Total Relaxation Meditation: The Plum Village Practice

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 28 October 2026

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Total relaxation meditation is the Plum Village tradition’s guided practice of lying down and letting the whole body rest. Following the breath, you bring kind attention to each part of the body in turn and let it release, often with a smile or a word of gratitude; some guides sing. Plum Village also calls it Deep Relaxation, and it says plainly that the aim is rest.

It comes from the community of the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh: a practice of that tradition, not something all Buddhists do, and a practice, not a treatment. For the wider family of methods, see our guide to Buddhist meditation.

What Total Relaxation is in Plum Village

Plum Village places it under resting. Its practice page describes taking time to “completely stop, lie down, and practice a deep guided relaxation or ‘body scan’”, and says its centres offer “guided lying-down relaxations of 30 minutes or more” in their meditation halls. The reason it gives is rest itself: “When we can allow ourselves to rest and relax, healing becomes possible.” That is the tradition’s conviction, not a medical claim.

Two names, one practice. Plum Village uses “Total Relaxation” and “Deep Relaxation” for the same thing. Its Extended Practices page calls the practice Deep Relaxation and speaks of “sinking into this state of total relaxation”; the Plum Village app’s “Deep Relaxation” collection includes a “5-Minute Total Relaxation for Healthcare Workers”, and Brother Dao Hanh’s recording there is titled “Total Relaxation Guided”. Practised as a community, it is “led by an experienced practitioner”, “a sister or brother in the practice”; afterwards people use the techniques on their own.

One name, two practices. Deer Park Monastery, a Plum Village centre in California, also gives the name “Total Relaxation” to a seated exercise of nine paired breaths whose last pair begins “my sitting is solid”. That is a different practice from the lying-down one described here.

How old is it? The sources we read give no founding date. Sister Annabel Laity (Chân Đức), a senior Dharma teacher in the Plum Village community, calls it “a favorite practice in Plum Village” and first heard Thich Nhat Hanh lead it at a retreat in Virginia in May 1989; that dates her first hearing, not the practice. His 1997 talk in Key West, Florida, “Selective Watering and Total Relaxation”, opens with it. The library’s summary says much of the talk was addressed to people in the helping professions, and it suggests total relaxation as one way to give body and mind time to recover after meetings.

How Total Relaxation is done

Here are the steps in our own words, from Deer Park’s written guidance and plumvillage.org. For the guidance itself, use a recording led by a Plum Village teacher.

1. Lie down comfortably on your back, and feel the floor holding your weight. If lying flat is uncomfortable, the UK lay community’s manual suggests bending the knees so the back rests flatter, with a blanket underneath; some app recordings invite you to sit instead, with the back supported. Deer Park says the instructions can be adapted to the body’s condition.
2. Feel the belly breath: the abdomen rising on the in-breath and falling on the out-breath. You come back to it near the end of the practice.
3. Visit the body part by part. Deer Park’s full-body version goes from the eyes, mouth and face (jaw and throat) to the shoulders, arms, heart, legs and toes. Breathe in aware of each part; breathe out and let it release. Its short form can also visit inner organs, such as the liver, lungs, stomach, intestines and kidneys.
4. Smile to it, and thank it. The short form pairs the breaths like this: “Breathing in, I am aware of my eyes. Breathing out, I smile to my eyes.” The full version asks you to send love and gratitude to each part, and at the heart, to resolve to look after it better.
5. Give more time to a part that hurts. Deer Park suggests sending “mindfulness energy” and a smile to a painful area.
6. Rest as a whole, then return to the belly breath, gently move and stretch the arms and legs, and sit up.

plumvillage.org adds that you may contemplate the body through a theme, “such as compassion, gratitude, wonder, or impermanence”. Sister Annabel calls “let go — let go of everything” an important instruction. She grants that it sounds contradictory to make an effort to relax, and answers: “when you are not relaxed, know you are not relaxed.” Relaxation, she writes, can arise out of that simple thought.

Short forms and how long it takes

The sources give different lengths, and they do not contradict one another:

plumvillage.org also suggests using it to put down your burdens after a long day at work.

Who leads it, and the songs

In community, an experienced practitioner guides it aloud. App recordings are led by teachers including Sister Chan Khong, Brother Phap Linh (with cello and shruti box), Brother Bao Tang (with songs from about 14 minutes) and Sister Tam Muoi (with singing near the end). Sister Chan Khong’s book Deep Relaxation: Coming Home to Your Body (Parallax Press, 2012) comes with an audio CD, and its publisher says she guides the practice with “spoken words and traditional songs from around the world”. Thich Nhat Hanh’s pocket book How to Relax (Parallax Press, 2015) is described by its publisher as “a simple guide to achieving deep relaxation”.

Alone, you can follow a recording: the Plum Village app’s Deep Relaxation collection includes Brother Dao Hanh’s guided session, recorded at Deer Park in December 2021 for use at home. Deer Park also publishes written instructions and suggests recording them and listening when you practise alone.

A practice manual from the Community of Interbeing UK, the tradition’s lay community in Britain, describes total relaxation by muscle groups: its sample session tenses one muscle group after another and then lets it go, and ends by visualising a walk along a country lane. That is the method of progressive muscle relaxation, not the monastics’ guidance.

