No Block

Muscle tensions inhibit flexibility. Sounds simple, right? The more flexible you are, the more you can move around freely. Right? Right. The way you move your body, from your head and face to your feet and legs is how you express yourself. Hence, if you are really tense, you will not be able to express yourself to the fullest extent. Now, where do chronic muscle tensions come from? Trauma. Trauma can be physical, like damaging impacts in an accident, or emotional, in a shit happens kind of way. They can be more or less bad, but they can manifest themselves in more or less strong chronic tension. The answer is, to let go..

Bruce Lee has once defined Martial Arts as honestly expressing yourself which basically means authenticity.  This is very closely related to Hermann Hesse's idea of what art is: Art is honest self-expression. Therefore, if you express yourself honestly and authentically, you exhale art, your very expressing yourself is art. With this there comes a fluidity of expression, because there are no more blocks holding you back. Zen-master Joshu (in the picture) was once asked what true Buddha-mind was and he put it like this: 

via Wikimedia Commons

Ball in a moutain stream. Thought after thought after thought with no block.

Without the tension, which is created by fear which again is created by previous trauma, there is no block and hence everything flows, as Heraclitus put it. With that, there is aliveness. The moments of anxiety before actually doing the thing or making the decision are what can block your self-expression. There is a lot to say about that, but I'll save that for another day, focusing on the Daoist approach to making decisions..

Now, if you let go completely, which also means let your muscles relax, and give yourself to life, bliss is attainable. Bliss and joy, the results of umcompromisingly freeing yourself and expressing it to the fullest extent, well aware that you will get hurt again. It is an act of faith. Faith in life or god or however you want to put it. This is not necessarily to be understood as a religious kind of faith, it is simply to be understood as trusting life. Trusting life, well aware that every peak is followed by a valley, yet that every valley is also followed by a peak. As Eminem put it: "I've been through the ringer, but they can do little to the middle finger." You keep going. 

In Taoist philosophy, this is sometimes called becoming one with the divine. One with the divine energy, which cannot be grasped with words, but only with experience. Hence, we just say, the Tao. Having faith in this energy which is life, and going with it rather than being afraid and trying to control it, because in the (futile) attempt to make life conform to our expectations, we tense up and become as rigid as our expectations. As I have eluded to in the beginning, movement is aliveness whereas rigidity points more towards death. Therefore, as Alan Watts puts it, life equals change. The more we cling to the way things were and refuse to accept change, the more we turn away from aliveness which is joy. The answer, is (again) to give yourself to the dance that is life. 

Also, rapper Macklemore puts it like this and is very much on point:

I am not, I am not going to stand on the wall I will dance, I will dance, I will break that ass off. And I see you in the corner, corner looking so small Doing the robot like if I die tonight at least I went hard I will not, I will not give a damn who watches me I will live, I will live liberate the fox in me I will be the discoball, freak and give my all...

There will be setbacks and there will be failures. This is about getting your feet back under you and continuing to dance. There is no benefit in dwelling on what has happened, the dance is still going on everywhere around you. It's on you to trust it and take part again and again, and again.

On a more physiological note, Kettle Bell guru Pavel Tsatsouline believed that if you are able to lift your left leg in a 90° angle and are also able to do that with the right one, you should be able to perform a full split. The only thing that hinders you, he argues, is psychological restraint, a.k.a. fear. (taken from Pavel Tsatsouline's Relax Into Stretch) Because we are scared to tear a muscle, as we are uncomfortable in the stretched position, we tense up, thus not allowing the muscle to elongate and therefore either forcing us to stop, or in fact tear something. A similar dynamic, as described above, seems to be applicable to life in general.

Overly philosophical part:

Uninhibited self-expression is not only a mental thing. It is mostly based somatically. It is embodied. (Side note for the extra-interested: On the cutting edge of cognitive sciences, the combination of neuro-science, philosophy, biology, etc., the concept of embodied cognition is a widely discussed topic these days. I recommend George Lakoff's Philosophy in the Flesh.) The body is where it starts. There is no consciousness without the body. Of course there are a whole bunch of philosophers (mostly the dusty ones which is almost all of them..) who will argue, and surely rather convincingly, that body and mind are strictly separated entities. The thing is, for the concrete and practical reality this does not matter at all. It is a nice intellectual debate in which I do engage in from time to time, yet what I'm talking about here is based on experience, not theory. It's not rational, it's somatic. And surely you could say that the mind and the body are different aspects of the same thing, that they are the same or that they are completely distinct. That's just semantics, it does not reach mentioned realm of emotion and expression which is in the body. (For further reading on this topic of trauma-related muscle tensions I recommend Alexander Lowen's work.)

All philosophizing aside, at the end of the day I will go with what brings me joy which is the body. To sum it up:

"Rock this party. Dance everybody. Make it hot in this party. Don't stop move your body.."

 

video vis Bob Sinclair's You Tube page