Moving from Letting Go to Letting It Glow
In Exercise 1, we cultivated sensations of letting-go in the limbs, and linking that to letting-go of the breath. Now we focus on letting it glow.
Begin by bringing on the heaviness in your limbs as you have mastered in the practice of Exercise 1 — using the final mantra as a shortened form of the exercise; or if you prefer go through the sequence in full. Then begin bringing on a glow of warmth in the arm by reciting the warm mantra for the arm three times, or more if you wish to await a stronger response.
After mastering the Warmth exercise, it can optionally be combined with the Heavy into a single mantra: “My arms and legs are heavy and warm”, or “Arms and legs heavy and warm”.
The Warmth Experience
The glow of warmth creates a pleasant sensation when it comes. Be patient — it may take a few weeks of regular practice before you feel it. The warmth typically emerges most easily in your dominant hand. For right-handed people, the usual sequence is:
- The right hand glows first
- After further practice, the rest of the right arm
- Then the left hand and arm
- Finally, the legs
The Attitude for Success
As with Exercise 1, an attitude of passive receptive “go with the flow” concentration is essential for success with warmth. Any sense of trying too hard to bring on the glow is counterproductive. Simply practise imagining, effortlessly visualizing, a glow of warmth, an aura enveloping the limb, as you say the words. If it doesn’t come in the early days of practice, don’t be concerned — it will develop with time.
In a study reported by Harano, Ogawa and Naruse (1965) it was found that under conditions of passive concentration on the phrase, “My arms are warm”, change in the felt warmth of the arms was reported and a corresponding increase in the actual temperature of the arms occurred. Related to these findings was an actual increase in blood volume as measured by a finger plethysmograph. It was also found that when an attitude of active striving was adopted to achieve this effect no subjective or objective changes in warmth occurred. This finding parallels the well-known views of Emile Coue (1922) who wrote that: “To make good suggestions it is absolutely necessary to do it without effort . . . the use of the will . . . must be entirely put aside. One must have recourse exclusively to the imagination”.
Alan Richardson, Mental Imagery
The Physiological Basis
The glow of relaxation is caused by the dilation (opening up) of small blood vessels in the skin. The sensation can be compared to mild sunburn without the pain.
The Trajectory of the Sensory Sequence
When experiencing warmth, you may notice the shape of your body begins to feel fuzzy and vague. The exact outline becomes blurred and expands outward. You sense the limb more as an aura, or envelope of energy, rather than a solid physical mass. We will build on that in Exercises 3 & 4 — evoking feelings of Clear and Light in the aura of the limbs — to attain an empty floating state .
After sufficient practice of the four feelings — Heavy, Warm, Clear, Light — they are used as a single mantra: “Heavy. . . Warm . . . Clear . . . Light” while focusing on different locations in the body where physical and emotional tension is experienced, breathing through the focus of tension.
The progression through the sequence of feelings:
(1) feeling the body as a heavy physical mass, a fullness of sensation;
(2) expanding and diffusing that out into a fuzzy glow of energy, a reddish glowing aura, the shape and outline of the body becoming blurred;
(3) clearing that aura of its colour, its fullness of feeling, so that it becomes transparent and relatively empty;
(4) what little residue of feeling remains is now quite weightless, an empty floating felt-sense.
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