If  managing stress in a more appropriate and health promoting way is on your list od resolutions for 2010, you may be exploring the idea of adding meditation or relaxation techniques to your self care routine.  Both offer numerous health benefits when practiced on a fairly consistent basis.    In Ayurveda, watching television on the couch is not considered part of an active relaxation practice. 

We often think of a glass of wine, a relaxing meal with family or friends, or enjoying a good book on a Sunday morning as relaxing.   But true relaxation is a regular practice that is cultivated and is defined by evoking and stimulating the relaxation response.   Some forms of conscious and guided relaxation may become meditation.   Many meditators find that their practice benefits from using a relaxation techniques that assists in accessing inner stillness.   Yet some forms of meditation are anything but relaxing.  Ultimately the difference lies in the practitioners intention and purpose.

All conscious relaxation techniques offer the practitioner a method for slowly relaxing all the major muscle groups in the body.  The intention  is to stimulate the relaxation response: deeper, slower breathing and other physiological changes that help you experience the whole body as relaxed.    Techniques include autogenic training, progressive muscle relaxation, and body scanning.  All these techniques bring an awareness and softening of the body through atttention to specific areas.

Meditation is a form of mind training, usually presented in one of three forms: concentration, mindfulness, and contemplation.  Mediatation operates on a fundamental principle that the mind determines your quality of life.  It is a practice that aligns your mind, teaching to see what is just as it is and freeing oneself from reactive conditioning.   Meditation is offered to relieve the mind from it’s busy programming of day to day events allowing the present moment to be accepted just as it is without needing to respond or react to it.

In either case, meditation and relaxation are both tools which offer stress relief and numerous health benefits when practiced regularly.  Many yoga centers and holistic health practitioners offer classes in both modalities. The beauty of these self care techniques is that they are low cost, (about the same as a co-pay at your doctor) , offer a community of like-minded friends also on a healing path,  and once you learn the basics you can practice at home and reap the long term benefits.