Personal posture is such an important thing to the health and well being of the body that it seems almost criminal that it is not given more attention. You are essentially a physical structure like a house or a bridge and just like these structures, your alignment must be perfect or else you will begin to feel stress that will eventually lead to a structural collapse.

Certainly you are a moving object unlike a static building, you also have amazing powers of self healing but if you continue to defy the laws of nature, as they apply to all the physical things on this planet, then you will eventually come to a point where you will not be able to heal yourself any longer. You see this in those chronic back problems that are so prevalent right now.

Certainly you are moving, but for large portions of your day, you will find yourself in static positions where you might move very little for hours. A great example of this is the office worker that sits in front of a monitor for hours with very little movement at all. The average office worker will actually sit in one position for six to eight hours a day!

”62% of workers routinely end the day with work-related neck pain, 44% report strained eyes, 38% complain of hand pain, and 34% report difficulty in sleeping due to work-related stress.”
Integra Survey, 2000. As published on the Tim Ferris blog.

62 % is a big number and one that can be alleviated to some degree. I hope to give you some options in this article that will help with this.

I personally like to separate sitting postures by regions, The two that we are going to go into detail here are; Chinese sitting style, the Japanese sitting style. These two styles of sitting are my favorites and are the ones that I would recommend to anyone because they are versatile and helpful.  Both of these styles have their strengths and weaknesses but with them you can get a solid understanding of your body’s dynamics and how to use either or a variance of both to get just what you need.

The first style that I will discuss is what I like to call the Chinese sitting style. This style of sitting is very practical and once you experience it and understand it, you tend to ask yourself why you had not thought of that sooner. This sitting posture is used a lot in Taoist sitting meditation and is a natural extension of the posture that one ideally assumes when one practices Tai Chi.

So that you get a basic idea on how to do this, take a cross legged seat on the ground. If this is difficult for you, find a nice chair and just take a seat on that.  I don’t want you to lean your back on the back rest of the chair but instead I want you to sit yourself with your back straight and relaxed but not supported.

To do this, you have to think of your back as being made up of a number of individual blocks that are stacked one on top of the other. Your vertebra are literally blocks that are stacked this way, think of yourself as building a block column of 33 blocks, you are stacking these blocks one on top of the other  until you have all 33 stacked all the way up.

As you can imagine, this can be a tricky endeavor and if you don’t make sure to stack the blocks perfectly, they will topple over on you. Unfortunately, you have built this 33 block column on a rickety table that keeps tipping one way and then other.  If your blocks lean too far one way, they will fall but if the table  goes too far the other way they will also fall. The only way to make sure that your blocks stay up is to hold on to the side of the table and make sure that it is perfectly balanced so that your blocks aren’t tipping forward or backward.  In all this craziness, there will be a point where the blocks are perfectly balanced; they won’t be falling forward or backward and they will be stacked in a perfectly straight line. This is called perfect alignment and is the perfect sitting posture of old.

Now, either sitting on the floor cross legged or on a chair, align your 33 blocks so that one is supporting the other…good. Now you have essentially a column that you have to balance, make sure that it is neither falling forward or backwards.  There is the one sweet spot where your column is not falling one way or the other. Here you are in perfect balance. Aligned with the earth.

This is the litmus test; relax your entire body.
Do you fall? If you relax every muscle, every tissue; does your body stay seated?  On your first attempt, most like not.

If your neck falls forward into your chest or if your body collapses into your stomach, then you have not stacked your 33 blocks properly.  In order to fix this, I recommend a couple of simple and fun little exercise:

1)    Find a nice straight wall and put your back against it. You will find of course that you back is not perfectly straight but curvy. Slowly push back on the wall so that your spine begins to align with the wall. Try to get your back as straight as possible without pain.  Let your neck stay curvy, it’s not meant to be perfectly straight.

2)    Get one of those big core exercise balls or a nice big beach ball and try to hug it. If you don’t have a ball, pretend that you are hugging a big beach ball like that. Sit and hug the ball. This exercise is great because it allows you to take a seat and feel your way to a perfectly aligned back.
If you can stack your 33 blocks perfectly and balance them so that you don’t have to use one bit of muscle to hold yourself up, then you have success. If you feel any tension whatsoever then realign yourself so that the tension goes away and you are totally relaxed and loose.

