I remember it like yesterday. It was January 1993, I was walking up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan when a small gold sign advertising a yoga studio caught my eye. I turned on a whim, went in, and some two hours later, found myself sobbing on my yoga mat.
I knew I was tight from years of working out, but it wasn’t until that moment that I realized that under the tightness I’d lived with from pushing myself around — muscling through everything I encountered without taking a rest — was also a deep, pervasive tension that came from the way I held myself together.
Sharing how to release this habitual tension has been at the heart of my teaching the past 25 years.
Tension has a psycho-neurological component. We need to realize that our bodies respond to everything we hear and experience around us, as well as to what we think and experience on the inside. Every time we don’t feel okay about something, we tense up in our body and it doesn’t release until we feel grounded, slow down, take a deep breath, and soften our body. In other words, in order to release tension we need to feel safe.
Our tension can be from an hour ago or a decade ago. What makes a difference is how we meet our tension. In fact, in all my years of teaching, I have never met a person who doesn’t benefit from recognizing where they hold habitual tension and it is what inspired me to write my book Deep Listening.
[To read the rest of this blog post by Jillian Pransky, click here.]
[Image from jillianpransky.com]
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