We can think of thoughts and emotions - mental processes generally - as having a grip on our muscles. Or rather, if we consider the Alexander stand that mind and body are one, then the muscles patterns are the thoughts, and vice versa.
So it needn't only be the so called 'negative' emotions - fear, anger, hate and so on - that cause the neck to tighten. It could just as well be happiness, excitement, anticipation and so on. Add the fact that very often we have mixtures of 'positive' and 'negative' feelings in us, and we can see that the whole process of tightening and releasing is not as straightforward as we might have thought.
We hold on to these emotions, so that our muscles are continuously locked into one emotional pattern after another as we move mindlessly through our day. No wonder we feel ragged with exhaustion at the end of it!
Perhaps what happens when we direct and allow release is not that we stop feeling the emotion, but that we stop locking it into us. We stay released, allowing it to flow through. Just as our muscles have to engage to a certain extent in the effort of picking up something, in feeling an emotion, too, our muscles have to do the same. But if there is just the optimum effort involved, we can get back to our normal, released state when the emotion passes.
And perhaps, in some cases, we get the time to pause and realise that we don't really need to feel that emotion after all.
1 comment:
Padmini,I never knew till just now that the so called "positive emotions" too can manifest themselves in us as tightened muscles! I always thought it's the "negative emotions" like anger and so on that did that. Hmm, it opens up a new line of thought to me.
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