What does this have to say about personal psychology? Can this posture be both a practical sitting posture and a metaphor for how you should conduct yourself? Let me know.

The Chinese sitting posture is wonderful for sitting without moving for hours. It’s wonderful for long meeting or for when you have to type for long periods of time. The disadvantages are that if you have to do a lot of moving on your chair, you will have to do a lot of re adjusting which can be difficult. Moving the mouse on a computer for example can be difficult while trying to maintain this posture.

For a more energetic sitting posture, I recommend the Japanese sitting method. This posture is more dynamic and is used in archery, tea ceremony and Zen meditation.

The best way to learn this sitting technique is to kneel on the ground placing your bum and the weight of your body on the bottoms of your feet. This is a very popular Japanese sitting posture and you will see it most clearly in Martial Arts academies, specifically in Aikido.

If you sit in this way, your back will naturally arch so that your back takes on some of the properties of an archer’s bow. The human back is actually very similar in curvature to an unstrung Japanese bow and when taught how to begin to master this sitting technique, many masters use this comparison.

The spine therefore has to naturally want to arch backwards a bit; as they say when training in Zen meditation, “ your back must be kept straight, and the anus must want to look up at the sky”. What you are doing by sitting this way is creating a natural tension so that you back arches backwards a little, your anus as they say tries to look up and your stomach pops out slightly from the dynamic of this tension. You are essentially drawing a bow, and you will find that your spine will take on this very feeling.

Never overdo it though! The idea is that with the slightest of effort on your part, you draw the bow and the pull from gravity on your body does most of the work.  The little tension should feel good. It is the slightest of tension coupled with the pull of gravity, which creates this nice taunt feeling. It’s pretty easy to master and a joy to implement.

Once this drawing of the bow is mastered, you once again want to balance your spine so that it is not falling forward or backwards but it is perfectly balanced.

The Japanese sitting posture is better when you have to lean forwards and backwards constantly in your day. As long as you keep that bow taunt, you will be able to reach for mouse, stapler or whatever you need. When you are done, just go back to a nice well balance sitting angle where there is no tension on your muscle or tendons and the bow is supporting all of your weight, without effort, and relaxed.

The disadvantages of the Japanese sitting method are that at first you can feel a bit of strain on your lower back as you get used to this method but if you continue, this should go away and you should be able to sit like this for hours. Also if you have a history or lower back problem, this might be too much for you and you might want to avoid this sitting method.

Remember if there is strain, you are arching too much. It should be a comfortable, relaxing tautness.

My final recommendation to you is that you get a seat cushion. The kind of cushion that I recommend are the donut cushions. These things are great and I don’t know how I survived without one.
You can either get the foam donut or the inflatable ones. I have the foam one and I like very much but you can give the blow up one a go and experiment with air pressure to see how if this is better for you. This cushion is ideal for either sitting style described above and will help you to achieve a more balanced sitting posture.  You can get these cushions at a geriatrics or rehabilitation stores. You will begin to alleviate most of your current pain when you begin to sit properly.

In our modern and frantic world, lack of sleep and 12 hour work days are becoming the norm. In order to survive the incredibly taxing modern schedule, the average person has resorted to coffee, cigarettes and drugs of all kinds. We have so much to do but we lack the energy needed to get it all done. Four cups of coffee a day does not make for a healthy lifestyle. And the excessive toll that the nervous system endures can be fatal in the long run.

Is there a way to increase your energy? Is there a way to help yourself out of the zombie like existence that comes from overwork and rest deprivation? Well the short answer is yes and I hope to help you with this task. This article will be the first of two articles that I wish to write on the matter and I hope that with the help of both, you will be able to find answers and techniques to help you regain your vigor and health.

In many ways we are sort of like an electrical machine that runs on an electrical charge. Our nervous system sends information in the form of minute electrical impulses and each organ in the body produces a small electric charge as it performs its functions throughout the day.  Doctors for example measure these electrical charges through special equipment like the EKG to measure the heart and the EEG to measure the brains activity. Therefore if you find yourself running like the energizer bunny all day, there will come a point where you will literally run out of batteries. In order to gain back our strength, we can eat something. When you eat something, you take energy from your environment in the form of calories, and convert it into body energy and work in the form of joules. You can see therefore that one of the most important ways to increase your energy is to have a healthy diet.

