The first thing to do then, is to locate the strain in your muscles. In order to do so, they must first generate more tension, then let go. In going over every group of muscles in the body, layer after layer, they learn to discover tension where they seldom suspected it, in the brow, the neck, the abdomen. Keep in mind, in order to relax, they must first produce more tension, conscious tension. Do not make another useless hard work in trying to relax. Do this systematically, tense a specific muscle and then cease. It will relax by itself.
Joseph Kennedy, best-selling author of Relax and Live, who has taught his methods of relaxation to hundreds of pilots at the Pre-flight school at Athens, Georgia, pertinently points out that these days most of us, in practically all our everyday activities are driving with brakes on. The brake they has in mind is unconscious tension. The worst of it is that they are not even aware that the brakes are on nor the fatigue from clenched jaw and other constricted muscles lead to extreme loss of energy. Tension is waste hard work, an investment of energy in to tasks that ought to be done automatically. For example, the speaker who tries hard to speak correctly and starts to stutter, finally becomes tongue-tied. Or the violinist, who hundreds of times has played a difficult passage without even thinking of it, fails in the coursework of a concert because they tries hard. Intense competition in every field of endeavor and the resulting anxiety and fear of failure mean that most of us invest much energy, great an hard work in to the task at hand, that they try hard. They do not rely on our automatic reflexes and on the gigantic storehouse of experience in our unconscious mind that can only come to the surface if they do not interfere with its mechanism. Now the strain, itself, can become an unconscious habit. And that is finally what makes it so hard to relax.
The fascinating thing is that the interrelation between mind and body is nowhere as evident as in this field. A tense muscle denotes anxiety. Tension creates anxiety; relaxation dissipates anxiety. This is literally true. It is as though the mind or brain received a message from the nerves of the tense muscles, stating that there has to be something wrong, that a special hard work was needed. There may have been actual anxiety at the source of the muscular tension, but as tension becomes a habit, so does the anxiety, that is purely artificial. As they relax, on the other hand, the mind assumes that everything is all right and imparts to the whole organism a feeling of confident security and well-being.
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