neutral, elongated, light-but-almost-hanging postures, somatization, desomatization, muscle tension, etc.
Another lens on muscle tension and other things is "somatization." I'm using this term here non-clinically and informally, and this is not medical or mental health advice. I'm also using the term a little "slant" from its technical context. I also like to use the word "physicalization," but I think that's idiosyncratic.
The basic idea is that "psychological stuff" can show up as "body stuff." This has been a cliche for decades or maybe since pre-history, but it's still absolutely shocking at times.
Somatization can look like muscle tension, pinched nerves, sleep disturbance, breathing disturbance, chest pain (in all sorts of weird point and manifold configurationa and different kinds of sensations), weird heart stuff, chills, panic with respect to sensations or physical symptoms, and so on. Somatization interacts with viral and bacterial illness, post-acute sequelae (e.g. "long covid") and physical trauma, the latter four which can weirdly amplify the former and further confuse and confound things.
If you have a new thing, depending on what's happening and your judgment, you should consider calling a triage line, or calling the equivalent of 911 in your country, or having someone drive you to the emergency room/department, or going to urgent care, or making an appointment with your doctor. Generally, all things being equal, consider getting stuff checked out by a licensed professional, then consider somatization.
causing somatization and reducing the chances of somatization
Sometimes somatization just happens; it just creeps up on you over minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years.
But, you can reduce the chances of it if you keep an eye out for "making-X-happen-ness"---for breath holding, quasi-deliberate exhalation, quasi-deliberate inhalation, holding an inhaled breath, holding an exhaled-breath state, quasi-deliberate "subtle inner pushing" within or along the surface of the body, clenched jaw, contorted facial expression, contorted neck and shoulder positions, force-y use prayer beads and tally counters, and things like that.
(Note: Spontaneous sigh and yawns, small ones, big heaving ones---it's probably ok to gently help things like these get over the hump, as it were, if they need a tiny bit of help. The body wants to do it, and you're helping out. [This applies to some redo-to-undo body movements, too, sometimes many, many times.] At sommmmeeee point it probably blurs into force-y, like really grinding them out, kinda, or something. But this is one case where if the line is a little blurry, I think I'd err on the side of helping along yawns and sighs. Usually the line won't be blurry, though!)
Note, generally, the above are things to try not to do, but, if, at some point, you've already done a bunch of these things, possibly for an extended period of time, then it's ok and probably often or usually good to do them again, to allow them to come up and to happen again, sometimes to gently help that happen, as part of redo-to-undo!
You might not remember whether you've done a particular thing in a past, so you might not be sure whether it's ok to "redo-to-undo" it, but effortlessness and spontaneity, sometimes with a little help, generally indicate redo-to-undo, that the things you're doing are good to be doing, and, as per usual, pushing or forcing generally indicate entrenching/entrenchment. So, if it wants to happen, versus you're kind of almost doing it to get something to happen, and it can be a little mixed and blurry, you just do the best you can, it's probably at least net redo-to-undo.
Sometimes, as part of redo-to-undo, something (doing, happening) seems spontaneous and effortless, and, so, "good to do or good that it's happening"---for a time, "but" then after a time we find that it's not spontaneous in that somehow, somewhere we've been pushing, clenching, something "there" all along, to make "that" go, and then, "oh," you let go of that pushing, clenching, something. That's normal! That's part of the process! It's working!
Stated a little differently, it's probably ok if-it’s-as-if “stuff” is spontaneously "flowing" from one place to another, just as an example of one thing that can be happening (and is it really "flowing" or whatever, but anyway) but if you’re “pushing” stuff to---or into---somewhere else, to like “make something go,” to “make something work,” to “make something happen,” that’s likely problematic.
neutral, elongated, light-but-almost-hanging postures: reducing the chance of somatization
The classic, imagining a string attached to and lightly tugging your head and spine to the sky, like a plumb line, chest maybe slightly expanded or simply neutral, shoulders neutral or ever-so-slightly forward or back, your vertebrae stacked liked dinner plates, skull perfectly balanced on your stacked spine, everything balanced on your perfectly angled pelvis (in a chair, on a cushion or etc.) can be helpful for reducing the chance of somatization. [The posture description might be shit. Check other descriptions and look at pictures and there are probably a few schools of posture.] If you "go out of alignment" then the posture takes more work, so that's a feedback loop. If something starts to tense, you're more likely to feel it, because you're sort of hanging there. You want your jaw kind of neutral too. And finally you want a cushion or seat that is as firm as possible while still being completely comfortable, to further maximize feedback. If you can't do some of these things for whatever reason, you just do the best you can.
