Control of the Body
& the
Senses
by Ernest Wood
Relaxation and muscle balance are
necessary to the practices of concentration and meditation so that (1) the body
may not be injured by the mental efforts and (2) the mental work may not be
spoiled by bodily discomfort. Third, we have to remember that bodily attitudes
are associated with states of feeling, such as lying down with sleep, and
kneeling with prayer. That has to be taken into consideration when you are
selecting a posture, but there is no objection to your lying down to concentrate
or meditate, so long as you find that it does not conduce to
sleepiness.
Try to select an attitude for
concentration which will be free from disturbing associations. It is generally
found advantageous to sit upright with the eyes closed, the hands resting, and
the head and neck straight but not stiff.
You will probably find that the
body is not as obedient as you would like it to be. It is often restless and
impatient or troubled by trifling sensations, even when you have removed any
causes of discomfort that there may be. Do not permit this. The body must be
your servant. Will you be master? Raise yourself up, and say: "I will". Do not
wish, but say: "I will". If the body is not bright and obedient, train it.
Tomorrow, and each day for one month set aside some time every day and do the
following exercises.
1. Standing still.
2. Nerve exercise.
3. Relaxing.
4. Breathing
exercises.
5. Stretching and bending
exercises.
Do all these faithfully every day
for one month. If you miss one day begin again on the next and then do the
exercises for one full month without missing once. This will give you an
opportunity of doing something that is at once beneficial to the body and
valuable training for the will. Train your body as a fancier would train a prize
dog; do not starve it or beat it, but do not indulge it
harmfully.
If you find that under this new
regime old dirt comes to the surface, and the body becomes weak and ill --
an effect due to past indulgence, not to present strain -- stop the
practice for a few days. Then begin all over again, and thus go on again and
again until the body is sound, clean, and strong. Continue until weakness and
sluggishness disappear. If necessary, make a change in your diet, in the
direction of the "cheerful" foods, avoiding both "heavy" and "exciting"
things.
The Five Bodily
Exercises
1. The Standing
Exercise.
With your watch in sight try to
stand perfectly still (except for breathing and blinking) in front of a mirror
for three to five minutes. Make no response to any twitching, tickling, itching,
creeping, aching, or creaking feelings that may arise. Think "stillness", not
"not-movingness".
2. Nerve
Exercise.
Sit down with your elbow resting
and hand raised, and look intently at the palm and fingers, keeping them quite
still. Very soon you may feel creeping sensations in the muscles and a tingling
in the fingertips, with a sensation of something flowing off. Something does
flow off, and has even been photographed occasionally during the last fifty
years; but now observe that you can reverse the flow by an act of will. Send it
back up the arm. Let it flow and reverse it several times, keeping the hand
quite still.
Afterwards practice this without
looking, for both hands and feet, and use the mood of it to reverse the currents
at times when you may become excited by unusually "nervous occasion". I call it
"nerve-fluid continence". There may be times, however, when you will feel this
flow -- perhaps even in floods -- and some intuition will instruct
you to let it go, and some other intuition may even tell you where it is
going.
3. The Relaxing
Exercises.
The first part of this work is to
acquire the feel of relaxation, for which I recommend the following. Hold one
arm out in front about level with the shoulder, loosely, with the elbow a little
bent and the hand drooping from the wrist. With the other hand hold a book, edge
upwards under the forearm, and try to find the pivotal point of the
horizontal arm, so as to get it well
balanced on the book. When you are satisfied that the arm will rest balanced on
the book without falling, use your imagination to relax it progressively from
the fingertips, thinking the withdrawal of energy slowly into the shoulder. When
the arm feels relaxed, suddenly pull away the book. The arm should fall
lifeless, if it is relaxed. (You could treat this as a game on some occasions,
getting a second person to hold the book and pull it away unexpectedly.) Try
this several times, as you may not at first achieve the required mental feeling,
on which follows the physical obedience.
