My collie, Banner, and I enjoying a sunset at the lake. No tension!

Meditating with body tension; Aaron’s guidance,

Holding the intention to write these blogs, for 3 months I’ve put aside my many-years pattern of talking with Aaron after I meditate. I’m missing that. Instead of choosing to write a blog over conversing with Aaron, I’ve decided to include Aaron today and just invite you in. I hope it’s fruitful for you too.

I awakened pre-dawn on this rainy morning and decided to get back in bed and meditate there, maybe sleep an extra hour if Hal didn’t buzz me to come in and take care of him.

“Breathing in; breathing out…” consciousness moving from breath to body as I noted the many knots and tensions. It led me back to those airplanes I made from popsicle sticks and rubber band as a child. I had an entire airport stored inside, spinning, leaping, collapsing! Why was this a surprise?

I had been meditating regularly, and also doing some body basics: energy balancing, Feldenkrais, some PT guided exercises. When meditating, it’s easy for me to go to a place of deep stillness; resting in awareness. That stillness is always there. It is ultimate reality and we do learn to rest in it. When mundane reality is not so pleasant it’s easy for ultimate reality to become a refuge. That’s not bad as long as there’s awareness that it’s happening. Stillness is comfortable. At this time of great stress who wants to be fully in the world?

But the physical body shows up the lie; those tensions that are dropped aside from mind in very deep meditation still show up in the body if they, the tensions, and the roots of the tensions,  have not been noted and cared for. That morning I began to see the hundreds of small tensions that I had been just pushing aside, storing in the body, so the stillness showed itself as an illusion.

It wasn’t so much avoidance of the unpleasant for me as what i perceived as lack of time. Truly, we cannot attend to everything within our linear-time lives. There is the habit of pushing aside that which it feels cannot be handled immediately; then I go past it  saying, “I’ll get back to it,” and never do. No time! For me, tension stores in my body.

Resting in bed, attention focused on the enormous amount of tension flowing through  this body which lay well-supported on a comfortable mattress, I turned to Aaron.

Aaron: Please bring attention to 1 area of contraction in your body. Do not try to fix it or change it just hold it as you would hold a crying child in your arms. When they’re ready to stop crying, they’ll stop. It’s your calm and loving energy that helps them, not saying “quiet,” certainly not shaking them or trying to push tension away. Find that presence within that can hold space for the tension without trying to fix tension. Find the immensity of spaciousness and love. Can you see the ways that you have been either avoiding the tension because you were too busy or quickly trying to fix the tension, to move past it?

Most humans are habituated to function in a linear way. When you’re stuck on that linear path, you can’t see the non-linear;  here is the spaciousness within which everything exists at once – tension and the lack of tension, joy and sorrow, pain and absence of pain. As long as you’re rushing back and forth from one opposite to the other, your body is impeded: unable to release the tensions. I think here of a rubber band with a stick in the middle you twist it until it’s fully wound up. You let go of the stick; it spins back with great force and begins to rewind itself again, and again and again.

Remember that which truly rests in that space beyond tension and lack of tension; within that nonlinear spaciousness. This is the place of release. More accurately, it is the space that is eternally free of tension,

We’ll start by bringing attention to just one area of tension. Right now, the tension in the chest area, heart, lungs, is predominant. Bring a hand up over the heart;  breathing in, speak to the heart. “Ohhh; I hold you in love. I see how you become a storehouse for minds tensions. I choose to no longer to ask you to do that.  The mind and the emotions are capable of dealing with their tensions I choose not to store them in my body I thank you and I release you from that job.”

Now just to begin to breathe visualizing spaciousness in the heart, in the chest, gently holding your hand upon it. “Thank you.” Invite them to come back to their innate spaciousness, just breathing in and breathing out

I knew you can see it happening as I do.

You are also perceiving the ripples of energy and tension in the belly, in the throat, everywhere in the body. Just take one at a time. Where it’s a predominant place where you perceive these ripples of tension, just gently place a hand upon the body there.. Remember that statement, “that which is aware of tension is not tense,”  but this is not the mental body, this is grandmother awareness, which touches every cell.  Literally invite the cells there in the belly that are contracted, that are holding tension, to breathe and open.  Expanding the belly, invite them to really stretch and release. Again, thank them for trying to protect you; release them from that responsibility in the future.

Do this for perhaps just 10 or 15 minutes today and then return to your meditation. If there is some place in their body that feels especially stuck, reverberating with tension, you can go back to it. If not just return to awareness or to your breath. It will take time to retrain the cells and whole energy system of your body, to remind it to trust that it doesn’t not have to take on this role, that it can be open joyfully alive and free of external tension. I love you and thank you I am Aaron

 

Here  I moved into meditation, and the contracted energy gradually opened and relaxed.