements which practiced agriculture. This expansion of population had a predictable side effect. The imperative to feed more mouths, aided by the invention of weapons of murder fuelled expansion to further territories. Most vulnerable were the nomads and hunter-gatherers who might have been simply decimated and their land taken away from them. Thus our peculiar agriculture/ monoculture marched on spreading its tentacles all over the planet. Forests were leveled, hunter-gatherers were exterminated and non-human species were wiped out to satiate the appetite of growing number of humans.

               

Human population had swelled to 100 million by 1400 B.C.E., and probably 90% of those humans were practitioners of our form of monoculture. The Near East hadn't been big enough for us for a long time. Monoculture  had to expand northward and eastward into territories corresponding to modern day Russia and India and China, and southward and westward into Egypt and Europe. Other kinds of cultivation that were once practiced in these lands, gave way to our style of agriculture.

As agriculture became more and more widely spread, it became the domain of a small band of farmers and with their income generating the bulk of the wealth of society, it became possible to build cities around trade and commerce, and to raise armies to take away by force what they could not produce on their own. Wars became increasingly more widespread and destructive and in a civilization where mechanization did not yet exist, human labor became prized. Slave trade did not originate with the Romans, but the Romans might have been the people who institutionalized it. Roman military campaigns became a major source of slaves, as Roman army would bring back captives as war booty and sell them into slavery. Looking at the Roman empire and later Mongols and Turks it is obvious how much of human creative energy was diverted towards warfare. With the advent of the monotheistic religions, culture and religion also became weapons to supplement warfare in domination of alien  human cultures.

The history of humanity for the next millennium was a history of wars, conquests, sacking of cities, wholesale massacre of populace of vanquished kingdoms and selling their pre-pubescent boys and women into slavery and prostitution. Description of a typical military campaign of Timur taken from Wikipedia reads like this :

[I]n 1400 Timur invaded Christian Armenia and Georgia. Of the surviving population, more than 60,000 of the local people were captured as slaves, and many districts were depopulated.

He invaded Baghdad in June 1401. After the capture of the city, 20,000 of its citizens were massacred. Timur ordered that every soldier should return with at least two severed human heads to show him. (Many warriors were so scared they killed prisoners captured earlier in the campaign just to ensure they had heads to present to Timur.)

Meanwhile buoyed by the success of agriculture human population kept on rising, and as an unintended  side effect widespread famine and plague resulted due to overcrowding and poor sanitation in cities. The Great Plague from 1665 – 1666 killed an estimated 100,000 people or 20% of London’s population. This period also marked a change in strategies towards usurping the wealth of foreign nations. The military conquests of Genghis Khan, Timur and their ilk were about defeating armies of foreign lands, plundering their wealth, enslaving their women and children and in some instances subjugating the vanquished ruler and forcing him to pay tribute to the conqueror. The next stage in usurping the wealth of external societies was colonialism which was perfected by European states starting 17^th century and which continues well into the present century albeit at a reduced rate.

Colonialism aided by industrialization marked a new phase in humanity’s sordid history. While the plunderers of the middle ages would invade and loot the wealth of the invaded nation, the colonialists hung around like parasites and built their empires on the blood and sweat of the natives, primarily of Asian and African countries. India and China which collectively accounted for 50% of world trade in 17^th century came down to a share of less than 5% by 1950. 20^th century which was supposedly the century when science gained an ascendancy upon religion also proved that the enlightening influence of science would not extend upon the violent and base tendencies of humans.

In a signal that our civilization built upon destruction of nature, subjugation of the weak and taking away by force what is not ours, was unsustainable, the first of the global economic collapses occurred in 1929. The first half of the 20^th century was a story of wars, which would make Alexander and Genghis Khan’s campaigns look piddling in comparison. Shorn of layers of needlessly complicated explanations, the reason these wars were fought was the same as the reasons for earlier wars fought in the dawn of civilization by our ancestors using swords and bows and arrows - greed, avarice and a general contention for increasingly scarce natural resources. For those who thought that the second world war had satiated our appetite for gory bloodlust, and a new era of peace and love will dawn soon, there were the Mao Zedongs, Stalins and Pol Pots to deal a rude awakening to.

Going into the new century, there have already been two worldwide recessions within a decade, and the second recession has not yet ended. Our population which had crossed 6 billion in the last decade of the 20^th century will double in 75 years according to current trends. We have razed the last of our great forests and wilderness as such does not exist anywhere anymore on this planet. No place in the US is more than 20 miles away from a motorable road. Non human species - both land based and aquatic are becoming extinct at an alarming rate with thousands going extinct every year. Meanwhile we blunder on, secure in a peculiar belief that we have been created by a guy who looks like us and who has created the entire planet and all sentient life on it for our consumption. This belief takes care of all remorse that most humans might feel at overexploitation of planetary resources.

Is there any way out of this conundrum we find ourselves in? Perhaps if industrialization can be rolled back and eliminated, and if human population can be brought down to 10% of its current levels there might be hope yet for humans as a species. Going by past trends that is unlikely to happen. We have been victims of our success, but we have also been captives to our collective hubris as a species. And we will pay the price soon, all too soon.