Diet, dieting and healthy eating are very popular right now, so I won’t try and beat a dead horse with this article. It is enough to say here that food must be considered fuel because this is exactly what it is. You don’t want to put garbage in your car so in the same vein, do consider the type of fuel that you are putting into your body.

Breathing is also a form of eating, so breathing is also fuel. Breathing properly is a must therefore if you wish to gain more energy and you should devote some time to learning this discipline.

I will assume also that you are like most people and haven’t actually had a good night’s sleep in a long time. The reason that I mention sleep is that this is of course a great way to increase your energy, but lack of sleep is endemic in modern Western culture. Certainly sleep loss goes side by side with the strenuous and hectic lifestyle that many of us find the norm right now.

This is unfortunate because a good night’s sleep will charge your batteries better than anything else. Try to get as much sleep as possible, whenever possible.  Learn to relax and if you are having troubles falling asleep then look for ways to beat insomnia.

The present article will focus on what we can do to conserve the energy that we have by showing you how you squander your emotional energy every day. This is in my opinion the biggest reason why modern man is constantly tired and unhealthy. The squandering of nervous energy represents the biggest loss of vigor and power by the average individual.

The satisfaction of one’s emotional impulses is always accompanied by huge expenditures of emotional energy. This means that every time that you expend a huge amount of energy having a fit of one kind or another, you are actually draining some of that nervous energy (electrical energy) that allows you to perform and function throughout the day. Therefore the first and foremost method of increasing energy is to learn to control your emotional outbursts and your reflexive actions.

The principal methods in doing this are:

A. Control your need to be expansive; This is the need to be extroverted, gushing, and unreserved.  There should be a great effort made on the reader’s part to exercise a more silent demeanor. For example;  you come across some type of news and you feel the urgent need to share this news or event with a friend, you must realize that this act of indulging, will only squander a large amount of your energy. Conserve your energy; say nothing.

Do not manifest so many reflexive expressions while listening to another person’s conversation.  An animated overexcited demeanor can rob you of that much needed nervous energy that you require to get through your day. Every exclamation, every word, every gesture that you withhold, will increase the amount of emotional energy at your disposal. Do not waste your energy on mere trifles, on commentary,  in words of admiration for those that surround you, or on the occasions or events that you happen to witness. All this does not mean becoming antisocial but it does mean the ability to withhold those actions that have no purpose for you or for the people that you are socializing with.

When you do have the need to speak, don’t do it in an automatic or mechanical way but measure the expressions that you are going to make so that you are expressing yourself in a measured conscious way instead of a reflexive or impulsive way.  Do not speak in an excessively animated way, because this only wastes valuable energy that can be better spent on other pursuits. Above all, do not debate.

B. Control your need to be accepted and valued; People have a natural need to be valued as worthy by others, and they will pursue this need any chance that they get.  We all have the need to have others think that we are cool or great in some way or another.  We want others to think that our opinions are very important and that our opinions are the ones that really matter.  Next time you are out in public and speaking to others, pay close attention and you will notice that we are all expending huge amounts of emotional energy on just getting noticed.

The need to feel and to express our self importance is the biggest drain that we have. If you want to limit your emotional outbursts and conserve your nervous energy, I suggest that you do everything in your power to limit these tendencies to feel important.

You do not need to show others who you are or what you are all about.  You need to do, and in order to do things better, you need to have more energy.  It is the ultimate waste of time and energy to be constantly placating the ego.

C. Control your rage (or as I like to say, control your sudden fits of enthusiasm); if a person can begin by controlling any and all acts of impatience, he/she will be able to, in a very short time, develop a serenity and cool that will be able to overcome any obstacle.  The facial gestures, body movements and exclamations that are brought about by fits of irritation and rage, can cause serious loss of nervous energy and should therefore be controlled as much as possible.  You should strive for a detached cool at all times so that you are not forced into reflexive and impulsive fits by the world around you.

I know that it can be daunting to pursue some of the suggestions given above.  I do not want you to become a robot; what I want you to do is to start to consider all of the wasteful actions that you perform throughout your day.

I actually want you to start to be less of a robot and to consider your actions before you undertake them. The robot acts in a mechanical way so that when it receives stimulus 1, it performs action 2.

I want you to strive to be more than a reflexive creature. I want you to be more conscious of your every day actions, and through this basic exercise, gain back the energy that you have been throwing away like there is no tomorrow.

