How we talk about relaxation.

Often when we speak about relaxation we speak as if it were an object or permanent state of some sort. We speak about "wanting to be" and "getting" and "trying to find".

This way we talk about it, the metaphors we use, seem to imply that there is something we can gain or lose, and that assumption seems to be what drives most peoples' quest to acquire it - ideally enough of it that they might never be 'without' again.

The situation seems to me quite different. In my experience relaxation is but one side of a continuum stretching from the extremes of Total Relaxation to Total Tension. More usefully, it might even be described as two poles of a circle which constantly feed back into one another.

(sound familiar?)

Both poles, and the alternating between them, are required for our life to function. Without this changing from pole to pole vitality cannot appear, and to stop at either of the poles themselves is to be lifeless. Total Relaxation is the posture of a fresh corpse (before rigor sets in): no tension at all, no movement, only a limp mass which cannot move itself. Total Tension is akin to the immobility of stones, unable to stretch, pulse, or move (again) without outside intervention. Even in our attempts to mimic an extreme, its opposite is always present. Like when we lie on the floor and release all the tension we can, still our heart and muscles of respiration seethe, pulse, and work within us, tensing and releasing by turns.

Even so, we can release much unnecessary tension by 'playing dead'. And then, in order to do anything at all, even the simple work of standing, we must tense certain parts of our bodies and create a structure which will hold up against the constant challenge of gravity. When we then transition that structure to do other work -walking, for instance- things become instantly more complex as we have to continually adapt our inner tension-structure to support ourselves within gravity.

This thought-model is of particular usefulness to bodyworkers, who quickly realize that not everyone has the same resting tension. For this reason, we might more precisely refer to the tonicity of a muscle - that is, how firm, turgid, solid, and not-springy it feels from the outside. Tension and relaxation, it turns out, are solely our own internal, subjective measurements. Not everyone experiences having a body as we ourselves do, no matter how tempting it may be to assume otherwise. What is a state of deep relaxation for one person may be some other person's equivalent of incredibly unpleasant tightness - it's all gauged by your own particular body and psychology.

The implication of all this is, happily, that relaxation is not a thing which can be found or lost,  RELAXATION IS A SKILL, a capacity which can be practiced, trained, retained, and expanded through time. That's the 'good news'. The flip-side of it is that skillful relaxation (the useful, with you all the time sort) requires that we as individuals investigate and work with our experiences of being embodied, both physically and mentally. Otherwise we are not learning the 'art and skill of relaxation', rather we are relying on externals which bring a temporary lack of tension to our experience, a fleeting relief we confuse with relaxation.

The 'art and skill' involved is then actually the ability to feel, within one's own experience, where in the body there is more tension and where there is less, to track how that tension moves and shifts (or appears to stay stuck in one area), and to consciously engage with and guide those movements.

Skillful relaxers are adept at releasing (ceasing to hold) unnecessary or excess tension, and at intentionally guiding the tense-release response in specific parts of their body as needed.

We too can have this skill, can practice this art, however no one can do it for us. It is our work alone. Others may show us tricks, point out blind spots in our structure, or in other ways aid us - and they will never be able to feel for us. It is, in moment, our own ceaseless work.