Again, because of redo-to-undo, if you've spent a ton of time outside a neutral meditation posture, i.e. living your life or meditating in all sorts of positions, or inevitably having done some pushing and contorting at some point, it's ok to deviate from neutral postures for seconds, minutes, days, hours, weeks, months, years redo-to-undo purposes!
de-somatization
I sort of think of there being "directness" and "aboutness." Like directness is "non-immediately-meaning-laden sensations" and aboutness is like meaning-laden-sensations, "knowing," felt-sense-y type stuff, and so on. The boundary between directness and aboutness is blurry and the relationship between the two is inchoate, perhaps in principle.
Importantly, I think generally speaking, while directness and aboutness are highly related, the relationship can be pretty indirect, and often is; generally, aboutness isn’t in the directness, if that makes sense?
Like, in desomatization, what can happen is that, like, in the fractional conversion of directness to aboutness---
---there might be, it might feel like a surge of anxiety or panic or overwhelming existential despair, paranoia, traumatic memories, and other things, and also of course positive insights and realizations, that kind of takes you over for a split second (or longer)---
---so like it's happening before you realize it's happening; it's already (just now for for a bit been) happening---
---that comes from a place you didn’t expect, where maybe you didn't even know there was a there, there, again before your realize it's happening---
---and it’s not immediately obvious that there was any connection at all to what was just immediately happening, i.e. meditating or meditative-ish reverie or doing chores or something in reverie (sometime in the past second, thirty seconds, or hour or something) even though they followed so closely (or relatively closely) in time.
So like something like that, to compress all that it could be just kind of a surge of something, like a surge or whoa or another emotion, with a dash or insight or understanding, maybe some memory about something that was hard or didn't seem hard at the time.
For unpleasant desomatization, generally nobody likes to feel anxiety or panic or etc., but generally the system does its very best (not to reify "the system," etc., etc.) to make it felt-safe-enough for it happen and only then it happens. And somatization at the extremes can become debilitating or even dangerous. So sometimes somatization is necessary for coping, trading off psychological to the physical. It can be absolutely necessary when we don't have the time or tools or support or knowledge or money or safety to immediately hold or experience or be or feel or work through things meditatively or psychologically or etc., alone, with friends, parents, therapists, etc. But, generally, eventually, you want to de-somatisize for physical health and safety and for psychological/spiritual/life flourishing in light of impermanence.
Sometimes: "Oh, I'm doing that, and, even though I know that, I can't stop." Or, or finally, "Oh, I'm doing that, and I can stop, and I have spontaneously stopped."
Recommended:
See also:
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[Editing note: parts of the below are maybe tonally off, still; also general editing]
We could make a distinctions between
- burn-off (evaporation; nothing useful left OR "elegance collapse" into something just as good or better but simpler),
- integration (sort of: influence becomes information OR/ALSO elegance collapse),
- entrenchment (stable or increased propensity for something [unwanted]),
- somatization (decreased propensity of some unwanted thing [e.g. anxiety, suffering] at the cost of subtle, cumulative increase in something off-balance with the body [breath, heart, blood pressure, immune system, muscle tension]; generally reversible).
Something to keep in mind, in my current, never-enough-data opinion, if someone says something like that they no longer suffer, or they no longer experience anxiety (and other things), even or especially if they've been meditating like thirty-to-fifty years, at least 50% of the probability mass or whatever should be on that they have been somatisizing for decades (and there will be extraordinary achievements in there, too, generally, of course, sometimes "free and clear" (in some sense..) and again sometimes devil's bargain).
if someone says
(This absolutely includes me, by the way. I'm still paying off big mistakes I made many years ago, and there's probably plenty more I'm not yet aware of.)
It's just that meditation can be so hard; one generally wants to hold the hypothesis, gently, that somatization (and, more generally, layering) is/are taking place, all things being equal, somehow, somewhere, perhaps steadily cumulatively, including often for very advanced practitioners, and holding this hypothesis is for self-protection and discernment with respect to extraordinary claims that others make and also personal error-correction processes, regarding oneself.
Maybe good to emphasize, that’s not to say if a meditator has obvious or reported health problem that they are necessarily somatisizing. For example, long-term health problems could have driven someone to meditation, even at a young age, etc., etc., or it's chance, other misfortune, etc.