I inherited the headache gene from my mother. I’ll get headaches when I’m not eating right, not drinking enough, sleeping enough or if I’m stressed. Sometimes they are mild, the kind you can ignore. Other times they make it hard to concentrate on anything, and all I want to do is lie down and try to sleep so the pain will go away. In cases like these even pills can’t take the edge off. But I found something that does help and in many cases cure my headaches.

The great thing about this technique is that you don’t need to have years of experience with visualization or mediation. If you can day dream, then you can complete this exercise!

Find somewhere you can be undisturbed for about five minutes. Ideally you would be able to lie down in a dark and quiet room, but if you’re at work this is probably not possible. The key is to find a place where you can be alone and relax (a deserted lunchroom or quiet park bench for example). If you will be sitting, then gently align your spine so you have a fairly straight back. If it feels better, lean against the back of the chair for support. If you have a bed, lie on your back with your arms by your side.

Begin by breathing deeply and slowly, concentrating on relaxing. When you are ready, concentrate on your head, and forget the outside world.

Imagine that your skull is made of energy. Give it a color! I usually choose silver, but you might prefer a soothing blue or radiant yellow.

Once you have this image in your mind locate the center of the headache. You want to feel the pain, and confront it with your full focus. Start contracting the energy towards it. Make the skull-shaped energy field get smaller and more spherical. Make it contract around the pain in your head, until the pain is completely surrounded by the ball of energy.

When this image is strong in your mind, see the sphere (with the pain inside) slowly taking the shortest route out of your head. As the sphere leaves your body the headache may move with it, or might just start to fade (as it does with me).

Don’t stop your concentration once the sphere is outside. You still have to dispose of it properly. Imagine the sphere moving away from you, and out of the building. Control it downwards until you see it sink into the earth, and out of sight.

Bring your attention back to your body. Keep your eyes closed and your breathing slow and steady. Feel for pain in your head. In some cases the pain may have completely vanished. You might feel a few last throbs of pain before it goes for good. If your headache remains, it should have at least lessened somewhat. Try the visualization again to see if you can sweep up more of the pain.

The key to this exercise is calm resolve. The usual reaction to a headache is to try and ignore the building pain, while it grows and takes the enjoyment of the day away from you. Instead meet the pain head-on, treat it like an invader that you are going to eliminate. Put that strength and resolve into the energy that you use to capture it. If your first attempt doesn’t work, don’t give up. If you doubt the effectiveness of this exercise, then it probably won’t do a thing. Put scepticism aside and be confident. Do you feel even a little better? If yes, then it worked! Keep at it and the results will only improve.

To close, I want to put a quick word in about headache prevention. Some people are just prone to headaches, and will get them no matter what they do. However, the following tips can help ward them off.

Eat plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. Avoid products that contain white or refined sugar as much as possible. Stay hydrated throughout the day. If you’re like me and you just forget to drink water then make a point of going to the water cooler every two hours, filling your cup and drinking it right there before you let yourself sit down again.

Get enough sleep. Listen to your body and go to bed when you’re tired. Television has been proven to make deep, restful sleep difficult. Turn the television off at least thirty minutes before you get in bed and instead incorporate a relaxing bedtime routine like sipping tea and reading.

Sleep on your side or back. Sleeping on your stomach causes a lot of pressure to build in your neck and cause a tension headache, because your head is twisted sideways all night. If you find anything other than your stomach uncomfortable then consider investing in a slip on pillow-top cover for your mattress. The extra padding will support your body better than a conventional flat mattress, especially if you’re a woman. Many people find that placing a pillow between their knees helps them sleep on their sides. If you wake up in the middle of the night, take five seconds to correct your sleep posture if needed.

Take breaks. Don’t do any one thing for too long, especially if you’re reading or working at a computer. Even two minutes of standing, stretching and looking around will rejuvenate you and help prevent eye strain and stress headaches.

It is essential that you have a good nights sleep, so that the body and mind can recuperate completely from the stresses of the day. When you have had a good nights sleep, it is much easier to wake up in the morning and you find that you begin your day with a feeling of well being. The person that has a good sleep, thinks and acts with the full measure of his or her faculties.

