Focused Awareness

Focused awareness is a term that I use to describe an essential component of the rest of the relaxation program. Martial artists and practiced meditators know it intuitively but they had to learn it too. Essentially it means that you can focus on a particular part of your body and allow it to relax. This is a good exercise to get started:

• Hold your hand in front of your face and stare into the middle of your palm. Now close your eyes. You don’t see your hand any more so your focus is shifted from it. You need to bring it back.
• Instead of your eyes, take your mind to the middle of your hand. Spend a few quiet seconds and tune in to a point in the middle of your palm.
• Be aware of any sensation there: heat, tingling, anything at all. Try and get the same direct awareness of your hand that you had when you were staring into the middle of it.

The following full body relaxation is similar to the progressive relaxation exercise but it doesn’t require that you contract your muscles before relaxing them. The contraction is just a technique to bring a focus to specific muscles. Here we’ll dispense with that technique and learn to consciously relax our body by directing our awareness to different areas.

• Lie on a bed with a pillow under your knees and neck supported, like in the progressive relaxation exercise. Put your hands together over your lower abdomen and focus your awareness there.
• There are many ways to section the body for this exercise. For this one we’ll be looking at horizontal bands.
• Start by focusing your energy at the top of your head. Consciously let go of any tension there.
• Be aware of the band around your head at the level of your eyes. Allow your eyes and temple to relax, all the way around your head.
• Then just under your chin up to the angle of the jaw just below your ears and around the bony ridge at the back of the skull (the occiput).
• Be aware of the small notch at the front of you neck, just above the sternum and below your throat (the suprasternal notch). Allow the relaxed sensation to spread across your collarbones to the tip of your shoulders, opening your chest. Bring it back to the middle now across the top of your shoulder blade (the supraspinous fossa) for the two halves to join at the junction of your neck (cervical) vertebrae and the first thoracic vertebrae, the one the top rib attaches to.
• Allow your arms to get heavy and sink into the bed. Slowly take your awareness down your arms to the tips of your fingers.
• Focus then just below your sternum at the solar plexus and relax across the bottom of your ribs all the way around to your spine at the last thoracic vertebrae.
• Now back to the centre at your navel and right around your waist to meet in the middle of your lower back
• Come back to the top of your pubic bone, again on the midline, and allow the relaxation to run across the top of the pelvis (the iliac spine) around to the back and spread out across the sacrum.
• From the front again just below the pubic bone and into the groin (the inguinal ligament) to join with two circular bands around the top of each leg. At the back of these bands where they cross the ilieum (the bony part of the pelvis that you sit on) bring your awareness back up to the sacrum.
• The two pelvic bands join at the sacrum where the relaxed sensation spreads to the tailbone (cocyxx), the anus and the perineum and encircles the genitals.
• Allow your legs to become heavy and follow your awareness all the way down to your feet.
• Come back to your breathing and focus on it until you’re ready to finish up.
• You’ll do it the same way that you did with the progressive relaxation. Be aware of the parts of your body that touch the bed, feel the heaviness in your limbs and slowly move your fingers, arms, have a stretch and open your eyes. Take a few deep breaths and you’re done.