Once you have caught the feeling
of relaxation practice it lying down. Stretch yourself progressively, beginning
with the toes and feet and legs, then up the trunk, fingers and arms also, to
the neck -- stretch the neck especially, wriggling it about and entirely
loosening it (this is very important) -- chin, lips, cheeks and nose,
brow, and scalp. As you proceed, let each part in turn sink back into
relaxation, until at the completion of the process you give a sigh of physical
pleasure which empties your lungs, which then quite naturally start breathing
again in a gentler manner and with a slower tempo than before. Now you should
feel a cat-like luxury, with a complete disinclination to rise.
4. Breathing
Exercise.
Thin, shallow breathing does not
conduce to mental power any more than to bodily health. Strong, slow, quiet,
steady breathing is best, and again we need to establish a mood for the
concentration-breath, which can be put on and taken off like a garment. For both
strength and control, first become diaphragm-conscious. Singers and speakers do
this in various ways. One of the best is first to find the diaphragm by placing your hand just below your
ribs and above your waist in front and then panting through your mouth like a
dog. Pant until your muscles ache. Next, sitting easily erect, neither relaxed
nor taut, put your mind on the front of the chest, not in the middle, but
towards the sides, and, simply by thinking and will, not by breathing, produce a
series of slight feelings of expansion and contraction of the chest, not so much
forward as diagonally sideways. After a little practice you can control these
muscles by thought.
Now you are equipped to set the
mood for concentration-breath. First breathe out as fully as you can. Next draw
the breath in slowly and evenly through both nostrils, depressing the diaphragm,
then, keeping the diaphragm down, draw in more air by expanding the chest. In
other words, drink down and fill up in two successive but continuous motions.
Hold the fullness a little while and slowly exhale. Do not overdo this in any
way. The intention is not to take in more air than is normal when the lungs are
reasonably fully used, that is, properly used, but to counteract habits of
shallowness, irregularity, and excitability.
One thus teaches the body what
good breathing feels like, removes the old built-in wrong feeling and replaces
it by the new right feeling, which will soon be ignorable, when it sinks into
the subconscious, becoming a habit. Do not push the chest out and hollow the
back, but rather draw the muscles of the abdomen well in -- which
straightens and flattens the back -- and keep them in while practicing
any breathing exercises.
Indeed, it is a good thing now and
then during the day whether standing, sitting, or lying down, to move these
muscles up and down a number of times, and finish the exercise with them up, not
voluntarily consenting to their dropping at any time. They can in this way
become obedient and strong, so that in connection with breathing well one
naturally avoids the error of pushing the chest out, and performs the correct
action of drawing the abdominal muscles in. One does not then confuse these
muscles with the diaphragm. Do not hold the breath so long that you have to
exhale rapidly or explosively. Everyone must find for himself the measure for
healthy breathing. Slow breathing is conducive to placidity and long life. I
think we are all likely to know by the feel of it when to let it go and when to
stop it, but have to watch carefully not to mix it with our personal
emotions.
Some say you should count, or tell
beads -- so many units of time for inbreathing, so many for holding the
air in the lungs, so many for letting it out. Many old teachers advised a 1, 4
and 2 unit rhythm, but this was for special purposes; probably the average
modern person will find about 4,4, and 4 convenient, with a unit of about 1
second. Quite a good policy is to practice as you feel it easy and pleasant. For
the practice of concentration unusual forms of breathing, such as very slow or
long breathing and the practice of breathing up one nostril and down the other,
are not required; abnormalities and extremes are to be avoided as dangerous. And
never cork the breath in at the throat, under the erroneous assumption that you
are "holding the breath".
5. Stretching and Bending
Exercises.
After you have done the preceding
four exercises, you may do these to put the body in trim for ordinary activities
of life. It is well to do them also
after any prolonged period of sitting.
