About seven years ago I began to practice a movement art called Qigong. This particular practice comes from China.
After I had been doing it for awhile, the teacher said “the first step is all about relaxing…that’s really the entire practice for Level One”.
This helped me so very much to hear. Most of us know what it means when someone says “relax your muscles”. You can feel the difference between tightening them up and letting go without clenching them.
Not quite so easy with THOUGHTS.
Lately I’ve been talking about working with thoughts, and the way Eckhart Tolle and some of our other great authors and teachers speak about where to start when working with stressful beliefs or painful thinking.
The first step with investigating this internal world, it seems, is simply noticing that you have one, and how wild and crazy it appears to be.
It’s almost like with the internal world, things are so nutty that we have to break it down into smaller, tiny little incremental steps of awareness.
With this inner world, we don’t even worry about relaxing yet. Even though we crave peace, relaxation, and gentleness so VERY VERY VERY MUCH.
And yet, just like my Qigong teacher, if someone said to you “go ahead and relax” you might notice that you like that idea. Apply relaxation, in whatever way you can, to your mind.
The very interesting thing about relaxing a muscle, your bicep for example, is that it feels like you are un-doing some kind of energy. Instead of pushing, doing, asserting….you let go, open, wait, get slower, unclench.
You stop moving the bicep. You let it be.
The greatest and most ancient holy teachers suggest in all their many ways that to experience this kind of letting go is not just Level One. It is moving into the greatest experience of peace that can be felt by humans.
So first, you notice. Then, you relax.
No grabbing, ruminating, planning on what to do, how to do it, what will happen, what to say, think, what you wish would happen.
It can seem cold to say “relax, open up”. In the face of natural disasters, destruction, death, danger.
Relaxing sometimes seems like the OPPOSITE of what is needed to solve a major mental problem.
But you can feel what it is like to only act if truly necessary, and that thinking obsessively about something feels tight, tense, aggressive.
“Sometimes you will go through deep experiences that bring up intense pain inside of you. If it is in there, it is going to come up. If you have any wisdom, you will leave it alone and not try to change your life to avoid it. You will just relax and give it the space it needs to release and burn through you.”~Michael Singer
See what happens if you can watch your mind tense up, but then find out what Relaxing would be like. Not apathy, not despair, hopelessness….just relaxing.
I find that where I was pinched around something, an idea, a thought, some imagination story in the future….I enter a place where I don’t know, I look around and see so much more of what is happening right here and right now.
I feel less alone, more in partnership with the universe, like we’re here together.
Love, Grace
Turning Relationship Hell To Heaven In-Person Intensive Seattle 12/1 10 am – 6 pm.
Horrible Food Wonderful Food Weekend In-Person Intensive Seattle January 12-13, 2013 Saturday 10 – 5:30, Sunday 1:30-5:30. To register for either weekend workshop, click here! Fill in the workshop fee after you click the Buy button at the bottom of the page. You can use paypal or any credit card (you don’t need a paypal account).
Mark your calendar for Breitenbush, the end of June! We will be looking at all aspects of what we consider to be flaws in the body, and Un-doing our beliefs about them. Stay tuned if you’d like to join me and Susan Grace Beekman from June 26-30, 2013. You can change your internal beliefs about what you think bodies should be like….and change your entire experience of being in yours.
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