A person’s exterior aspect, also reflect the benefits of a good sleep. The person that is able to sleep normally and well appears fresh and vibrant, he is clear of vision and the muscles around his face are relaxed and calm. The voice seems to have a deeper tone and has clarity.

Sleeping well conserves the individual; every hour that you sleep is truly an interruption of life, that is every hour that you sleep is an hour that you do not age.

Lack of sleep on the other hand, takes its toll on the body. Sleepless nights can bring about major nervous disorders, and these disorders create all the other nervousness problems that plague most people today. Lack of sleeps and rest puts the body in a state where it becomes difficult to fight off microbial infections. A person who lacks sleeps, finds it difficult to deal with any bleakness or emotional distress. In a word, a person that lacks proper sleep , lacks the energy to deal with the onslaught that it must face on any given day.

The need to beat insomnia therefore is of great importance. The exercise below was developed so that you can exercise your will and efficiently begin your nightly sleep.

Finish your day’s routines and get dressed , or undressed, for bed. Begin by lying down comfortably. Your limbs should be completely extended. Find the most comfortable position that you can, where your entire body feels relaxed and calm. Once you have found a very relaxed resting posture, you need to immobilize your body completely. This is an exercise of will, where you will train yourself to maintain one position in bed for an extended period of time. Make sure therefore that your lying posture is very comfortable. Your neck and head should be positioned properly and your joints should not be bent in an unusual position.

The second thing that you need to do is to make sure that all the muscles in your body are truly fully relaxed and calm. Begin with your feet and work your way up the body, using your consciousness to see and mentally command your muscles and tissues to relax. As you command each and every part of your body to relax, exhale. This exhale should be like a sigh of relief. I recommend that you read my article on breathing, specifically the section on baby breathing.

Once you have spent a bit of time in this resting posture, you will develop a very strong desire to move. Usually we allow our bodies to move as they will while we are lying in bed, without much conscious thought about it at all. This exercise requires you to do the exact opposite. You must stay very vigilant and make sure that you do not allow your body to move all. You might find this harder to do than you imagine because of the fact that you have probably been very lax with your bodies movement in the past.

When this need to change position arises, fight it at all costs. Stay immobile. You need to exercise your will power at this point. Don’t give in; contain your body’s desires.

After about fifteen minutes of this state of utter immobility, you will feel the growth of a very lovely feeling that lets you know that slowly but surely, sleeps is beginning to catch up with you. If you are persistent and maintain this sate of immobility, you will see that you will slowly beat your insomnia. Stay immobile for as long as you need to. Eventually you will be overcome by a deep and restful sleep.

There are a lot of people who would love increase their metabolism. Having a high level of metabolism enables you to burn fat and lose weight fast with the least amount of activity. Metabolism is the chemical process that occurs in living organisms, resulting in growth, production of energy, and elimination of waste.

The most important factors in the rate and strength of your metabolism are muscle tissue and activity. The more muscle that you have, the more energy that you burn. The more activity that you do, the more energy/calories that you burn. How much you eat, what you eat and genetics also play a very large role in your metabolic rate. Metabolism starts to slow down when a person begins to slow down with age or as a result of a very sedentary routine.

To increase your metabolism you should:

 

