The Practice of Zen Brings Relaxation

A series of simple and beautiful exercises are the vessel through which you can achieve a profound sense of relaxation, eliminating the daily stress-mental and physical-that has been accumulating throughout the years. A weary body is uplifted, carried away from the dark cloud of woe brought on by strain and exhaustion.

With practice, relaxation imperceptibly becomes a part of you. The fascination of movement itself exerts its own influence, once you have established grace with ease of motion. Without too much conscious direction, it \"takes over,\" and your response is an immediate exhilaration.

The results, too, are speedily visible. You walk with a light rhythmic gait as though you were hardly walking at all. So beautifully motionless are your head and shoulders that you feel as if you were sitting in a rickshaw, carried along by its motion instead of your own.

You have learned to efface your ego so that consciousness of self is subordinated to concentrating on the task in hand. You have found a fundamental unity of body and purpose from which a new inner harmony materializes in action on the physical plane.

On this plane, with your newly-acquired body flow, you interpret and exemplify the very spirit of Zen with its in­sistence on moving with life without trying to arrest and interrupt its flow. You, too, go ahead with your work, with­out dwelling unduly upon your own reactions to it.

Rhythm has become a vital factor in your existence, ex­tending far beyond the exercises you do. In time you will even recognize your remaining tensions as a rewarding experience, accepting and affirming them as an integral part of life\'s pendulum swing; just as darkness is the compliment of light, and the sun is both the destroyer and creator of living matter. You will take obstacles in your stride, making them stepping stones to achievement.

By discovering and centering your physical forces, you have established a unity and a sense of integration that frees your body to create its own well-being. You have brought its skeletal framework into a balanced state wherein the various parts function naturally. In doing this you ful­fill Zen\'s aim, too, which is to release the mind from having to think about the body.

Zen\'s principle of \"going right ahead\" in life as in all art without wasted energy, is also paralleled by your own economy of motion in all you do. A harmonious muscular system cuts out dispersed effort. It is free from all that is superfluous or nonessential. The good walker, uses just the right amount of energy to propel himself forward; not a jot more.

If you fear that Zen\'s acceptance of all things may tend to justify every act, that its all-inclusive pervasiveness may spread its message too thin, then do not forget the rigid dis­cipline observed in Zen communities. No society can long endure without moral training. The age-old duration of Chi­nese and Japanese civilizations-compared with many in the West-must be attributed primarily to the self-discipline of its teaching.

Students adopt the techniques of Zen. But they can take from it its \"moment of truth,\" the flash of enlightenment, which is not unlike a sudden conversion, and in which all distinction of \"I\" and \"not I\" are set aside. In a sense this can be our shield in a world that is \"too much with us.\"

As gadgets and traffic continue to multiply, the techniques for externalizing life become daily more blatant and dis­tracting. Now that technological ingenuity has put limitless power into man\'s hands, and now that this modern frag­mented creature possesses the ability to blow himself and his planet to pieces, it is perhaps common sense to shift the gaze from externals and look inward.

Your hour of physical development can be your hour of awakening and recovery of the strength that is dormant in us all.

By discovering and centering your physical forces, you have established a unity and a sense of integration that frees your body to create its own well-being. You have brought its skeletal framework into a balanced state.