Much as we might like to think so, we cannot relax the tensions in our bodies until and unless we resolve the emotional conflicts that underlie them.

We are always tense or anxious for a reason, and the reason is always due to suppressed feelings.

We can verify this simply by relaxing. As we relax, the feelings we've been resisting surface naturally. If we don't want to feel these unresolved emotions - and the chances are that if we're stressed we don't - we will have little choice but to revert to the behaviours that have been exacerbating our tension.

This is why most methods of dealing with stress don't work. They fail to resolve the issues that lie behind it.

Stress is the inevitable result of insisting that things be other than the way they are.

To accept any situation, we need only to accept the feelings we have about it. If we feel okay with the feelings we have about something, we feel okay about the thing itself. But if we resist our feelings, we move ourselves towards stress and unhappiness.

It is our feeling sense that produces what pleasure and happiness we draw from our existence, and it is the unresolved feelings within us that cause our pain and suffering.

Because we naturally withdraw from pain, our instinctive tendency is to avoid the feelings we could benefit most from resolving. The deeper the hurt, the deeper we wish to keep it. Thus a rejected boy might grow into a man driven to find acceptance, or a destitute child may become an adult who yearns to amass a fortune.

But no amount of success will repair these wounds. Nor can we resolve the anger, anxiety or pain that creates our stress until we experience all the subtle details of it. There can be no healing without feeling.

Suppression
Unfortunately, suppression has become a way of life for many of us. We use alcohol to suppress fear, tobacco to suppress anger and marijuana to suppress sadness. But not all means of suppression are so obvious. Some people use shouting to suppress anger. Violent people are often those that cannot handle their feelings of rage, and will do anything - including punching, kicking and otherwise damaging the person that has been unfortunate enough to give rise to their anger - to stifle the unwanted feeling. At the other end of the spectrum, people have been known to wail at 147 decibels in order to avoid feeling their sadness in detail.

Suppression always involves denial, because in effect we are pretending that something that has existence is not really there. Such practice goes beyond dissatisfaction and insisting that things be different. By imagining that we have cracked a problem that hasn't been solved at all, we are performing an illogical, if not insane, act. Such practice is rather like an accountant placing a ledger he is unable to balance in a bottom drawer and supposing that his job is done. In the same way that the unbalanced ledger will sooner or later surface in his career, quite probably with disastrous results, so too will our suppressed emotions return to haunt us.

Integration
Rather than expression, which many of us might understandably hold to be the antithesis of censoring our feelings, the opposite of suppression is in fact integration, which in this context means accepting or including into the whole.

The integration of a previously uncomfortable or unwelcome feeling is what happens when we cease to fight with it. By feeling it honestly, we can change the way we relate to it and find a way to accept it exactly as it is. When we manage to do that, something miraculous always happens. Either the feeling becomes suddenly more comfortable, or more often than not it disappears completely. But always we feel more relaxed.

Anger
To demonstrate one aspect of such integration, let's take the feeling of anger. Anger in its unadulterated state is pure intention and nothing more. The problems we have with that emotion come after we have learnt to judge it wrong and to suppress it. All our feelings, in their untarnished form, exist to serve us, and integrated anger can serve us extremely well. But suppressed anger causes frustration and struggle while we wrestle to keep all that rage from our awareness. The more anger there is, the more energy and effort are needed to keep it suppressed. This means that people who habitually suppress their anger are likely to experience fatigue and depression in their lives, but it also means that the most frustrated people have access to the greatest amounts of energy.

Sadness
Sadness is another emotion many of us will go to any lengths to avoid. Yet if it was as painful as we imagine it to be, the pop charts over the years would not be so full of sad songs. In reality, many of us enjoy listening to music that stirs the pain inside of us, in the same way that others find pleasure in watching 'weepies' on the TV or at the cinema.

When a loved one dies, and we consciously allow the grieving process, the sadness and pain keeps getting integrated until we are left with a sense of gratitude for the time we got to spend with the loved one before their death. And so it is with all pain and sadness. If we can feel it honestly and find a more positive way to relate to it, the grief will integrate into a sense of appreciation.

Fear
There are two types of fear: rational fear and irrational fear. A good example of the former would be the dread of being run over we might experience while crossing the M25 on foot. This fear is based on our immediate reality, and if we are not extremely careful, it may turn out to be very well founded. Irrational fear, meanwhile, is not based on what's going on right now. One example is the fear of public speaking.

When rational fear is integrated it turns into alertness, a quality we would find indispensable in crossing the M25. It's worth pointing out that suppressed fear will not help us at all in the same task. Those of us who constantly push our dread away from our awareness have the marked tendency to lack any kind of vigilance, and can be a danger to themselves and others. If we allow them to, our feelings will always serve us, but if we hide them away they will work against us.

Integrated irrational fear, meanwhile, produces something else entirely. Plainly we don't need alertness in a situation that is not really threatening to us. Instead, the full acceptance of unfounded fears produces excitement. To comprehend this more fully, imagine a child on a roller coaster. Not yet understanding how to make his fear wrong and suppress it, the child experiences a buzz in his stomach as he whoops with exhilaration. In the same way, many performers have learnt to transmute stage fright into a feeling of excitement they can more readily use.

Guilt
If we do something that goes against the grain of our moral and ethical sensibilities, we will likely experience guilt. This is not altogether a bad thing. When viewed from a positive perspective, guilt can be seen as the call of the conscience. It's a feeling that asks us to reconsider our behaviour and perhaps choose a more loving course. But if we ignore these feelings, we learn nothing. The cheating husband, for example, is not without guilt, but in order to continue his unfaithful pursuits, he must learn how to suppress his guilt. Certainly he will have to learn how to hide it from his wife. Unfortunately for both him and his partner, in hiding it he is refusing to learn from his infidelities and is thus condemning himself to an unconscious search for more guilt to add to a growing slush fund of remorse and self-reproach.

