No Sound

Relax

Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand – relax.

If you relax it comes, if you relax it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it.

To relax is a unique individual activity. While some may find sports relaxing, others find them stressful. Napping or reading a good book might be your idea of relaxation, but the inactivity might drive your best friend crazy. Finally, many people need, or want, a structured relaxation program, such as meditation, martial arts, or yoga, while others prefer to be spontaneous and avoid structure at any cost.

Be aware – A relaxation which has been managed is not much of a relaxation. There is bound to be a subtle tension around it – you are holding it. You can sit silently, still, but deep down you are very tense, you are holding yourself still – no movement. This is not stillness, this is fake. Stillness should be natural.

I am not against work; work has its own utility – but only utility. It cannot become your life’s all and all. It is an absolute necessity that you need food, that you need clothes, that you need a shelter. Work, but don’t become addicted to work. The moment you are out of work, you should know how to relax. And it does not need much wisdom to relax; it is a simple art. And it is very simple because you already knew it when you were born; it is already there, it just has to be made active from its dormant position. It has to be provoked.

All methods of meditation are nothing but methods to help you to remember the art of let-go. I say remember, because you knew it already. And you know it still, but that knowledge is being repressed by the society.

Simple principles have to be remembered: The body should be the beginning. Lying down on your bed – and you lie down on your bed every day, so nothing special is necessary – when you lie down on the bed, before sleep comes, start watching with closed eyes the energy from your feet. Move from there – just watch inside: Is there some tension somewhere? In the legs, in the thighs, in the stomach? Is there some strain, some tension? And if you find some tension somewhere, simply try to relax it. And don’t move from that point unless you feel the relaxation has come.

Go through the hands – because your hands are your mind; they are connected with your mind. If your right hand is tense, the left side of your brain will be tense. If your left hand is tense, the right side of your brain will be tense. So first go through the hands – they are almost the branches of your mind – and then reach finally to the mind.

When the whole body is relaxed the mind is already ninety percent relaxed, because the body is nothing but extensions of the mind. Then the ten percent tension that is in your mind… simply watch it, and just by watching the clouds will disappear. It will take a few days for you; it is a knack. And it will revive your childhood experience, when you were so relaxed.

Have you ever watched? Children go on falling every day, but they don’t get hurt, they don’t get fractures. You try it; whenever the child falls you also fall.

One psychoanalyst was trying some experiments. He announced in the newspapers, “I will pay enough money if somebody is ready to come to my house and just follow my child for the whole day. Whatever my child does, you have to do that.”

A young wrestler turned up and he said, “I am ready; where is the child?”

But by the middle of the day the wrestler was flat on his back. He had already got two fractures, because everything that the child was doing he had to do. And the child got excited: This is strange! So he would jump unnecessarily, and the wrestler had to jump; he would climb the tree, and the wrestler had to climb; and he would jump from the tree, and the wrestler had to jump. And this continued. The child completely forgot about food, about anything; he was enjoying so much the misery of the wrestler.

By the afternoon the wrestler simply refused. He said to the psychoanalyst, “Keep your money. This child of yours will kill me by the end of the day. I am already ready to go to the hospital. This child is dangerous. Don’t do this experiment with anybody else.”

Every child has so much energy, and still he is not tense. Have you watched a child sleeping? Have you watched a child just sucking his own thumb, enjoying it, dreaming beautiful dreams? His whole body is in a deep let-go.