1. Build muscle and lose fat at all cost! As we get older our metabolism slows down and we get flabbier, but new studies show that we can reverse this effect and that the biggest reason why we get slower and flabbier is laziness. The more muscle that you have, the more calories you burn and therefore the less fat that you have. Use weights when you exercise. There is nothing like resistance training to increase you metabolic rate and increase your overall strength. You don’t have to start with very heavy weights. If you can feel a resistance from the weight, then you are benefiting from resistance training. If you are not interested in building muscle bulk then use lighter weights with lots of repetition. This will give you a very beautiful sculpted look.
2. Do cardiovascular training on a regular basis.   The ideal is to do something that will have you taking deep breaths but not wheezing.
   – Begin slow and build up by increasing the length of the workout and the speed.
   – Try doing your cardio with some weights.
3. Eat breakfast. They don’t say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day for nothing. After having been asleep for hours, the body is literally starved for sustenance. If you starve the body, the metabolism slows down. In other words, thinner people eat breakfast.
4. Stay away from sugar. When the body consumes sugar, all of its caloric needs are met very quickly because the body can very quickly break down sugars and make body fuel. Unfortunately the body will the store the pasta that you has just consumed before, the only way that it knows how, which is to turn it into fat.
5. Eat hot, spicy foods. Hot foods with lots of hot peppers will actually increase your metabolism!
6. Make sure to get your daily dose of sleep. Some research has shown that people that don’t get enough sleep will increase in body weight. If you are lethargic all day due to a lack of sleep, then your metabolism has slowed down and that is not what you want when you are planning to lose weight. Another important issue is that if you are now regularly working out, you will want to give your body more sleep so that it can heal and recuperate.
7. Drink more water. Water is the single most important ingredient in flushing out waste from the body. Have you noticed that you start to feel lethargic when you don’t drink enough liquids? This is because the body needs water for all major functions and if you don’t have enough of this precious liquid then your body will try to compensate by slowing itself down.
8. Eat smaller meals but with greater frequency. The ideal would be to eat four to six small meals a day with not more than 3 hours in between. This is a very BIG secret to metabolic increase!
9. Never skip meals. The most common idea when dieting is that you have to skip meals. This is the biggest mistake that you can make! Not eating on a regular basis slows down your metabolism.
10. Plan when you are going to eat, and how much. Start a journal that will allow you to plan in a very specific way what and when you will be eating. The more chaotic that your meals schedule is, the more chance there is of losing the momentum that you want to maintain.
11. Drink lots of green tea. It can be used as a substitute for coffee. Tea has actually more caffeine than coffee and will stimulate your system. Unlike coffee, there are no real bad side effects from drinking too much tea. And of all the teas, green tea has been shown to flush away fats from the system.
12. Eat plenty of high energy foods.  Fruits are a great source of energy and you should teach yourself to use them as replacements for junk food. Royal bee jelly, bee pollen and blue green algae are fantastic sources of energy since they are basically concentrated super foods. Buy these in pill form and you can pop them throughout the day whenever you are feeling a little tired.

 

Achieving the desired body weight is never impossible if you stay focused and determined so that you can learn to consciously control your metabolism levels. Staying in shape is more than just a whim; it has to be a positive change that you make in your daily routines and a change that has to be there for the rest of your life.

The very first thing that you do when you begin life is take a breath and the last thing that you do upon your death is to exhale. To say that breath is the be all end all of existence is not an overestimation.

To truly cover the marvel that is the living breath, would require a volume of books but I hope to give you a basic understanding of and the importance of the proper method of breathing.

Your breathing regulates and controls every single function in your body. This is something that the East has known since time immemorial and the West is just beginning to understand. If you can at least teach yourself to breathe properly, then you will be a long way to extending your life and improving your health.

Most people have heard the famous phrase about how you can go without food for weeks and without water for days but you can only last a few minutes without breathing. Well, the most important point from this anecdote would seem to be that oxygen is the most important thing of all, but that is not actually the case. The most important lesson is that breathing is a form of ingestion; eating is ingestion, drinking is ingestion. When you breathe, you eat. The fact that you are digesting with your lungs instead of your stomach and intestines doesn’t make breathing any less a form of food consumption. Air is food, learn to eat properly.

Therefore just like having a good diet, you want to ingest healthy air. Most people now a days live in the city, unfortunately here you will not find healthy air. Every single chance you get, take walks and strolls in areas where there is a lot of Flora, the more the better. Get out of the city when you can and go camping or hiking in the great outdoors. Take deep breaths when you get there and your body will love you for it.

Now the best way to begin to breathe properly is to learn to use your entire lung capacity. Most people tend to breathe with only the upper 0ne third of their lungs. This is a terrible mistake because you are robbing yourself of much needed energy.

Think of your lungs as one large glass and oxygen as the water that fills the glass. When you breathe in you are going to fill yourself just like a glass…bottom to top. If you keep this in mind then you will fill your lungs from the bottom to the top. And when you breathe out, just like a glass of water, you will empty your lungs from the top to the bottom. This is most efficient use of your lung capacity and it will allow you to take in much more energy with each breath. Also remember that just like the water fills the glass completely, you want the width of your lungs to be filled completely. Feel the pressure against the sides of your ribs as the air fills the full width of your lungs.

In the East there are an infinite number of variations in breathing style. Some prefer long exhalations, while others prefer long inhalations, and many a Yogi will tell you that the key to it all is a perfectly even breath.