A walk along the river

As one exited the retreat place, and descended down a set of uneven steps into the forest, the calm and tranquility of the jungle seemed to take over. A mud track led one further along the forest, where a hundred meters on, a narrow canal became visible. One could cross the canal and continue deep into the forest, or descend on the other side and reach a dry river bed. A traveler suddenly coming upon the dry river bed which seemed to extend interminably in either direction would feel an expansion in consciousness. It was a study in contrasts with the intimacy of the forest one had just crossed, and yet its experience was as vital to the enrichment of the soul as the experience of the virgin, untrod forest. In the vastness of that river bed, unsullied by any vestiges of human civilization, one was forced to confront one’s aloneness. And yet this aloneness was not claustrophobic. One could develop a deep, intimate relationship with this aloneness, get to know it, and to appreciate it; and within that knowingness, within that relationship something of one’s innermost self would be revealed.

The river bed was littered with boulders large and small, interspersed with smaller pebbles. These pebbles had been boulders once, and the boulders will become pebbles some time hence in the future. And yet unperturbed with the knowledge of their past or awareness of future they existed in the moment. Sun shone upon the boulders and as one neared a turn in the river, trees on the river bank cast their shadows – lengthening as the sun receded towards the horizon. One felt alone and yet blissful, not at one with all of nature but rather in an intimate relationship with her. There was a deep contentment and there was knowledge of the one who was feeling content. As one ambled along the river bed, that sense of contentment deepened and a feeling of bliss seemed to overtake the entire body. All the psychological tensions and human contentions that come from living in the civilization had been left behind. It was in such moments one realized what a burden the mind is.

Osho had once narrated a story of a child upon whose back a monkey had been tied, when both the child and the monkey were very young. Being young and not very strong, carrying the monkey was heavy burden. However, this burden did not lessen with time. As the child grew and became stronger, so did the monkey. As the child became an adolescent, the monkey also grew in years and in weight. As the adolescent became a youth, the monkey also matured. With his back doubled over with the weight of the monkey, the man was never able to walk straight. He would hunch, he would hobble, he would struggle in carrying the monkey on his back, but it never occurred to him to put the monkey down. He was so used to carrying the monkey around with him, that he did not even notice that he was carrying an unnatural weight upon his back, which was pulling him down. It seemed to him to be the most natural thing in the world to be permanently burdened with a monkey. But with age, as the monkey became bigger and more restless, the man started facing difficulties. His back was hunched over, he started ageing prematurely and he was in general sad and depressed.

One day, when things reached a nadir, the man went to see a famous Master who was visiting the town. He complained to the Master and wept bitterly about his life. The Master smiled at him compassionately and asked him to put down the monkey. At first the man did not realize what the Master was talking about. What monkey? How can there be a monkey on his back without him noticing? As the Master persisted, the man eventually came to his senses and realized that all his troubles arose from the monkey he was inadvertently carrying around on his back. With the Master’s assistance he released the monkey – and put it down. A sense of relief overcame him. For the first time in many years he felt light, he felt free. And yet it was a strangely unnerving feeling. He was used to the monkey. The monkey kept him grounded. He did not know what to do with this new found freedom! For the man, life without the monkey would take getting used to.

And isn’t it true for all of us? We go around in life with our own personal monkeys tied to our backs. We feed our monkeys with our fears and anxieties and worries about the future. Our back is bent over with the weight of this monkey and yet we persist in carrying it around, nurturing it and refusing to put it down. We complain of our lot, we weep bitterly and suffer sometimes in silence and sometimes in impotent rage. Yet we cannot summon the courage of putting the monkey down. Somewhere She smiles in compassion, looking at our antics. She allows us to struggle, in the hope that someday we will see light.

One walked on - devoid of thoughts, feeling a sense of calm descend upon oneself. Occasionally the shrill cry of  a cicada would pierce the silence, but it was an ineffectual weapon against a silence that was as deep and pervading. Like the ripples upon the surface of a lake, the sound would soon die down and one would be engulfed with silence that seemed to be in the natural order of things.

One more turn and one could see in the distance a fork in the river bed where the river branched into two. At this point, the river bed was interspersed with dry leaves. This part of the river boasted of a more than usual concentration of trees, which no doubt were responsible for the rich harvest of those leaves. The leaves seemed to glow with an inner luminosity as embers of dying sunlight from a sun about to set fell upon them and imbued them with a special radiance. There was something magical about those leaves. Fragile; their existence could be wiped out by a gust of wind or a single footfall, and yet there was something of the eternity in them. Perhaps their beauty was enhanced by the fragility of their existence.

Something of the melancholy of autumn described by Keats as “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” seeped deep within one, as one came to terms with the uncertainty of the existence of those leaves. And with it came an epiphany that all things arise and pass away. There can be relief in not knowing and calm acceptance in the face of uncertainty. Impermanence can also be beautiful. One can deeply feel beauty of an intimate experience, without wanting to hold on to it. Life can be a string of such beautiful moments, each of them arising and passing away in eternity, hardly registering upon the deep silence, and yet providing succor to the soul that is sensitive enough to look out for such moments.