Meditation as Wakeful Relaxation: Unclenching Smooth Muscle

Summary

The frontier of my meditation practice is exploring it as wakeful relaxation. This is how my meditation teacher, Roger Thisdell, framed it for me recently. People often treat relaxation and wakefulness as two opposites: relaxation as a drowsy and dull, wakefullnes as sharp and jittery. But the two can co-exist.Over the last two weeks I’ve been actively trying to relax during meditation. And goddamn it, folks, this is hard. I am constantly spasming in different ways. There is a lot of tension in my body and my experiential field.Relaxation is this game of whack-a-mole: relaxing one area of my body causes tension to pop up somewhere else. Proper relaxation requires coordinating mind and body in ways that’s not unlike learning to dance.The thing is, intentional relaxation brings anxiety and fear. Sometimes it’s about past experiences. Sometimes it’s the stress of publishing daily — I’m currently doing Inkhaven, a 30-day writing workshop where you must publish a 500+ words post daily or they kick you out.To get to each progressively deeper levels of relaxation, I have to be fairly equanimous. That usually means being a bit overwhelmed with emotion. Muscle tension seems to guard against feeling stress. It’s not just “bracing for impact” — something more complex is going on.When I manage to relax more completely, something shifts in my experience. I get less reactive and less neurotic — I generate fewer negative “what if” scenarios. Interfacing with people feels less effortful too: e.g. it becomes easier to switch from planning my day to chatting with a friend who walks by.It’s almost as if my default stance on reality changes. What’s going on? There’s something in vasocomputation I’ve been calling a “stance” or way of feeling — stances are essentially discrete patterns of muscle tension (primarily vascular tension) that we can jump into and which offer specific affordances. The girl in this video is a great example: she goes from her default stance, to professional-calm,...