SGM August 2016 Weekly Message Two: “Mastering Meditation Step 2–Releasing Subconscious Tension & Relaxing Deeply”
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Welcome back to the August 2016 Edition of Spiritual Growth Monthly. I’m Kevin Schoeninger. It’s great to have you with us here at SGM!
In this week’s message, you’ll discover that there’s tension hiding under your awareness that is affecting how you think and feel and what you do—without you knowing it! You’ll learn how to recognize this tension and release it, so you can move forward in life from a place of deep relaxation, ease, and flow. Becoming familiar with the feeling of deep relaxation is also the second of four steps to master your meditation practice—which is our bigger project this month on SGM.
My Personal Training business is called “Holistic Fitness.” The reason is because I’ve discovered over the years that physical training is just the tip of the iceberg. It is a starting point that can lead us into training our minds, our emotions, and even our Soul. So, in my work with clients, I incorporate physical tasks that challenge strength, balance, posture, and flexibility as well as meditation, t’ai chi, qigong, and Reiki.
Through doing this for 35 years now, I’ve discovered that there is no separation between the physical, the mental-emotional, and the spiritual—they are intimately intertwined. One of the most fascinating ways I’ve discovered this is in doing hands-on work with clients.
At the end of each client session, I do assisted stretching in which I take my clients through a series of yoga-like stretches. While this may seem like just a nice way to cool-down and release muscle tension, it’s shown me that it’s much more.
From stretching others, I’ve discovered three important insights that lead into deeper release on mental-emotional-spiritual levels. These insights are actually the basis of the effectiveness of yoga, t’ai chi, qigong, and other mind-body meditation practices. They are:
1. We are not aware that we are holding tension in our bodies.
2. The tension we are holding relates to the thoughts we are thinking, the emotions we feel, and the actions we feel able to take.
3. Mindfully releasing physical tension helps us to recognize and release associated negative thoughts, feelings, and habits.
Let’s explore each of these insights and then I’ll show you how to put them to use to release the tensions that are subconsciously dragging you down. As you release these tensions, you’ll discover a deep state of relaxation that is the second key to mastering your meditation practice.
Most of us do not realize how much tension we are holding in our bodies. The tension has become so normal that you no longer notice it. Tension comes from stress. Here’s how that happens:
You are faced with a situation that is challenging. You don’t know if you have the resources to handle this situation well. This initiates your body’s stress response.
Immediately, your amygdala, the part of your brain responsible for monitoring threatening situations, fires up. It sends alert signals throughout your body to mobilize you to action. Your hormone system switches to adrenaline mode and electrical signals shoot through your connective tissue preparing you to be on guard.
If you are facing a major, or life-endangering threat, this reaction is dramatic. You feel your heart race, your breathing quicken, and your muscles tense. If and when you handle the threat, those physiological responses subside and you return to a resting state of recovery.
Since the situation and the resolution are somewhat dramatic, you will likely notice and feel the effects. The sensations are strong and the contrast between alarm and recovery is great—so you can easily sense it.
However, there are two situations in which the tension does not subside—and you don’t notice it. In both cases tension is subconsciously stored in your body.
The first case is when a situation is dramatic and you are not able to handle it—it overwhelms you. Being in a car accident, being subject to physical or emotional abuse, being the victim of a crime, or experiencing intense trauma such as war, can often exceed your coping resources. In these situations, the stress response is initiated and your body goes into shock. Your body “freezes” in that state. You lock into stress mode and do not recover.
As time passes the tension that is locked into your body moves to the background of your awareness and you no longer notice it. It becomes “normal.” However, it continues to affect your body and how you think and feel.
For example, you may find that you become anxious in related situations. You may find that you’re meditating or dreaming and you flashback to the original stressful event or you have persistent negative thoughts and feelings that you are unsure of their origin. You may have persistent mental chatter related to that event such as “I’m unsafe,” or “I better be on guard or things will be taken away from me.”
These thoughts and related feelings will continue to cycle in your mind and body until you are able to consciously process and come to resolution with the traumatic event and release the associated tension.
The second cause of subconscious stored tension is more subtle. It’s so subtle that you will probably be completely unaware of it, until it builds into something like digestive issues, chronic back or neck pain, or migraines.
I began to notice subtle tension when I was stretching my clients. In one dynamic stretch, my client is lying on their back. I am standing and holding them by their ankles. I rhythmically pull one leg and then the other, creating a side to side rocking motion at the hips. This is a great way to release hip and lower back tension.
As I stretched client after client in this way, I would notice that most people would at first have their hips “locked,” so that I was not able to move them. I would have to say something like, “O.K. now, let your hips go.” With that simple instruction, most people are able to let go and we get some degree of that rocking movement.
I generally keep this rhythmic stretching going for at least 60 seconds, so the hips and back let go and release more and more. What I would notice is that a few seconds into the motion, many clients would lock up again. Their hips would go rigid.
Intuitively, I would ask, “What did you start thinking about just now.” Invariably clients would say, “What do you mean?” When I questioned them further, they would say things like, “Oh, I just started to think about this or that that I have to do later,” or “I started to worry about such and such.” It was fascinating to see how just initiating a slightly stressful thought would immediately produce tension in the body.
How many stressful thoughts, worries, or anxious moments do you have in a day? How many of these thoughts or worries are persistent? For example, with finances, your work, or family situations? Can you imagine how much subtle tension gets stored in your body—without you even knowing it—as a result of those stressful thoughts and worries?
