Happy new year! Yes, there is a mental change that needs to happen.

Happy New Year to you too Alvina. Sometimes we are struggling against ourselves without even realizing we’re doing it. Bates said somewhere that the best way to get rid of a bad habit is to replace it with a good one. Maybe that’s what our New Year’s Resolution should be!

Happy new year! Stop struggling against yourself sounds like shifting mental paradigm.

Noted, thanks for listening!

Makes sense! Things get easier when you stop struggling against yourself.

Thanks David,

This is true, most people understand relaxation readily on those terms you’ve described. I hadn’t thought of that.

A certain text from Bates’s book comes to mind right now, which illustrates it nicely I think. it is from chapter 31 (“Letters from Patients”) where the first paragraph was written by Bates and the second by an unnamed lady. Bates gives it the title “A Mental Transition”. The lady describes the rest/relaxation principle very well I think.

The lady wasn’t treated by Bates, but her husband was and she said:

I particularly noticed his serenity of mind after treatments. In this serenity he seemed able to do a great deal of work efficiently, and not under the high nervous pressure whose after-effect is the devastating scattering of forces.

“It did not occur to me for a long time that perhaps your treatment w as quieting his nerves.

But I am inclined to think that the intervals of quiet and peace were wonderfully beneficial, and why shouldn’t they be?

Bates seems to have liked this letter (which I quote here in part) well enough to put it into his magazines as well in February 1920 with a different title (“Mental Effect of Central Fixation”).

Lovely pictures presented during the video by the way. Very beautiful and peaceful.

I’ll wait after everybody gets the email blast this Sunday with this blog post, which is when most people see it. If people are interested I’ll record a video on the other method I use for resetting. Otherwise I’ll just send you a personal email about it.

Chopping up the idea of relaxation into several recognizable, specific parts I think is useful. Most everyone understands relaxing your shoulders, letting your body sink down and feel heavy. To some extent people understand quieting the mind, and also the idea of staying in a quiet mind state once you open your eyes and start to move around. From there, as you get more active, interacting with the world, the complexity goes up, like using only the appropriate effort to accomplish a task, being sensitive, optimistic, and more, which are also all things that can be broken down more specifically.

‘Relaxation’ is indeed a rather vague term. isn’t it. Most people think of ‘relax’ as being rather like crashing out in a favourite chair, watching a favourite TV show or music video. Or maybe relaxing means for some of us a party with family/friends with some soft pop music (dance, anthems…) with some drinks perhaps.

These kinds of ‘chill out’ experiences are of course very pleasant, but Bates Method relaxation is different (but just as, maybe even more, pleasant!). It is about unconscious relaxation but that isn’t going to mean much to people who haven’t experienced it themselves. Most people I think conceive to ‘relaxation’ in conscious terms, however to achieve unconscious relaxation all we can do is to (persistently) seek favourable conditions like David describes and then hopefully (unconscious) relaxation will come of its own accord.

For me, classic central fixation practices are the most effective for (Bates Method) relaxation. Others may of course have different practices which are just as good. The popularity of more modern methods seem to support this.

Defining and understanding what is meant by relaxation, both in the ordinary sense, and in the narrower, highly specific Bates Method sense, is a very useful endeavour since clarification will help all of us to understand this core principle better.