My Process - 2nd Reading of Meditations on Pain

Everyone with a heart experiences emotion. These emotions are felt as sensations in the body. When emotions are uncomfortable or painful, we tense up, we try not to feel what we are feeling, and this distorts the body posture. After the emotional episode is over the mind moves on to another experience, but the body has not forgotten! The impact of emotion is imprinted in the body and it retains the painful memory in muscular tension, even though we have lost conscious awareness of it.

When I started to establish a daily meditation practice, I found that decades of asana practice had not eliminated all the tension and pain from my body. My hips were open and I could sit comfortably for a long time but I discovered tensions in my upper body that would not go away when I came to sit.

It started with an awareness of a knot under my right shoulder blade, and no matter how I practiced or shifted my posture, it would not go away. I discovered that this knot was just the tip of the iceberg - literally a knot that tied many other tensions neatly in place, such that this was the one point where I felt tension. And yet as I started to release it, it was as if my body had been a tightly wound ball of string that started to unravel once the knot started to loosen.

For many years, I maintained my yoga practice (asana and pranayama) as Pattabhi Jois had taught me, then around 15 years ago I added another practice as taught to me by Acharya more focused on meditation. Around 5 years ago I significantly reduced my asana practice and began to focus more exclusively on meditation. But when I had to close the yoga shala in March 2020 because of the coronavirus epidemic, I stopped my asana and pranayama practice completely and started to focus exclusively on meditation. Now I no longer had to go to the shala, I started to go down to the river each day before sunrise. I found a rock in a quiet spot and would sit there for around 2hrs each morning. This was the beginning of my daily meditation on the pains in my body.

In the beginning, my process was to simply focus on the tight spot. Just by bringing my attention there it started to relax. I noticed that I had unconsciously exacerbated the tension just because I was feeling it. Somehow I was trying to make it feel better by tensing up other muscles, but I was just making it worse. So, just by bringing my awareness there it started to relax immediately. Although there was clearly a psychological component to the tension, the physical tension was muscular.

One accumulates a lot of memories in a lifetime. Pattabhi Jois used to say that every time you blink, you think a new thought - that is a lot of thoughts, even in a short life. Every experience is remembered, and every uncomfortable experience causes tensions in the body. But many of our thoughts are repetitions of similar thoughts, so you do not actually think a new thought every time you blink, but the repeated similar thoughts tend to re-enforce each other, creating deeper and deeper tensions in the unconscious and in the body.

The idea that body and mind are connected is not at all new. If you have pain in the mind, you will often become aware of uncomfortable sensations in the body. Some people have tried to map different types of emotions to different body parts - anger to the liver, for example. Although emotion is often associated with stress in particular organs, the mapping in the musculature is more complex and individual.

From the first day sitting with this type of enquiry, afflicted memories from my life started to emerge and I was taken on a journey through my whole history of affliction over this period of time. The bodily map was the prompt, the journey it took me on was not historically linear. As tensions in one muscle released, proximal muscles were affected, but distal muscles were also impacted. The connection between one memory and another was more often due to similarity or association and hardly ever due to sequence in time.

The body just started to unwind, but it could only do so, if I was willing to acknowledge and feel what had caused the tensions in the first place. I had by this point in time already done a great deal of self-analysis and excavation of my past. I had sought out my demons and attempted to confront them, bring them to light, release them… But I discovered that every experience had made an impression on my body and that through this impression, they had remained somewhat stuck there. Only through feeling the visceral sensations and acknowledging the psychological complexes and memories, would the body-mind let go.

At the beginning of the process I was mainly aware of the muscles and associated memories and emotions releasing. But I soon became aware that the release was not purely muscular. The pathways the release took also followed lines of fascia, were related to specific organs, nerves, joints and perhaps nadis. Some days I would feel that one whole side of my body was open - either releasing or just relaxed, while the other side was blocked, dense but also possibly releasing. I could feel nerve pathways with blockages emanating from between the vertebrae - especially those of the neck and through the arms. The pelvic floor went through a profound release, and in spite of the hips and legs feeling much less tension than the rest of my body, there were also releases that flowed down through the knees and ankles. Every release had a psychological counterpart. These were not necessarily “cerebral” - sometimes there were no memories, just sensations and sometimes I discovered memories and events that had been lost for decades.

I sat with this process for two years, sitting every day for a few hours and over time I developed a number of different techniques to release these tensions in the body and mind. I have now been recording this process in a forthcoming book: “Meditations on Pain.”

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I will be offering a second reading via zoom of my research and work and some practical exercises on Saturday August 13 at 2PM UK time or 9AM New York Time for those who are interested in hearing about and supporting this project. A recording will be available in case the timing does not work for you.

To get a zoom link, and to support this ongoing research, please make a donation here: https://gofund.me/1c781de2

or here: https://www.integralashtanga.com/pay.../support-my-writing