RELEASING TENSIONS

Our homegrown meditation group gathered on Zoom last night for a virtual sit. Last week our first experiment revealed a couple of technical deficiencies, which we were able to overcome this week, and our session was a distinct improvement from that point of view. It bodes well for future sits.

I chose to use the opportunity to work on the release of tensions. Having myself observed their presence in various parts of the body, I walked participants through those places where we tend to allow tensions to gather: breathing into the back of the neck and the shoulders; less obviously--for me at least--the wrists, hands and fingers; the face, starting with the lower jaw, then the cheeks, the area around the eyes, the temples and the forehead. The scalp. Then on down the back to the base of the spine. And so on.

After working to release the tensions by directing the breath to areas of stress, it's good to recall that these are generated by our emotional reactions--particularly by fear, anger, sadness, grief, all of which have been accentuated by the predicament of this current global coronavirus pandemic. So I invited the group to identify those emotions, where they arose, and to first acknowledge, then gently, insofar as possible, to release them. And finally, behind them, we brought our attention to the source of those emotions; what triggers them, what aggravates them, what causes us to cling to them?

It is all quite slow, quite difficult and demanding work, but work that I personally have found rewarding. If I can manage to observe those troubling emotions and the tensions that they cause without attachment, but with clarity and equanimity, they lose some of their potency, some of their unhelpful claim on my attention and their painful physical effects. i hope--and believe--it was helpful to my friends. For myself, I know that I'll return to this practice frequently as the anxiety continues to grow...