Deepening

How to achieve deep, healthy levels of mind

by Juan R. Silva

When you practice the Silva Long Relaxation Exercise (also known as the Silva Centering Exercise), there are three things you need to do while you close your eyes.

Far from going into a nice relaxed position, and listening to a beautiful voice of the instructor, rambling on through a conditioning exercise, you must go to work. You must activate yourself. After all, that's where we originated our "Dynamic Meditation" model.

We want you to do three basic things while you are listening to this exercise, to the Long Relax:

First, you should practice your concentration. Concentration is basic. It is the fundamental of imagination and everything else. If you don't have the ability to concentrate, it is hard for you to do anything else. You should concentrate before you do anything else.

Second, you should practice your imagination. We want you to exaggerate. We want you to learn how to exaggerate your imagination, because we feel you will be in a better position to control your programming. In enhancing your imagination, you'll be able to better program yourself, for programming to be more effective. At the same time, it will maintain you active while going through the exercise.

We don't want you to close your eyes and go into a hypnoidal condition where you are locked in to the process in a sort of hypnoidal sleep. Students sometimes do that because of a lack of experience in doing the relaxation exercise. It is natural for every one of us to fall into a hypnoidal trance.

By being mentally active, you avoid this to a big extent. You also avoid what often happen when students tell us, "I lost your voice, how come I didn't hear you." Of course that happens, because the mind wanders. This is another reason you should practice your concentration, and practice exaggerating your imagination - because you maintain yourself active right there, with what you are doing.

At the same time remember, this has to do with acquiring all these levels with conscious awareness. We must maintain our consciousness as much as we possibly can. I'm not saying that we won't go to sleep here and there off and on. We will. But not for too long a period time. We'll be in much better control of that.

The third thing you must practice is to coordinate the physiological relaxation with the mental relaxation.

It is easy to go into a mental relaxation. It only takes about two or three seconds once you acquire the proficiency. But you see, you leave your body behind. This is also true for people who might have taken the course four or five years ago. Yet when they do the Long Relaxation Exercise, you can see in their body language - that their body is still erect - it is as if this is the first time they ever closed their eyes and went through the relaxation exercise.

That means that they have not practiced. They have not acquired the ability to relax properly.

Remember that we are a body-mind entity. We are not a body and a mind. We must relax the body and mind simultaneously. It takes a little longer for you to relax your body than it does for you to relax your mind. And in your body, there are tissues that relax before others do. The tissues that are most sensitive relax quickly.

It takes a little practice. Nevertheless, you start incorporating this physiological relaxation with the mental relaxation.

How to practice

The importance of continued practice

Correcting problems

The best way to practice

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