Hi,
So I don't know about you but I personally tend to get real tense physically during the day without noticing it.
And it is such an unconscious habit to me that it even happens during the night.
I wake up and my face hurts because my jaws are clenched.
I sometimes also catch myself frowning when I concentrate or even when I'm just waiting for the next subway train.
It happens less and less but it does come off as a reflex.
My body,
And especially my face for some reason,
Seems to go back to a place of tension,
Rigidity,
As if it was expecting something bad to happen.
That is a bad habit,
Something that comes off automatically,
That many of us have and it reveals an underlying apprehension or discomfort that we are not necessarily aware of since we have adopted this posture over time and we got used to it.
Just like wearing pants for the first time must have been noticeable for us toddlers and now we don't even consciously feel the fabric on our skins anymore.
When I catch myself clenching my jaws I realize,
Hey,
There's nothing to be tense about.
And anyway it's not like being tense would make me safe from any form of danger.
It would actually be worse.
Being rigid is resembling a piece of dry wood.
You snap easily while being relaxed makes you like water.
You adjust to whatever is going on and nothing can stop you.
The point is,
Relaxing your body is the only thing to do since it already does and knows what it has to do.
The body is intelligent.
You don't have to make any mental or physical effort to help it function properly.
Alan Watts makes a very nice analogy about that useless effort which is pointless tension in the body.
He compares it to when you're in a plane that's about to take off.
Many of us get on the edge of our butts as if we were trying to get lighter in order to help the plane to get off.
See that's exactly the same useless effort that takes place when we're tense.
It's like we're trying to stop external events with an inner tension which is nothing more than symbolic resistance.
So I'm inviting you today to try this challenge.
Bring your awareness to your body as often as you can and notice if you're tense.
If you are,
Dissipate that tension by bringing awareness to it.
It doesn't have to be a big gesture like entirely stopping what you're doing to make 10 yoga pauses.
Just do something small like unclenching the jaws or simply bringing a patient awareness to the parts of your body that are tense and feel your breath expanding in those areas as if they were opening up.
Only by noticing the tension you're getting used to recognize when you're tense and it becomes conscious.
So you can gradually let that habit go.
And by getting used to relax our bodies it affects our minds positively as well.
By relaxing the mind you relax the body and by relaxing the body you relax the mind.
It's like a vicious circle but not vicious at all.
This one is a good little circle that gets you in a state of effortless presence.
There's plenty of things that we do for the only reason that we never really paused and asked ourselves why we are doing it.
And being tense is one of them since we are crushed under serious amounts of stress in everyday life.
And when we come home we are still under the effects of all the physical and psychological tension which co-create each other as we've seen earlier.
But since we don't pay attention to the tension and we don't recognize it we stick with it even in situations which are not even stressful to us.
Like watching TV.
And we're still tense doing that.
So just like for everything else bringing awareness to something dissolves its power over ourselves.
With awareness comes clarity and it allows us to see how some habits that we have aren't useful and they can be detrimental to us.
Just because of the fact that we don't notice them.
So y'all take care of your beautiful selves.
Have a nice day.
