Sanctuary for Heart Magic

THE SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF CHRONIC MUSCLE TENSION

What actually keeps your muscles tight?

Most all of us have experienced chronic muscular tightness or tension at some point in our life. In fact nearly everyone has an area in the their body that seems to always be tense no matter how much it gets stretched, strengthened or mobilized. While on the surface it seems like the problem is a faulty muscle, joint or ligament that is constricted, more accurately chronic muscle tension is a response to a particular type of information. The muscle is not the cause of tightness, but an effect of resistance. This is why stretching it until the cows come home doesn’t work. Mobilization, massage and strengthening may provide temporary relief, but a few hours, minutes or moments later the tension is right back in the same place again. Clearly something else is going on, but often we don’t make the connections that go deep to the surface appearance. Instead we keep relating to it as a “muscle” problem.

What are tight muscles responding to? 

If I distill it down to the most fundamental core, muscle tension is a response to something painful that we don’t want to feel. It is a protective response to conscious and unconscious content that lives in our mind that doesn’t feel good. To protect ourselves from feeling whatever it is that we don’t want to feel, we generate muscle tightness. Muscle tension is a type of body armor that gets created in response to pain. In acute situations it might be responding to pure physical pain, but in chronic situations pain nearly always has a psycho-emotional root. 

You might wonder what these things are in our conscious and unconscious mind that we don’t want to feel. This is different for everyone, but there are some common themes. These include not wanting to feel disappointment, difference, non-belonging, betrayal, wrongness, abandonment, not being enough, rejected, lack of support, hatred, ugliness and scarcity of resources. This is not an exhaustive list, but many of these things live in our bucket of “feelings we don’t want to feel.”

Now you can understand why rubbing or stretching a muscle out doesn’t really cure the muscle tension, but rather only provides temporary relief. 

The tension goes deeper than just a mechanical manipulation. Understand too that most people don’t want to dive into what lies deep to the muscle tension because that means they are going to need to feel the pain that keeps that muscle tension in place. We have strong neurological protective mechanisms whose “job” or function is to protect us from pain. While that is ok in the short-term, if it perpetuates into a long-term strategy we never get to resolve the pain in our system and it remains as low grade, or sometimes significant, muscular tension.

BEING WITH MUSCULAR PATTERNS

Content vs. no content

This brings me to the next topic which is that we don’t always need to know the “content” that keeps a muscular tension pattern in place. In fact sometimes knowing the content can interfere with our capacity to feel it. What this means is that we don’t have relive the stories about our past over and over again. Instead we just need to access the emotion that is being repressed, stored or not felt, which that muscular pattern is assisting to dampen or protect us from. 

How do we access the feeling without story? 

One way is through bodywork that focuses on gaining awareness in the body rather than on alleviation of the muscular tensions. Eventually the result is still relaxation of the muscles that are activated, but it is through being with what is held there rather than trying to get rid of what is there. There is a ginormous difference between those two approaches. One is a temporary cessation of discomfort, which will likely return in a future moment once the activating factors trigger it again. Keeping you cycling in a tension – relief – tension cycle. The other approach often entails an initial increase in discomfort along with a moving into and towards the pain so that it can be felt. Once that which has not been allowed to be felt begins to be felt the muscle tension pattern becomes irrelevant and lets itself go. Remember the muscle tension is a response and not the source of the problem itself.

Now all this to say that stretching, strengthening, rubbing and massaging all have their place and are needed in different scenarios. For example sometimes we just need relief, even if it is temporary, because we don’t have the capacity in that moment to feel or deal with anything more than what we already are. Also sometimes rubbing or massaging an area can help open or access the feelings that are stored inside of it. In this case, massage is used to activate or move towards the discomfort. There are also scenarios where muscles are weak because they have been overstretched or we have been compensating by using other muscles, so we need to retrain them. 

It is less about the activity or therapeutic means and more about how we approach the muscular pattern. Are we trying to get out of something or are we moving towards it? This is the question to ask yourself. Also know that the higher the resistance to the underlying pain, the tighter the muscles get. This means if we are trying to get relief by pure mechanical methods we will need to work harder and with more aggressive tools, and the less likely we will be able to get relief.

The “being with” approach isn’t instantaneous. 

You might need to actively move towards and be with the pain more than once. It takes whatever it takes to penetrate below our defenses so that we can feel what is there. What’s key is consistently moving towards at whatever pace you are able. There is often a moment when we do get to the core and are able to access the fullness of what has been repressed within a specific muscular pattern. It is usually distinct and we can feel the muscles soften as we soften. 

There may be content that arises during the process, but it is not required. We don’t have to mentally understand why we feel the pain we do, we just need to feel it. Even if there is content present it might not make full sense to us. Accepting that it doesn’t make sense is important in allowing the feeling process to complete itself, otherwise we may halt the process by trying to understanding it. It’s not the mind that heals through conceptual understanding, but rather it is the body that heals because the repressed emotions are able to be felt and move through. This allows the muscles to move freely again.

Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, DC, MSA, L.Ac

Network Spinal Chiropractic & Nervous System Specialist at the Sanctuary for Heart Magic in Boulder, Colorado, a Mentor for Heart-Led Healers at Soul Luminaries & the Writer of The Everyday Divine.