Other reasons for positive claims besides somatization and extraordinary achievement are mediate fortune (not necessarily good fortune in that sometimes mediate challenges can counterfactually reduce otherwise tremendous suffering later, e.g. gaining experience with the medical system and self-care and healthy habits for a medium-bad health thing, thereby avoiding or greatly ameliorating at least one much worse health thing later, for oneself or another; also, becoming more empathetic and compassionate with respect to other's suffering). And finally, there's, generally, grace, though extraordinary achievement is a subtype of grace and doesn't have explanatory power, in a vacuum.
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The connotations are sort of tonally off, but meditation is very much a "giving someone enough rope to hang themselves" sort of thing. I think someone said "meditation will amplify the neuroses you already have" (at least at first?).
Basically, I think, people stumble upon the sort of push-away (--> somatization) maneuver, and layering in general, and think that it's doing something good enough to sort of double-down on (because bad feelings, etc., fractionally, iteratively go away when it's used), and, especially when one is a beginner or intermediate meditator, it can take 100+ hours or a few thousand hours, to notice something is going weird and maybe often not know why. Further, there can be large-scale somatization tangles, where a previous, latent somatization stint, even if no longer actively accumulating somatization, starts causing problems because of how it's getting tugged on or wrapped around, but it can take a long time to "get to it" because of delayering ordering, and so things could get worse for hundreds or thousands of hours before they get better, worst case. Besides somatization-type-things, there's also behavioral, cognitive, preferential, and emotional rigidity-type-things, that can happen from lots of layering, in general, mentioned elsewhere in this document, and those dynamics apply here, too.
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In any case, real change comes from, when safe, not even exactly inclining or going towards, though that's often gently ok (if no grinding or jamming), but something more, like, hanging out with; keeping company; being patient with; low-pressure, loose, ok to drift away for a (long) time, almost incidentally "staying with," when you do; neither moving towards, nor moving away; not amplifying nor facilitating, nor pushing away, nor trying to reduce or diminish, if safe; let it/things/all come to you, relax and let go as best you can, arrange yourself to let the body move you... This patient, patient, in its own right revealed order order, un-rush-able, undoes it self, takes care of itself, comes to you, sometimes scary, sometimes soft, somethings big smears and sometimes the tiniest, most intricate things, encountering, encountering, encountering.
(Daniel Ingram, when writing about equanimity, says something like "front of hand and fingers in contact with the water, maintains contact as the water undulates, back of the hand never gets wet." (I think that's not exactly what he said, but. It might be a classic analogy, or something he formulated, not sure.)
takes care of itself, comes to you
And, of course, still, sometimes, you're trying stuff, experimenting, playing with auxiliary practices, main practices, reading, exploring teachers and systems, and finding the ways in which you've already been doing that thing or already know how to do that thing, in a way that's just right for you.
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Say that, suffering, as such, in a vacuum, is bad, but not all contextual suffering is bad (you're the final arbiter), and you're not bad to/if you suffer.
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To be clear, somatization is a subtype of layering. That is, de-somatization and pre-de-somatization involves ordering and delayering to "get to the right place" (if it's not already 1-step away) and then also during the de-somatization / delayering process, too. Sometimes you'll do some de-somatization, and then you need to wait minutes, hours, or days for other stuff to delayer possibly "quite far elsewhere" then more de-somatization in the "previous place" becomes available, and this can repeat. So, if someone has kind of been somatisizing (and layering) for X years, or they did a bunch and then successfully stopped (maybe without realizing that they had been doing it then that they stopped), it might take months or years to delayer enough that that particular desomatisizing can begin. Not always, though. It depends on the layer structure in the intervening years and it's possible that nothing got layered on top of that particular stuff when they stopped doing it.
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Theories of the body and / or hypochondriasis can hide somatization not like in a morally bad way but sometimes you can think a body or brain thing best has a body or brain explanation but sometimes those sorts of things unravel in a "purely meditative way" and you were sort of wrong about the proper type of explanation for it (and that's ok). Like something that felt "thoroughly and obviously neurological" was like a phenomenological-conceptual thing that got stretched to its limit and bottlenecked somehow before it meditatively unraveled. Ditto for digestive stuff, breathing stuff, and so on. But check with your doctor etc. etc. and electrolytes and vitamins and etc. matter.