Recently I’ve been thinking about tension and relaxation – mainly as I’ve released just how much body tension I’ve been holding over the years, and how much this leads to injuries and anxiety.
The Walking Wounded
You can see it every day if you look closely, people walking around with stiffness in hips and hunched over shoulders. If you ever try yoga you’ll soon discover where your own particularly weak points are (and really everyone should!). Although some are obviously the result of physical trauma from accidents I’ve realised the majority are largely driven by experiences and our reactions to it. Especially in the UK we are discouraged to express emotions, and this causes deep held tension over time.
Any massage therapists, shiatsu or other practitioners out there will know they are taught that the release of a knotty bit of muscle can sometimes trigger quite intense and emotional reactions (there are many anecdotes) as part of their work on peoples bodies. The evidence is clear on this if you dig for it, but this blog post isn’t about that. It’s about what mammals do with uncomfortable experiences. There is a way that mammals deal with the aftermath of a fight or flight experience to ‘reset’ after, the only mammals who don’t do this are animals kept in zoos (wow the implications for surveillance culture!) and humans.
Shake it off
Any dog owners out there will know dogs shake all the time, not only when they are wet. I noticed my dog will do this after an uncomfortable or scary experience and then move on happily afterwards, and a bit of researching later I stumbled across this guy – Dr. Peter Levine, who wrote a book about doing exactly this called ‘Healing Trauma‘
I had also had some experience of this studying Qi Gong – the body will involuntarily shake often, and also within the Ba Duan Jin stretches, which shaolin monks still practice today https://activeqi.co.uk/ba-duan-jin/ – it ends with deliberate shaking of all limbs and the body. We seem to be so resistant of showing weakness that we simply don’t do it anymore and suppress whatever traumas we have on the daily. Stiff upper lip and all that!
If you have a bad experience you can quite literally ‘shake it off’. I would encourage anyone to look into this as I am. I’ll be trying the Dr Levine method, and I can highly recommend ‘The way of energy‘ as an introduction to Qi Going (Chi Kung).
