Profound Tension Release

"As we become more and more aware of the parts of our body, at a certain point we will notice something else: the tension in each part. The more we explore this, the more we begin to sense that our entire body is actually riddled with tension. We are talking here not about the natural, healthy tension that is part of our being human, but instead we are talking about neurotic tension, elective tension, superimposed tension – superimposed by our conscious orientation, our ego. Neurobiology tells us that this kind of pathological tension extends all the way down to the cellular level and is a contributing factor to ill health and disease.

So why are we so tense? As we shall see later for ourselves, any naked, unfiltered experience is initially felt to be painful and problematic; without thinking, we try to withdraw from it, evade and get away from it. We do so by literally tensing up, and this tension is everywhere. Why is unfiltered experience painful? Because any new experience is perceived by the conscious ego as a threat. As William Blake observed, human experience in its primal, unprocessed form is infinite. This infinity runs against one of the ego’s primary functions, which is to meet the unexpected and, through subverting it into a convenient and safe interpretive framework, to limit and control it and finally, when carried to an extreme, to deny not only its significance but its very existence. When new meditators confess, ‘I feel like I am missing out on the experience of being alive,’ they speak the truth.

Tensing up is a way of avoiding the unadorned experience and the discomfort it brings ego, whether that discomfort is physical or psychological; tension is our way of closing down experience and shutting off awareness. It is the somatic expression of us holding on to our small ego concept, our restricted, left-brain identity. On the one hand, physically freezing and contracting in tension, and, on the other, psychologically shutting down and hanging on doggedly to our small sense of self are actually the same thing, just manifesting in these two different modes.

In Somatic Meditation we do notice that if we relax physically, our small, ego-centered self begins to soften and relax, becoming less paranoid and rigid; and if we have some familiarity with the meditative process and are able to drop beneath into our larger Self, we relax completely. When we try to meditate in a state of tension, unless the tension is directly, openly, and somatically addressed – and resolved – we are likely to end up feeling that we are skating on the surface. We are still hanging on to ourselves, even coopting our meditation practice in the process; thus, we remain trapped in our little prison, no matter what sophisticated technique we may try.

One of the basic principles of Somatic Meditation, then, is that as we move along the path, our practice involves ever deeper and more complete relaxation. ... By relaxing, our awareness opens and we gain access to a fuller and fuller range of our human experience, which means our somatic experience. ... So in Ten Points ***, we are learning how to connect with our body, discover how we are holding on, and then develop the capacity to release, relax, let go, and see what comes next.”

*** Detailed instructions (pp43-56) are ideally read & understood before practicing this powerful guided meditation: http://www.shambhala.com/theawakeningbody

Reginald A. Ray. "The Awakening Body. Somatic Meditation for Discovering Our Deepest Life." Shambhala, 2016.