Relaxation and Mystical Breakthrough

What I have to say is very simple, but it's very important. Your capacity for awakening and for living an enlightened life, in other words, to be a full and complete reflection of divinity in this world, depends more than anything else on your ability to relax.

That’s it.

Please hear that. Some truths are difficult to embrace not because they’re complex but because they’re so simple. These truths hide in plain sight because we can’t believe the answer to life’s existential questions could be that obvious.

Your capacity for awakening depends more than anything else on your ability to relax.

In our society, we are conditioned to be tense and guarded, forever defended against anything that might go wrong. Even those of us with years or decades of spiritual practice often haven’t experienced what true and deep relaxation is.

True relaxation can’t be described in any meaningful way except to someone who has already experienced it. I can only say things that might inspire you to let go completely so you discover it for yourself.

Relaxation is attained by giving up control. That means giving up control of how you think and how you feel and where you're going and where you are. You let everything be exactly as it is regardless of how you feel about it, and surrender more and more deeply.

If you rest in that depth of complete relaxation, sooner or later you will discover that everything, absolutely everything, is being taken care of. There's actually nothing you need to do. There never has been anything you need to do. In fact, you have never done anything, no matter how it seemed. Everything has always just been happening.

The depth of relaxation that I'm pointing to is absolute. It can't be equated to any lack of tension because it isn't in opposition to anything else. True relaxation is so deep that it embraces any tension. It's a relaxation so profound that it has nothing to do with the experience you happen to be having.

It's full and complete all the time, no matter what. It's always there. It's always who you are. And on those occasions, like in meditation, when you have the opportunity to put your attention on it, you feel how utterly deep it is.

It can feel like your flesh is slipping off of the bones that hold it. Or as if you are melting into the space around you – expanding in every direction and through time into the future.

This depth of relaxation dissolves all of the boundaries that separate you from anything else.

Spiritual realization and union with the Divine depends more on our ability to relax than on anything else. As you sit in meditation, give up all control and allow yourself to melt into complete, unbroken and absolute relaxation.