A Standing Relaxation Practice (When You Can’t Relax Lying Down)
What does relaxation really mean?
Relaxation is often viewed as the opposite of work—just taking a break, lying on the couch, or watching TV. It’s frequently seen as wasting time or even as a synonym for laziness.
The truth is, relaxation has to do with our body and our mind. Tension plays a big part in this story, and it’s separate from tightness, which occurs when we use a muscle and it doesn’t return to a resting length.
Tension usually contains a psychological or emotional component. We’re armoring up because we feel vulnerable in some way—maybe from the news, what’s happening in our families, fires in our communities, or an acute danger. It’s the way our body responds to feeling provoked, overwhelmed, separate, or even unloved.
Tension is the stress response finding a home in our body.
Working With Our Tension
Muscle tightness responds to stretching; muscle tension responds to feeling safe.
That means that the way we work, our pace, our attitude, our movement styles, and importantly how we talk to ourselves matters. When we notice how tension separates us from our own body, mind, spirit, and connection, we begin to see how it separates us from each other and the world.
If we want to work with this deep tension in our body and mind, we need to work progressively, sending messages of care, support, and safety all along the way. I write about this practice in my book, The Power of the Pause, and I call this process LAR—Landing, Arriving, and Relaxing.
Landing—We need to begin with building a foundation that allows the body to feel supported, so it sends messages of safety to our minds. So we spend time relating to support as we begin to get grounded. We invite our body to be in relationship with the earth body that is already under us and inside us.
Practice Landing Into The Power Of The Pause With A 10-Minute Meditation
Arriving—Grounding naturally begins to expand space for our breath, and our breath gently nudges more space for itself inside of us. The breath is a softening agent, and it further calms our mind and our body. Once we receive these messages of support and calm, then we can learn to loosen the grip that we add on the tension in our body and mind.
Practice Arriving: A 90-Second Practice To Find Presence
Finally, we begin Relaxing—We can learn to loosen our own grip, expand our awareness, and consciously relax into the here and now with whatever the present moment is serving up.
Relax & Relieve Tension Now—Even if You Can’t Lie Down
This short practice features an 8-minute slow flow and 5-minute standing relaxation exercise to help you land, arrive, and dissolve tension so you feel grounded, revitalized, and ready to take on the day—without lying down.
