Relax

Waking up to your life can be like resolving a full-body, ever-migrating muscle spasm. Have you ever felt an intense muscle spasm? It’s tight, burning pain that radiates out from the offended muscle, and nothing you actively try to do will force it to let go. You want to relax it, and you just can’t.

You say you know how to relax? I am still working on that one. One of the ways my family most loves to relax is to make a big bowl of popcorn (on TOP of the stove, with REAL butter) and watch a movie. This sounds very relaxing, yes? Arrange your favorite chair just so, have your blanket on hand if it’s winter and you live in a badly insulated New Englander like I do, then sit down, kick back, enjoy!

This is actually not at all relaxing in my experience. Some of you may know what I’m talking about.

When you avail yourself of a movie or play, in a very real way you give your entire being over to the story. It begins mildly enough, as you begin to decipher and understand what’s unfolding in front of you. Soon enough though, you are fully living the life displayed on the screen in front of you. A car accident occurs; your body braces for the impact. Two characters argue; your face contorts to express their emotions. If you’re able to notice, you can also feel the same vague nausea and racing heart that comes with relationship upset. Your body is fully engaged in the drama.

I’ve been pretty much asleep to my body for most of my life. But at the age of 43, I was lucky enough to stumble into a yoga studio. I had looked at pictures of yogis for a few years before that, and thought it looked like a beautiful way for a middle-aged woman like myself to get some physical exercise. I’ve almost always had some physical activity in my life, from field hockey and basketball in high school, to teaching swimming during college summers off, and then, of course, high impact aerobics in the 80’s. More recently, I’ve become a walker. But for all of that activity, there was strangely no sense of my body really. Sure, I would know if I had worked out too hard after too long a break. I could tell if I had a cold coming on, those sorts of things. But as it turns out, after a little bit of yoga practice, there was suddenly a wealth of information available that had been missing most of my life.

And with this information, there was suddenly a lot of bad news being delivered. The headline read “Stress is Hard on the Body.” No big shock, I know, but until I actually began to feel the effects of this habit of “sleepy” life on the physical being, I didn’t really get it. Just as with watching the movie, in response to the stimuli of my life, most of the time I was unconsciously tensing muscles, upsetting my stomach or training any number of other unhealthy, unconscious body habits.

Fortunately, there is a wonderful element of most yoga classes that’s called “relaxation.” Basically, at the end of class, you lie down and practice letting everything go. I say practice relaxing, because again, you don’t know how good or bad you are at this until, well, you know. It turns out I am terrible at relaxing. After all that delicious strength, stretch and range of motion physical activity, the basic idea is to lay the body down, arrange it very comfortably, breathe deeply a few times and with each exhale release activity a little more. Then rest, really rest all physical effort and let every muscle go. After three years of this, including completing a first-level teacher training course, I am just beginning to develop the skill of relaxing. This has only been possible through seeing how unrelaxed I am much of the time.

Waking up to this life is just so, with the elements of our emotional and spiritual lives added on to the physical piece. When we first begin to see what’s happening, we see that we are very tightly contracted around the people and events and things in our life. Our bodies brace for impact, our minds close to ward away the unthinkable and our hearts cave backwards to shut out the painful. It’s the full-body muscle spasm. This news can be so disheartening that I imagine there are those who immediately contract MORE, never to poke their curiosity back out to see if there’s something to be done about this condition. Conditioning is the word exactly, since we have spent a lifetime conditioning ourselves up to this painful mind/body training, like perfectly focused athletes.

For me, the practice of meditation has been the doorway out of the condition. And just as it has been in yoga practice with seeing how my physical body has trained itself to contract, the practice of trying to sit still starts as the painful awareness that the conditioned habit is to do just about anything but sit still. This is less stumbling awake, more like twitching, fidgeting, and clenching awake. Inviting yourself to sit still and let effort go, you see that the mind/body has trained itself to move, emote and mind-grind unceasingly. And here’s where it gets trickly There likely comes next a burning desire to forcefully undo, fix, positively take on the active project of stopping this right now. And this brings more muscle spasm, more contraction, more frustration and pain.

It is the seeing of this, just recognizing alone, that we cultivate when we sit meditation. With no effort to fix or run away from the fact, seeing invites relaxation around the fact. Recognizing this as so brings the effect of allowing the body and mind to begin to release the conditioning. The muscle spasm starts to unwind. More information becomes available, now to the mind and the emotional self. More waking up happens.

I still really enjoy movies. I feel my body engage with and mirror the characters and events. This practice has really helped me see that happen in my walking around life, too. And in seeing it happen moment by moment, I can relax into it, not let it take over and run the show on so much conditioned habit. It’s another nice side benefit to waking up to life.