Stand with the heels together;
raise the hands reaching high above the head; bend forward to touch the toes
without bending the knees; return to the upright position, reaching as high as
possible, standing on the toes.
Stand as before; let the hands and
arms rest straight down the sides, with the backs of the hands turned outwards
from the knees; slowly raise the unbent arms outwards and upwards, until the
backs of the hands touch above the head; stretch, rising on the toes and looking
upward; slowly return.
Stand once more with the hands at
the sides, palms inward; lean over slowly to one side until the hand sinks below
the knee, while the other hand is curled up under the armpit; slowly swing back
to the opposite side, stretching the body all the time.
Perform all the exercises with an
even movement and concentrated thought, for at least one minute each. Finally
stand, raise one foot from the floor by bending the knee; now raise the other
and lower the first, and thus run for about a minute, without moving along. In
this exercise the two feet do not both touch the ground at the same time. In all
these or any other exercises do nothing to strain the heart.
Extras.
There are certain exercises for
the eyes and neck which can be performed in oddments of time which would
otherwise be wasted. Both these organs need a training in balanced musculature.
I seem to remember that someone once said: "You are as young as your neck."
Perhaps I only thought it. In any case, it is true. For balanced musculature you
need development, loosening, and relaxation. First stretch your neck to loosen
it and let it sink back into place.
Then there are six exercises; (1)
Rolling the head slowly round and round, both ways; (2) Slowly nodding the head
far forward and backward; (3) Lolling the head over from one side to the other;
(4) Twisting the head to right and left; (5) Jutting the chin out horizontally
and bringing it far back without altering the level; (6) Carrying the head a
little to the right and left without altering its vertical position. Finally
again stretch your neck and loosen it back into place.
Another good exercise for the neck
is to sit with your hands on your knees and slowly roll the upper part of the
torso round and round, while having the neck completely relaxed, so that the
head also rolls round, but only by gravity. Begin this exercise by leaning
forward and letting the head loll forward, pulling upon the back of the neck by
its weight only, causing a feeling of stretch. Then move the torso round slowly.
As the right shoulder goes down, the head, being relaxed, will roll over on that
side, and so on right round. This should be done several times, both ways. A
good finale, while the head is forward, is to shake the whole relaxed face --
not too forcibly -- with jaw, lips, nose, temples, and all loosely
wobbling in their state of relaxedness. Unpleasant as this may appear to any
spectator, you will find the effect very pleasing when you restore yourself to
your usual equilibrium.
For the eyes, while you sit
comfortably without moving your head, let your gaze very slowly and steadily
follow the outline of the opposite wall or some large object, first in one
direction, then in another. At every decided change of direction close the eyes
tightly for a moment. Go up and down, across and diagonally, as well as round
and round both ways. As a variant of this exercise, look at a near object and
then to something beyond it. In other words, look from near to far and back
again, not jerkily, but with slow motion. In general, for eye health, don't sit
in a room where you cannot see something twenty feet away, at which you can look
whenever you pause for thought, or, if you must be in a small room, learn to
"look through the wall". Sometimes children look at the ceiling when the teacher
asks a question. Sometimes there then comes an ignorant rebuke: "Look at me, not
at the ceiling; you will not find the answer there" -- making it more
difficult for the child to think, and perhaps even harming his
eyes.
All the foregoing exercises can be
practiced at any odd spare moments. They will always prove time well spent. So
precious are they all that I would say to anyone who feels miserable and
depressed: "Just do some of them, and especially the neck exercises, and then
see how you feel!"
 This article is excerpted from the book:
Concentration: An Approach to Meditation, by Ernest Wood.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, The Theosophical Publishing House,
www.theosophical.org
Info/Order this
book.
About the Author
Ernest Wood is well known as both a writer and a lecturer on religious
and educational matters. His work is always careful and thoughtful. His
convictions as to the possibilities which we may attain in the near or remote
future by internal self-culture are in accordance with the practical mysticism
of both East and West.
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