In a yoga class, we often explore postures in which we are explicitly looking for support - by which we mean the amount of muscular work the body needs to do in order to maintain a position or to move through different positions, and the amount it can relinquish, via our bones, to the ground. This is often called “grounding”, and when we experience good grounding, it has an overall quietening effect.
If we are lying down in Shavasana (Corpse pose), the floor does all the work of support - and if we lie here for long enough, so long as we do not become cold or uncomfortable in some way, we will eventually feel ourselves softening and letting go. As we surrender our body weight, our muscles can relax. Relaxation is an important skill - but we also need to be able to get up and move about in life, and all movement requires some degree of effort. The balance between relaxation and effort becomes the interesting question.
When we are standing we need the body to provide itself with some support - even if we are standing still. Otherwise we’d fall over. So the question then becomes how much effort is actually necessary. It’s difficult to know! We had to experiment with this as small children: learning to get up onto our feet and then mastering how we could stay there. We almost certainly fell over in the process, and then tried again, repeatedly, eventually learning to stabilise ourselves in what is an inherently unstable position. Having learnt this, we could move on to greater physical mastery.
As adults we get sucked into our heads and cognitive learning processes, and often become disconnected from body awareness and the richness of our sensory experience. So the challenge for many of us is to learn to feel ourselves more clearly again, to discern differing degrees of effort and the difference between too much - which leads to stiffness and tension - or too little, to recognise the subtleties of changing states, and to come to know our patterns and habits of moving, which tend to keep us incurious or even fearful, and can eventually limit us.
One of the difficulties we have is that some of our tension is obvious - we might know for example that we have a stiff neck, shoulder or jaw after a long car journey or some stressful event - but we all carry unconscious tension in our bodies too.
We all defend ourselves from stress, shock, sadness - even excitement - in a bodily way. Over our lifetimes, these defensive patterns become habits. Muscles commonly tighten to protect the vulnerable belly, heart and throat areas, or we might clamp down on difficult feelings by using the jaw, or by restricting breathing, and limiting the range of movement of the diaphragm.
These are not conscious choices we make but an inevitable and universal fact of embodied life. As we encounter stress regularly, and our bodies repeat these defensive patterns, they develop into habits, and we are no longer aware that we are holding muscles in an active state, it simply becomes part of the normal texture of the body.
What we do not know, we cannot change. So the first thing our yoga practice helps us with is this noticing of the different experiences of:
- relaxation - which we could think of as an absence of effort,
- effort - which we could think of as necessary work for the task at hand, and
- tension - which is too much much effort.
In attending to the body in this way, we are also working with the mind, of course, and our ability to both pay and sustain attention, to discern and differentiate sensations, and to notice change.
Noticing changes isn’t so that we become neurotic or overly self-absorbed, but so that we become more aware of the beginnings of discomfort, the early signs that all is not well. If we can notice these as they happen, rather than after the event, we might be able to respond more intelligently, and before things get out of hand.
In this vein of thought, I think the Princess and the Pea has got a bad press! If we know we are uncomfortable and that we can do something about it, it would seem like a good idea. If we can get better at recognising the inner voices that tighten and fix us while they are still whispering rather than shouting, then instead of self-soothe through old strategies like over-eating, we can use our yoga skills to help us feel more grounded and centred. A body that can lose tension is one in which we feel more at home; a mind that is less rigid in its thinking can allow for other points of view - and then we are more likely to respond to life more usefully.
As adults, the harsh voice of judgement can also be well-practised, so I think it is also really helpful to keep reminding ourselves to add a good dollop of kindness and self-compassion to all of the above. Humour, playfulness, curiosity - these are all good ingredients to add to the basic and most important ingredient of all: self-awareness. This path of yoga is a process and a practice. If we are on it, we know that it is probably for life, and we take one step at a time. As the Bhagavad Gita reminds us, “Yoga is the journey of the Self, through the Self, to the Self.”