Tension Comes Unbidden - Relaxation Must Be Cultivated
This is a concept I come back to again and again. We must cultivate relaxation, it does not arrive on its own.
We often assume that relaxation is a default state which we return to when the pressure lets up. It is not. It is a skill, and like every skill it is built through repetition, a skill that most adults have not practiced in decades.
Why the Body Cares
The reason this matters energetically is mechanical.
Think about a garden hose. A hose with real elasticity in it allows a great deal of flow. A hose that is tight and rigid restricts what can pass through it, no matter how hard you turn up the tap. Your channels behave the same way. Relaxation yields significantly better results than tension or force, not because relaxation is spiritually virtuous, but because a relaxed channel flexes to carry energy more freely. The same applies physically, relaxed blood vessels carry our blood more easily than constrained ones - meaning our hearts don't have to work as hard and our blood requires less pressure to circulate.
This is why forcing does not work. It is basic plumbing.
The Seventy Percent Rule
There is a practical instruction that I give all my students. Use no more than seventy percent physical effort in any energy body exercise. We lead the qi, we don't push it, and we never force it. Forcing it is how people get hurt.
Seventy percent isn't laziness. It is the level at which you can be engaged and simultaneously stay relaxed. Take it closer to a hundred and you add tension, tension that actually decreases the flow even if it feels like you are moving more energy. The process can be deceiving because what one usually feels at one hundred percent effort is the friction of resistance rather than the energy flow itself.
Another one of my favorite sayings is:
"Strength Without Tension, Relaxation Without Dullness"
Both halves of that sentence matter. Strength without tension is engagement that has not tightened. Relaxation without dullness is softness that has not gone slack or sleepy. We don't want to be a taut bowstring, and we also don't want to be a floppy noodle.
Melting Tension
When I work with people on releasing tension, we scan the body from crown to toe, allowing the tension to melt and evaporate, layer by layer. Work down from above the crown, all the way into the earth. Do not push it out. Let it melt out.
Once it has all melted into the earth, you can transmute it, allow your roots to grow down into the ground and be nourished by the energy released from the melted tension. The tension doesn't just leave. You transmute it and allow it to return as reorganized energy that feeds you. Transforming tension into vitality is one of the most elegant aspects of authentic energetic cultivation.
The Wu Wei of It
The Taoists called this wu wei, effortless effort. You grow into a posture rather than straining into one. Water yields to everything and still wears away stone, it doesn't push, it flows, it dissolves impurities, and it carries things with it (like a rising tide lifting a boat or a river flowing to the ocean).
We delve into these practices in Cultivating The Energy Body. And we go deeper into the shamanic aspects of relaxation and cultivation with Inner Vision.
Start with ten or fifteen minutes a day. Let something melt.