The art of letting go
Letting go of tight, restricted, stiff, tense muscles is easier said than done.
While the advice to just let go sounds like a good idea, our muscles may have
forgotten how to relieve the tension and remain tight as a drum.
It’s possible our muscles have forgotten the art of letting go.
Letting go of muscular tension
When we were young we could easily bound down a hill. Today, as an adult so many of us brace our way down the hill or stairs instead of easily letting go.
When we begin an activity from a place of already being contracted, we accumulate more contractions and move further away from letting go of the muscular tension we’ve added.
When we are in pain, we are often wary. If we happen to stretch a contracted area, then the brain will send a message to re-contract afterwards. Things tighten up once again and letting go doesn’t happen.
Even in a traction device, our muscles will re-contract afterwards so hanging upside down to lengthen muscles may feel temporarily good, yet the brain will do what it does to reset the muscular tension levels back to its set points.
Instead, if we consider our self as a self-adjusting organism, we don’t need any contraptions or devices, just our self and gravity since this is the field we happened to have things go awry in.
In the practice of somatics, we aren’t necessarily focusing on the muscles, we are working with the lines of communication from the brain to the muscles. The pathways or information from brain to muscle is where we play and change both the brain and body.
When we experience a painful signal – this can be our greatest teacher since we can locate a movement above, below, to the right or left or forwards/back of it – which we can release by being careful.
Regaining the ability of letting go
If you believe you can improve yourself, we know today from neural plasticity, the brain and thus the body can change itself.
With a little know-how we can relearn the lost art of letting go.
By easing our way into greater range of motion rather than force, we’ll end up being stronger simply by letting go. If we push it, our brain will naturally re-contract the muscles.
To go easy is like untying a knot gently. If you tug too tightly, the knot will tighten.
Please join me in Letting Go which offers you the fun, simple moves done in a different way of focusing on movement and using the brain to reset our muscles naturally back to deep levels of relaxation and comfort.
