Meditation: An Internal Massage

Written by Kyle Schauenberg

Tending to Tension: 

One way to think of meditation is as a skillful way of tending to the tensions of life that lodge into your energy body.  It's a bit like an energetic massage:  as you meditate, you are rhythmically tending to the tense areas of our life through a flow of your attention: attending to the tense places and receiving the healing qualities of that same attention.  

As humans in the modern world, we have plenty to feel tense about.  And we need tools to process that tension, metabolize it and let it alchemize into energetic fuel and intuitive wisdom.  This is the function of a meditation practice. 

Everytime you go to meditate, you are creating a soothing environment to deal with the little energetic knots of tension that have built up in your system.

First, initiate your practice with a soothing thought (aka: a mantra). You can choose any of life’s infinite qualities that would feel relaxing to you today. Let’s get literal: maybe you choose the mantra “relax.” Simply offer yourself the word “relax” and all the sensations that come with it. You might start by saying to yourself, “This is the time I set aside to relax…I get to relax right now.” And then you allow relaxation to come over your body. You notice your muscles releasing; you notice your heart rate slowing; you might notice your breath chilling out. You simply let the sensations of relaxation flood through your body. And you continue savoring the mantra “relax.”

And then pretty quickly, as your body physically gives over to relaxation, your mind/body system will get to work searching for aspects of your life that need relaxation the most - and you will start becoming aware of what has been making you tense. You will have thoughts and memories and projections related to your tension. This doesn’t necessarily feel relaxing - in fact those thoughts can be downright uncomfortable - and, yet, you are still in a state of relaxation as you savor your mantra “relax.”

This is very much like the way a massage therapist will soothe your body physically and then begin looking for where they can work their magic most productively. They find your most intense muscle tension and go to town. And it hurts so good.

And similar to the way a massage therapist will apply pressure and then the absence of pressure to your muscle tension, your meditation practice will flow between giving attention to your emotional tension and releasing into simply being with your mantra. You will flow like this in your meditation practice: soothing and attending to tension, soothing and attending, all the while in an overarchingly relaxed state of being.

In this way, your meditation practice massages your emotional knots and frees up your energy to flow with more inner alignment and ease.

Photo by The Anam