Shame
Shame grows out of the notion that there is something wrong with us. It could be that in our view our nose is either too large or too small to fit our idea of a perfect nose. Maybe we think we are too short, or too tall, or too fat or too thin. An inadequacy in a certain area might be enough for us to judge against ourselves, or, no less plausibly, it could be a talent for something that we have always found embarrassing and even now make ourselves wrong for. There are many, many things we can disapprove of about ourselves. But what we disapprove of most regularly is our feelings.

Shame is related to all suppressed feelings, because in order to suppress something we first have to make it wrong. If we imagine being ashamed of something we will notice what desire we have to hide that thing. So it is with feelings. Whether it is the general human malaise of not feeling good enough, or a more specific thing we judge inferior or inadequate, shame makes us want to hide ourselves. Every time we make any part of us wrong, shame accompanies our decision, which means that some measure of shame accompanies all suppressed feelings.

It is therefore not surprising that we have the tendency to find shame uncomfortable and seek to remove it from our awareness. But by avoiding shame we are simply perpetuating the problem. By making wrong what has already been made wrong, we are simply adding to that slush fund again. The only way out of this vicious circle is to accept each feeling as it presents itself to us. In this way, we build a body of goodwill to ourselves.

The good news here is that shame, when felt in detail and accepted, integrates directly into self-esteem.

Integration is ceasing to make a certain part of us wrong. The extent to which we have self-esteem is the extent to which we love ourselves unconditionally, anger, sadness, fear, shame and all. The more we accept and embrace all parts of us, the better we feel about ourselves, and the better we feel about ourselves, the more our self-esteem will grow.

Vivation
Vivation is the skill of integration. It is a safe and pleasurable technique that effectively resolves the emotional conflicts that cause the tension and stress in our bodies.

The word Vivation is derived from the Latin for life. It means the process of embracing life fully.

Jim Leonard created the Vivation process in California in 1979. After investigating numerous personal growth methods, he developed the means for causing integration and therefore emotional resolution at will. One way to describe Vivation is to say that it is the act of cultivating our willingness to feel all our feelings honestly and accept the gift of energy each one has for us. It is the art of finding the pleasure within the pain, and making peace with all of our feelings.

Because Vivation works entirely at the feeling level, it has no religious or psychological counterpart. This means it works just as well for Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists as it does for atheists. Whoever or whatever you are, Vivation will increase your relaxation, your enthusiasm, your courage and your self-esteem. It will expand your sense of well-being and increase the energy flow in your body, thus enhancing your ability to enjoy every aspect of your life.

Although Vivation is a single skill, it has five component parts. When all five components are present, integration occurs in every case. There is no feeling - emotional or sensational - that will not integrate with the focused application of the Five Elements. These same skills integrate the feeling of having drunk too much coffee in just the same way that they integrate the grief of losing someone. They will resolve stress as effectively as they will resolve anger and frustration.

The Five Elements of Vivation are:
1. Circular Breathing
2. Complete Relaxation
3. Awareness in Detail
4. Integration into Ecstasy
5. Do whatever you do - Willingness is Enough

The First Element, 'Circular Breathing', means breathing in a way that enhances the energetic connections within our bodies. Circular Breathing re-energizes the patterns of energy that have been suppressed, making them stand out enough for us to experience them in detail. Skilful use of this element makes it possible for us to develop an energy-level rapport with such suppressed patterns of energy. Thus it becomes easier both for us to focus on them and to relate to them in a more positive way.

The Second Element is 'Complete Relaxation'. Since integration is always a relaxation, this element supports the resolution of all suppressed feelings. As we relax, we cease to fight, and thus the resistance that has kept the feeling from our awareness is removed.

'Awareness in Detail' forms the Third Element of Vivation, and is in many ways the essence of the process. Even when the other elements become automatic, as they will do with practice, our focus remains on exploring the details of our feelings. In order to integrate anything, we must first be aware of it. In fact, the only way to integrate something thoroughly is by being aware of it at the feeling level.

The Fourth Element is 'Integration into Ecstasy'. This means changing the context in which we hold the feeling. If we can embrace the possibility that there may be something good in what we have previously made wrong, or realize that what we're feeling is not infinitely bad, this is sufficient to cause integration.

'Do Whatever You Do - Willingness is Enough' is the Fifth Element. As its title suggests, this is about developing an enthusiastic readiness to feel and integrate our feelings. Instead of focusing on the process, it's about concentrating on the sensations in our bodies instead. The fact is we need neither special circumstances nor any particular procedure to integrate something. We cannot do this wrong. If we are willing to integrate, that willingness is all we need. More importantly, if we know it is all we need we will integrate our feelings more easily.

Each of the Five Elements represents an individual skill. All of us already possess some ability in each of these areas. For example, we can all breathe, and to some extent or another we can all relax. But as with any skill, our facility with all of the elements can be developed with practice and proper learning.

Vivation can only be learned experientially. Each element comprises a substantial body of knowledge but the knowledge needs to be internalised in order to practise Vivation with consistent success. This is because everything in Vivation happens at the feeling level. We can talk endlessly about feelings but all such talk is an intellectual exercise. There is no substitute for experiencing feelings at the level at which they occur, and it is only in this realm where they can be properly integrated.

For more information, visit the website www.vivation-uk.com

Vivation is a registered trademark of Associated Vivation Professionals Mick Sands 2002. All rights reserved.