Relax vs Relaxation
Relaxing is what you need to do to live happily for a long time and do a great job. Relaxation is an activity—one in which you are at your best when, paradoxically, you can relax.
Yoga, mindfulness, centering down, spirituality, and all the eastern concepts that western people try to employ are summarized, in my mind, as the ability to turn off our nonstop mental overdrive and enter into a relatively empty zone: a zone where the mind stills. This is achieved only by pushing in the clutch of our mental engine.
A friend described this space as “ecstasy…a place where the stress of performance is replaced by joy.” His mental awakening was achieved by the dramatic letting go of attachments—to work, to family, to his wife—all of which he loved and kept close, but no longer felt he needed to possess. His ecstasy was independent of outside objects and the people in his life.
Our western minds may not be liberated enough to travel solo through life on a magic carpet of happiness, but we can learn to notice what generates stress, reflexively relax in front of it, and mindfully respond with our best thoughts, actions, and intentions. We know that when our responses are tense, their quality is diminished and our life shortened.
So, practicing the art of relaxing becomes our new sport. It takes effort, training, focus, and practice to get to the nothingness space. Nothingness is the pause between the mind and the tongue. Nothingness is where you can take your mind at night and, when the engine won’t turn off, bring your thoughts into empty space— a space where there are no attachments, no plans, no dreams, and no nightmares. Nothingness is the new nirvana for driven 21st-century achievers.
Relaxation used to mean just chilling out with friends and family, watching sports, playing games, reading books. Relaxation was an activity, and sometimes we actually relaxed while doing it. But we often returned to work facing the same stresses, with the same level of stress. We didn’t evolve by harnessing relaxation to become healthier or happier. We were just doing something different.
Today, if we learn how to relax—if we learn to respond to challenges with a long pause, if we can go to nothingness more frequently—we bring our entire mental capacity and our physical skills to each event and respond with our most evolved answers, actions, and intentions. This is possible only if we have spent time in spaces where there is nothing but our consciousness.
