How to Relax in Mindfulness

When you think too hard about not making mistakes, that's when you make more mistakes, right? Do you remember writing with pen and paper back in the old days? Or on a typewriter? Now we can just click Delete on our keyboard and it's easy, but back then it was very difficult to correct a mistake, whether typed or handwritten.

The more we think, "Oh, I need to be mindful," the more we concentrate narrowly and forcefully. And when you squeeze your attention and strain so hard, sometimes that works against you.

Attention requires a sense of relaxation. There needs to be some balance in our mindfulness practice.

Some meditation traditions, like the Tibetan tradition, even say that the only thing you really need is relaxation. They say that if you can relax, that's already enough. But can you imagine yourself completely relaxed? Relaxing 100 percent is almost impossible, right?

We think we cannot be aware

When someone tells you to be mindful, you feel, "No, I can't be mindful. I need to relax now." On the other hand, when someone tells you to relax, you think, "No, I can't relax, I have to focus." Our mind always needs to concentrate on something.

So you see, the balance between focus and relaxation is already there in the makeup of your mind. It's nothing new you need to find from outside. It's already there.

When someone tells you to focus all at once, we feel "I can't do that" and our mind opens into some kind of spacious state. But when someone tells us to relax completely and not concentrate, we can't do that either. Our mind immediately goes to some object; a flower, a person, or a thought.

So these two qualities of focus and relaxation are already there as natural parts of the makeup of your mind. We only need to find a balance between the two, between mindfulness and relaxation. Focused, but relaxed. Relaxed, but not distracted.

So finding that balance is the key. And that's the hardest part here. Doing just one or the other is easy. But having a balance between the two is not so easy. It requires practice.

Taking a conscious pause before expressing your emotions

One of the biggest problems we see in American culture is that we always try to express everything. And expression is good, it's not bad. But maybe that expression could happen just a little bit later.

So this way of relaxing with mindfulness can be very useful for us. We can breathe and sit with whatever emotions are right there in our heart and mind. And we can relax a bit with that.

Learning to take a few moments before expressing your emotions can save you a lot of trouble. And money. If we take a minute to look at our own experience of emotions before we try to share our experience with another person, whether it's a positive or negative experience, then we give ourselves a little space. In that space, we can learn a lot.

Over time, as we continue this practice of taking a gentle pause to observe and feel our experience, we begin to understand more and more how our mind works and how our emotions work. As we look at our experience, we begin to find the balance between concentrated attention and spacious relaxation. So, little by little, we can also look at who is looking.

A Short Practice: Relaxing in Mindfulness, with Emotions

Here is a simple practice you can try at home. Choose a time and place where you have a reasonable level of quiet and solitude and minimal distractions. It's suggested that you turn off your phone, set it aside, or at least disable notifications while doing this brief practice:

1) When you do meditation, you're usually working with your breath. Inhaling, exhaling. You're trying to relax your mind through your breath and through one-pointed focus and relaxation.

2) From time to time, look at the observer… inwardly. Not always looking at the breath or at whatever meditative technique you're using from any wisdom tradition. Instead, you can look at the observing mind itself, the observer.

3) As you do this practice, if emotions arise, take a gentle pause. Rather than looking at the object of your emotions or at whatever you're thinking about them, observe the experience of the energy of the emotion itself. Look at what you're feeling, within your heart. See that energy, connect with the energy, and pause. Right there.

4) This practice of giving yourself space to feel the energy of whatever emotions arise can be very useful for you in finding that fundamental balance between mindfulness and relaxation.

This is an excerpt from teachings by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche originally given during a presentation at Google headquarters in San Francisco, California, in 2016.

Originally published on Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche's personal page.