Stressful thoughts, feelings, and experiences immediately translate into physical tension. I have become chronically aware of that insight as I have worked with clients with neck and low back pain in particular. Yes, these relate to physical issues such as muscle tightness, weakness, and imbalance—AND they are invariably accompanied by stressful thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
For example, I’ve learned that when someone has an acute neck or back pain attack or spasm it is pretty much always traceable to a stressful event at home or work. Yet, most people do not make that connection. Most are looking only for physical causes and physical cures and fail to see the mental-emotional events that set the pain and tightness in motion.
Fortunately, your body and mind are equipped with resources to release pain and tension and the accompanying thoughts, feelings, and experiences. While these tensions may exist in layers that take time and consistent attention to release, this doesn’t have to be a hard or painful to do. A practice such as meditation is a gentle way to release these tensions as they arise in awareness—whether they come from traumas in the past or just momentary tensions of the day.
Last week, we talked about the first step in establishing an effective meditation practice—good preparation. If you set up a meditative space, create a ritual around your practice, sit with good posture, and adopt a mindful, motivated, non-judgmental attitude, you are well-prepared for a good session.
This week, we’ll talk about the second step in mastering meditation, which is releasing subconscious tension through Conscious Relaxation.
All of us have tension in our bodies of which we are unaware. As a result of this, I’ve found it to be equally true that most people do not know what the sensation of complete relaxation actually feels like.
In the book, “Meditation: An In-Depth Guide,” authors Ian Gawler and Paul Bedson tell a funny story that highlights the fact that “many people have this muscular tension in their body and they have become so used to the feeling of that tension that they do not even consciously register it anymore.” (p.81, MAIG)
As Gawler and Bedson tell us, there was a participant in one of Ian’s meditation classes named Brian. Brian came to meditation class wanting to relieve back and shoulder pain that had plagued him for years. In their first class, Ian slowly guided the class into a meditative state and then opened his eyes to check on how people were doing. He noticed Brian “sitting there, deep furrows across his brow, shoulders hunched and hands tightly squeezed in two fists.” (p.81, MAIG)
When the meditation was over, Ian went around the room and asked about people’s experience. When he got to Brian, Brian said through clenched teeth, “Oh, fine, really relaxed” and he seemed to mean it.
Ian had seen this before. In teaching meditation, he had learned that:
A) people are not aware of the tension they are holding and
B) they are unfamiliar with the feeling of being really relaxed. They just don’t know what deep relaxation feels like.
Because of these teaching experiences, Ian has learned to use simple exercises to help people both become aware of tension and become familiar with what relaxation feels like. After doing these exercises for a few weeks, Brian reported that “I have a lightness in my body. The backaches and shoulder pain have gone and I seem to have more energy.” (81, MAIG)
Above, we talked about how intensely stressful experiences are palpable when first experienced and noticeable when they subside—if they are handled well. There is a sharp contrast between alarm and recovery that provides a clear awareness of the difference between tension and relaxation.
When I first learned energy meditation in the Kriya Yoga tradition, the initial instruction capitalized on this feeling of contrast to train a feeling of relaxed energy flow. The idea is simple: you go through your whole body from toes, to legs, buttocks, abdomen, chest and back, shoulders, and face, first gradually tensing each area into a strong muscular contraction, then slowly releasing that contraction until you feel the muscles completely soften.
Go ahead and give this a try just with one body part and see how it feels. I suggest trying it with one hand. It’s a pretty cool sensation.
Place one hand, palm up, on your leg. Focus on the sensation in your hand as you slowly curl it into a fist and then gradually tighten it to about 70% of maximal contraction. Hold that contraction for five seconds. Then, very slowly release that tension until your hand is completely limp.
When you think your is completely relaxed, see if you can let go even more—until your hand and fingers are softly resting on your leg, like a cloud floating in the sky. Notice how that hand feels. Compare the sensation to the other hand and notice any difference.
You may feel a lightness in your hand, a warmth of energy flow, or just a soft, spacious feeling.
If you really want to go for this, you can perform a Contract/Relax sequence, first with both feet, then both legs, both hips, your abdomen, your chest, your back, your shoulders, and your face. This technique, sometimes done from head to toe, or in other sequences, is generally known as “Progressive Muscle Relaxation” or PMR.
Once you are finished, you will likely feel deep relaxation in your whole body at once.
A few years back, I recorded a whole body Rapid Relaxation Meditation that uses this Progressive Muscle Relaxation technique as part of my program, “The Complete How to Clear Anything System.” If you are interested, you can check out replays of the Training Unit in which we explore this technique in-depth here:
PC Users: http://www.mindbodyclearingnow.com/replays/unit3/
Apple Users: http://www.mindbodyclearingnow.com/replays/unit3/apple
As Gawler and Bedson describe PMR, “we use the muscles of the body to get the feeling of relaxation, and then we extend that feeling throughout the areas of the body that are not made of muscles—areas like the pelvis, internal parts of our tummy and the inside of the chest, for instance.” (p.83, MAIG)
With a little practice, you’ll be able to call to mind that feeling of relaxation into your whole body and instantly sink into it.
The more you get used to that feeling of deep relaxation, the more easily you’ll notice when other feelings enter your inner space. You’ll recognize physical tension as it arises, as well as tension-producing thoughts and anxious feelings as they arise. The more relaxed you can become, the more that anything other than relaxation will be noticed by way of contrast.
Becoming familiar with a background state of relaxation will enable you to notice anything that arises in your inner space, relate to it from a relaxed point of view, and let it go. When you can relate to anything that happens in meditation from a calm relaxed place, you have taken the second step to mastering your meditation practice.
I would love to hear your questions, comments, and experiences in our Discussion below.
Until next week,
Take time this week to become familiar with how deep relaxation feels,
Kevin