Tension Release Theory

“The thing about tension is that it can only survive in darkness. In other words, it can only really survive when we’re unconscious of it. And what we’re doing (in somatic meditation) is we’re putting our awareness deliberately down into the tension. In other words, we’re extending our consciousness into our unconscious.

And when we do that, when tension moves from being unconscious to conscious, then we actually have the capacity to make a startling discovery, which is that we are the ones that are hanging on. We are the ones who are the agents of the tension. And then we’re able to let go.

Now what is going on with tension? Why is our body so tight from top to bottom? We have big bands of tension, we have areas of tension, we have tension all the way down into our cells. Long story short, tension is the ego’s way of not feeling. What happens with our ego is that when our body receives experience in a way that is unrestricted, that’s open, and it’s much fuller than we would like, the ego recoils from the somatic awareness, from the somatic experience. It recoils back into its own internal logic. And it does this by literally tightening the body. It pulls back and it enforces tension on the body. We tighten up. You can see it when you hear a loud noise your body will instantly tense up. When unpleasant experiences happen you can feel your whole body shutting down and tightening. This is what happens. So tightness and tension is the ego’s way of rejecting the information of the body, withdrawing from what the body knows, of pushing away the information that the body is trying to send our way.

As long as we don’t address the tension in our body, we don’t have access to what the body knows. So that’s why, at the very beginning of the somatic descent, number one is we have to begin to develop this capacity to know directly, to sense directly, not through our ego mind, our conscious mind, but to sense directly the life of the body. And secondarily, we have to begin to discover the tension that’s in our body. And we need to begin to release it.

Over time, through this practice, we become extraordinarily relaxed and the health benefits are very very many, but most important, we begin to make ourselves more available to what the body knows. It’s as if tension is a lead wall between the objective, impartial, vast awareness of the body and everything that the body knows, moment-by-moment, and our conscious mind. Tension is that lead wall.

And what we do with (Ten Points practice), is we’re beginning to dismantle that wall so that the body, and everything that the body knows and is, begins to become available to our conscious mind. And our ego, our rigid, paranoid, disconnected ego comes into a new relationship with our body. All of a sudden, instead of pushing the body away, and rejecting its wisdom, its information and its life, we suddenly find that our conscious self begins to become nourished by the body, begins to be informed by the body, and low and behold our conscious mind begins to see itself more, as we do the practice, as an assistant to the body, as an emissary of the body, as a servant of the body, as a loving partner of the body."

Reginald A. Ray “Somatic Descent.” Sounds True, 2016. www.soundstrue.com/store/somatic-descent.html