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Muscular spasms/contractions/tightness, suffering, and relief

Just finished watching this video. Watching this, I had an idea as to how the muscular contractions that have their origins in the mind can be relieved if the mind experience which is causing the muscle contraction can be experienced consciously. As long as the experience remains subconscious, some muscular contractions remain and keep on causing suffering. If it comes to the conscious part of the brain, then it stops causing the muscular contraction and the suffering goes away.

This process seems almost parallel to how meditation works. It brings to awareness what causes upheaval in mind and once that is seen through, it no longer does.

Also, practices such as yoga which involve stretching can release certain emotional states and it is believed that if kundalini rises suddenly, it can be dangerous. I think it might also have to do with being unable to process difficult emotions which come to the surface doing advanced yogic postures.

In my own experience, I have found that more stuff that I process through doing different practices, the more relaxed my body becomes. I have also read (have mentioned this before on DhO as well) that enlightenment/awakening can be considered as having progressive state of relaxation.

After my first Goenka Vipassana course, I had a very relaxed body and gained the insight that some emotional events cause the body to tighten up and if those don't occur, then my body will remain relaxed and I won't suffer.

RE: Muscular spasms/contractions/tightness, suffering, and relief
Answer
1/20/13 9:47 PM as a reply to Change A..
Another episode that comes to my mind is that once myself and few others were trying to touch our hands to the ground while bending at the waist and I was unable to and one Tibetan lama was the most flexible of us and he could easily do so. Then after a day or so, I read a Tibetan book about how to do visualization of the deities and I did that. Just by doing that, my flexibility increased a lot and I could easily touch my hands to the ground while bending at the waist and everyone was surprised at the change.

RE: Muscular spasms/contractions/tightness, suffering, and relief
Answer
1/21/13 2:11 AM as a reply to Change A..
All of this makes perfect sense to me, though I have no experience of the second example.

Some points that may relate from my own experience:

  • Muscular tension has held in the body even though the mind has calmed down dramatically over the last 2yrs
  • Yoga stretches is helping this, but I've only just started to work seriously on problem areas (neck/shoulders/hips)
  • If the body is unwell, the mind follows --this is most notable in that whenever Im sick it's almost impossible to break out of the DN during meditation. You could perhaps argue this the other way around, but it doesn't seem that a tense mind is causing common colds / viruses etc.


I was reading about Prana yesterday, and in particular Kirlian photography which seems to capture Prana on film, though in science they call it Bioplasmic energy. Apparently you can see dramatic changes in prana between sick and healthy organisms and even predict disease as localised pranic disruption appears to precede physical illness in the body. So with that in mind Im adding pranayama practices for the first time. Too early to have anything to say about it, but it seems like pretty interesting stuff as my own perception of energies in the body seems pretty good. And I'd be interested in seeing if I can exercise any control over them.