In my Mindbody Medicine for Women Experiencing Chronic Pelvic Pain FB group a member asked how to stop tensing her body all the time. She noticed that she is regularly tensing her jaw and pelvic floor and suspects that this is contributing to her pelvic pain.
My body has always run on the tighter side (I can’t imagine what it would be like without yoga!) and I went through a phase in my 20s where the more body awareness I developed the more fixated I became on how often I was tightening and clenching various muscles throughout the day.
The one perspective I’m about to share transformed my relationship to my body and the way I perceive any physical tension I experience.
I’ll start by saying that it’s not unlikely that all this clenching and tensing is contributing to this individual’s pain. I often talk about the pain<—>fear cycle and how fearing your pain creates more pain, because fear leads to more tension, which can lead to more pain! Not to mention that the more you fear the pain the more attention you’re putting on your pain, which means you’re strengthening your neural pathways to pain.
One of the challenges here is that these muscle contractions are happening under the radar. It’s happening without you realizing it or willing it to happen. One of the reasons for this is that it could be learned behavior from a lifetime of living with anxiety and/or stress. When you are living with anxiety/stress/lack of safety/PTSD it is not unusual for the muscles to contract in response. So, in order to get to the root of these issues and stop the contracting from happening in the first place it would be helpful to do a deeper dive into your past with a mental health professional who can help you to understand where this is coming from. I will share a lot more about this approach in the future, but today I’m going to talk about the very first step you can take to find relief from all this clenching!
My belief is that the first step to managing the tendency to tense and tighten is to decide you’re OK with it.
Why would you ever decide you’re OK with experiencing physical tension?
Well, if you can respond to the physical tension with compassion, non-judgmental awareness and a few deep breaths and shift into an even slightly more relaxed state it doesn’t matter how many times you tighten back up during the day.
Why?
Because this kind of contraction and expansion is happening inside of you and in the world outside of you all the time.
You breathe in (expand), you breathe out (contract)
When the heart pumps it expands and contracts
The ocean ebbs and flows
Instead of having the goal of achieving total relaxation 100% of the time it’s a much more realistic and healthier goal to lean into the natural contraction and expansion that’s happening in your body all the time. This might look like:
Notice the tension in your body
Mindfully and non-judgmentally label the sensations as well as any thoughts and emotions you are aware of. Make a note of any unhelpful narratives you have in your mind about what’s happening in your body, i.e. “why is this happening again?!”, “what’s wrong with me?!”, “ugh, again?!”, “why can’t I just relax?!”. I can assure you that pushing against your experience in this way will only create more tension.
Breathe right into and out of the area of tension. If the tension is in your hip, for example, you might imagine you have a lung in your hip and you can breathe right into and out of it. With each exhale release even just 1-5% more of your tension.
Feel yourself move, even if only slightly, from the experience of contraction to the experience of expansion.
Then move on with your day!
Whenever you notice you’re contracting again you can repeat the above.
Your ability to do this without resistance will help you create flexibility in your nervous system.
Can you see yourself as the ocean?
Can you lean into the natural and flowing nature of contraction and expansion?
I’m not as afraid of my physical tension and my propensity for tightening as I used to be, and you know what result this has? I come out of tension so much faster than I used to. This means I also experience way less pain. I used to notice contraction —>fear it —> be upset about it —>get tighter —>go into spasm —>be upset and afraid of the spasm —>be in spasm for days —> so on and so forth.
Now I know how to relax and I trust myself to be able to return to a state of relaxation from a state of tension.
They key here is befriending your mindbody through mindfulness and relaxation practices. When you befriend the mindbody you can allow it to be exactly as it is and trust in its rhythms.
Let me know- do you think it’s possible for you to accept your tension and open yourself up to the natural flow of contraction and expansion or do you wish you could just be totally relaxed all the time?
Wishing you deeper breaths and greater joy,
P.S. an amazing tool for practicing being with contraction and expansion is Peter Levine’s practice of Pendulation. Stay tuned for a blog post all about pendulation in the coming weeks!
an excerpt from my video response to the question being addressed in this blog post