Total Relaxation and the body scan

It would be wrong to say this practice “is not a body scan”: Plum Village calls it one, and the app offers Brother Dao Hanh’s recording for “a total relaxation body scan at home”. In both practices attention travels through the body. The difference lies in aim and manner. The scholar Bhikkhu Anālayo notes that lying down brings relaxation naturally and helped MBSR spread, but that its body scan is not “merely about relaxation”: “the emphasis is on being aware without reactivity”. Our body scan guide treats calm as a by-product, not the goal, and tells you to “just feel — don’t fix”. Deer Park’s guidance asks you to release each part, smile to it and thank it, and to spend longer with a part that hurts. Plum Village makes rest the point, adds songs in some recordings, and openly suggests practising in bed “until sleep comes”. (The full-body sweeping taught on S. N. Goenka’s courses is another relative; see S. N. Goenka.)

Progressive muscle relaxation, developed by Edmund Jacobson in the 1920s, works by “actively contracting muscles to create tension and progressively releasing this” (Toussaint and colleagues, 2021). The monastic guidance we read (plumvillage.org and Deer Park) has no tensing step; the UK lay manual’s sample does.

Where Plum Village says it comes from

plumvillage.org grounds its resting practices in “mindfulness of the body in the body” (kāyānupassanā), the first of the four foundations of mindfulness (sati). Sister Annabel reported in 2007 that Thich Nhat Hanh was teaching relaxation in Vietnam as one of the essential practices of the Ānāpānasati Sutta. She quotes the exercise as “breathing in I am aware of my whole body, breathing out I relax my body”; his published translation of the sutra reads “Breathing in, I calm my whole body.” The wordings differ, and we keep them apart. (His four-line breathing verse has its own page: “Breathing in, I calm my body”.) The sutra’s third step is breathing “experiencing the whole body” (MN 118:18.3). In Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation, the fourth reads:

Three cautions about that link. First, the sutta gives the practice to a meditator who “sits down cross-legged, sets their body straight” (MN 118:17.1); the guided lying-down form is Plum Village’s own adaptation, though the early texts do count lying down among the postures of mindfulness (see meditating lying down). Second, the sutta says “stilling”, not “relaxing”; Anālayo, a scholar writing outside Plum Village, reads the fourth step as pointing to “an experience of relaxation at the bodily level”. Third, the sutta’s “whole body” is disputed (see how the translations differ): Anālayo notes that Theravāda commentary reads it as the whole “body” of the breath, and argues himself that it more probably means the physical body. He also cites a practice from Thich Nhat Hanh’s 1988 commentary on the sutra, in which awareness moves with the breath from the hair of the head down to the tips of the toes. (On whether the body scan itself is ancient, see where the body scan comes from.) Sister Annabel also links relaxation to tranquillity, one of the seven factors of awakening.

Before sleep

Plum Village welcomes sleep. Its evening practice says: “Lying on our back, we can practice Deep Relaxation until sleep comes.” For daily life, plumvillage.org suggests simply “scanning our body for a few minutes before we go to sleep”. Deer Park writes that practising in bed “can help us fall asleep easily”, and that even without sleep it helps us rest; Sister Annabel says someone lying awake can be “refreshed and less tired the next day”. These are the tradition’s own claims; we found no trial that tests them (see the evidence section below). Clinical insomnia programmes use meditation differently; the research is on our page on mindfulness for sleep, including when to see a doctor.

For children and families

The Plum Village book Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children (Parallax Press, 2011) lists a children’s version of Deep Relaxation among its practices, and its CD includes a guided total relaxation. Thich Nhat Hanh gave a talk to children at Upper Hamlet in July 2011, “Relaxing My Body”, whose description says he taught them to relax the body and smile to life. Deer Park suggests practising together as a family. See also mindfulness for kids.

What the evidence does and does not say

We found no controlled trial of Plum Village Total or Deep Relaxation on its own. PubMed searches (October 2026) pairing “total relaxation” or “deep relaxation” with “Plum Village” or “Nhat Hanh” returned nothing. A wider search, for “total relaxation” with “Buddhist” or “mindfulness”, finds one item: a 2018 letter in BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care by Suwanvecho, Suwanvecho and Pongpirul, authors based in Bangkok, titled “‘Total relaxation’: Buddhist mindfulness-based intervention in laypersons and patients with cancer”. It is a short letter, not a full trial report; its text is subscription-only and we could not read it, so we cannot say how it describes the practice or what it reports.

The nearest study we could read is a 2023 study by Niu and Long: 31 adults in China, after traumatic stress in the COVID-19 pandemic, joined ten weekly online sessions of a Plum Village-based programme in which deep relaxation was one of about ten practices. Depression and anxiety scores fell, but there was no control group, the authors call the findings “preliminary”, and the study cannot show what deep relaxation did on its own.

Results for the MBSR body scan or for progressive muscle relaxation belong to those practices, so we do not borrow them. The publisher’s description of Sister Chan Khong’s book speaks of a “measurable reduction of stress levels”, but it cites no study. For what mindfulness research does support, see the benefits of mindfulness.

When to go gently

A Plum Village recording itself warns that the practice can stir things up. Brother Bao Tang’s recording carries this note: “When we are not in a good state of mind, getting in touch with ourselves may trigger strong emotions.” It suggests pausing, or stopping the audio and going for a walk. The app notes that these practices often encourage you to feel, and thank, particular parts of the body, and that “all bodies are different”; it offers a trauma-sensitive relaxation by Sister Chanh Niem. If lying still with the body reliably brings distress, stop, and talk to a doctor or a qualified therapist. Our pages on meditation problems and mindfulness for anxiety cover the common difficulties.