Dynamic Relaxation

Abstract

Edmund Jacobson (1970, 1974) introduced progressive relaxation, a graded series of muscle tensing and releasing exercises for the learning of profound muscular and mental relaxation (Bernstein & Borkovec, 1973). Jacobson’s premise was that by voluntarily relaxing the muscles we can, in fact, slow down the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the fight-or-flight response and nervous tension. When the sympathetic nervous system is quiet, the parasympathetic becomes more dominant, allowing the heart rate and blood pressure to go down, blood vessels to dilate, the internal organs to relax, and restorative body processes to take place. “If you relax your skeletal muscles sufficiently (those over which you have control), the internal muscles tend to relax likewise … Excessive tension… in the visceral muscles depends more or less upon the presence of excessive tension in the skeletal muscles” (Jacobson, 1976, p. 158). Thus, control over processes that we tend to think of as involuntary, such as pulse rate and blood pressure, becomes possible.

The bow too tensely strung is easily broken.

Publilius Syrus

Human beings, once they advance from crawling on all fours to walking on two, no longer need regress to a limping posture once they become older. That is to say, the bodily decrepitude presumed under the myth of aging is not inevitable. It is, by and large, both avoidable and reversible.

Thomas Hanna

The first awareness is of how much we abuse our bodies. Then comes compassion, then behavior change. Compassion and gentleness are healing.