I will give you a basic rule of thumb and then you can decide for yourself how you wish to vary your breathing cycle. But before we continue; please be very careful with these exercises. If you have heart trouble or if you are at risk of brain hemorrhage, please contact your doctor before you try anything that might be risky to your health.

Anyway, the rule of thumb is this:

• If you are inhaling, then you are taking energy into your body. A slow inhale is like a sponge soaking up pure energy from its surroundings. For example; a very long inhalation, as long as your lungs can possibly handle, while you imagine white light entering every pore of your being, followed by a short fast exhalation, and then another long inhalation (for as many times as you want), will allow you to absorb a great deal of life force.
• If you are exhaling, then you are distributing and concentrating the energy that your body has or has just acquired through the inhalation. Therefore by making and exhalation far longer than the inhale, you make yourself stronger, more solid.For example you can imagine the energy of your body being channeled into a particular Chakra, so that as you breathe out, that particular energy center grows brighter from the energy and power that you are delivering there. If you are injured, you can project energy into the injured area and speed up healing.

 
P.S. Read Chakras and apply what you have learned.

Relaxation is the key to everything, and the ability to relax is critical if you wish to maintain a healthy body. Hypertension and stress are like invisible wounds that rob the body of energy, allowing dis-ease to enter your body thus making you sick.

It is also imperative in any game or sport that you maintain a deeply relaxed body and mind. Without relaxation, your body will be slow, stiff, easily overcome or damaged. If the mind is not kept totally relaxed, it will not be able to act spontaneously and quickly to the ever changing present moment. In other words; relax and win.

In a world filled with anxiety, how is it that we attain a relaxed mind and body? It takes the ability to train yourself until relaxation comes to you with simple conscious effort. And believe me when I say that if you are willing to put in the work in the beginning; you will be able to relax easily, in a matter of seconds, and just about anywhere.

There are two different ways that that are most effective in order to attain relaxation. These can be used as you see fit and interchanged in accordance to taste, mood, and environmental requirements. Theses two methods are breathing and visualization.

In order to master each technique, let us begin by having you lie down in comfortable bed and close your eyes. Once you have mastered each technique, you can do it in any physical position, with your eyes open or closed depending on what you prefer at the moment.

Breathing

The first technique I like to call Baby Breathing or Sleep Breathing because  as you have probably guessed; it is the kind of breathing that babies normally use and the kind of breathing that you use when you go to sleep.

Begin by taking a nice deep breath, filling your lungs completely. As you do this, you will realize that there is a natural tension created as your chest muscles and diaphragm work to fill your lungs with air.

Now that your lungs are completely filled with air; relax completely, release the air trapped in your lungs, letting all tension and worry leave your body forever. Let that out breath complete itself naturally. Don’t decide how long the exhale will be, don’t do anything at all, just let the exhale do itself. The exhale will get slower and slower as your lungs empty out of air and the body naturally stops. Then there will be a natural desire to breath in, so follow this yearning and again take in a complete lung full of life giving oxygen.

If you fall asleep, which is quite possible, then do it next time sitting , and finally standing with your eyes open. Soon you will be able to do it anywhere.

You want to know something even better? Your body will begin to remember that feeling of great relaxation., and before you know it,  you will be able to remember that feeling so that you will be able to become instantly relaxed, anywhere, anytime.

Visualization

The second method involves the use of your active imagination. In the panorama of your mind, I want you to imagine that you are riding down a very long descending escalator. You step on to this escalator and you slowly descend down a long, dark, and cozy-warm tunnel. As you descend, you go by a beautiful number Ten and as you pass this number you hear a soothing voice say Ten. The sound of this voice saying Ten, relaxes you completely. As you keep going down the escalator, you pass a Nine and that great voice once again repeats this number…Nine. And as relaxed as you were before, you are even more relaxed now. And again you descend down this cozy tunnel…

This continues until you descend completely and reach Zero at the bottom of the escalator. You can descend on an elevator or anything else that you might want to imagine. Also you can start at 20, 30 or what ever you are most comfortable with. This technique can only be used under certain circumstances but it is quite effective and will also allow your body to experience and remember what it is like to be deeply relaxed.

Once you are a master of this technique, you can recall the feeling of great relaxation anywhere. Recall in your mind what you experienced at zero, or the bottom of the escalator. The instant that you make this recollection, your body will relax completely.