“When we are relaxed we have the capacity to direct the mind in more healing ways—which has a further impact on our healing.” - Herbert Benson, MD
Imagine taking a tablespoon of salt and pouring it into a shot glass filled with water. Chances are you wouldn’t want to drink it as it would be too salty. Now imagine you took that salt and added it to a 32-ounce water bottle. It would still be salty, but more palatable than the shot glass. Take that same tablespoon and dilute it in a gallon jug of water and it would likely be even easier to drink. Continue to take that same tablespoon of salt and dilute it in more water and, eventually, you will no longer notice the taste.
Our challenging thoughts, feelings, and experiences are our “salt”. We live in a noisy, busy world in which our senses are bombarded with sights, sounds, smells, and physical sensations. This sensory data is potentially endless, so the mind acts as a filter, selecting what it will attend to. As we interact with the world, our body responds with a mixture of feeling tones. These can be neutral, pleasant, or unpleasant. When the feeling tone is neutral, the mind filters this information objectively, providing factual information about our experience. When the feeling tone is charged, registering as either pleasant or unpleasant, the mind’s impressions become subjective, reflecting our personal experience. Challenging experiences are generated from strong, unpleasant feeling tones when our mind creates our “salt”, which can make our lives unpalatable, just like the shot glass with the salty solution.
To help us organize the feelings that arise from the information gathered by our senses, the mind creates narratives about our experience. Perhaps on your morning walk you see your neighbor approaching with his dog—a daily occurrence. How you react will depend on the story your mind has created. It may be neutral, simply acknowledging his presence, but if his dog bit you last week, you’ll have a very different narrative. You will most likely react with fear, even if the dog is calm in the present moment. Reacting with fear to a dog that recently bit you is a reasonable response to a previously threatening situation. This experience can change if the dog remains calm in the future. The initial experience can, over time, lose its charge, allowing the storyline to change. One day, you may even approach the dog without fear. You can’t change the fact that you were bitten, but you can create space or dilute the experience, helping it to eventually lose its sting.
An unpleasant experience like a dog bite comes with a much simpler narrative than those that cause pain in our lives. Our most painful experiences can become deeply embedded into complicated and layered emotions, with storylines that run deep within us and are hard to unravel. The idea of making space for these painful experiences runs counter to how the brain operates when faced with challenging feelings. When something hurts—either mentally or physically—we search for ways to stop the pain, to “fix” it. Although it seems that finding a root cause would help us to heal, frequently it only increases tension and makes us miserable. When we attempt to diagnose, analyze, or let go of uncomfortable emotions, our brain responds by narrowing our focus of attention, directing all our energy to the pain. Our thoughts start to churn while our awareness of the world constricts. This tension signals the brain that danger is lurking. The body responds by ramping up the nervous system to get ready to fight, flee, or freeze. The more we struggle to make sense of the feeling, the greater the tension which adds to our stress. Before long we are experiencing a host of physiological symptoms such as low back pain, neck discomfort, insomnia, high blood pressure, and depression.
Carl Jung, a 20th century psychiatrist, once stated that most problems in life aren’t ever resolved but are instead outgrown. He explains that many of life’s challenges lose their urgency when other experiences come into our view. As our horizons expand, our problems lose their urgency. According to Jung, most of our troubles are not solved logically, but simply fade into the background as our attention broadens and opens us to new perspectives or experiences.
Creating space seems like a good idea, but it is hard to do when we experience powerful emotions such as fear, betrayal, grief, or loneliness. Mindfulness, with its practice of paying attention to the present moment in a nonjudgmental way, can help soften the sting of unpleasant feelings by creating a pause. Rather than trying to run away from unpleasant feelings, mindfulness encourages us to release our resistance, letting the experience simply be as it is. With mindfulness we learn how to let things be, rather than striving to let things go. This doesn’t mean we agree with all the stories we create about our feelings—those that tell us we are unworthy, undeserving, unlovable, and so on. We are encouraged to simply acknowledge the presence of these stories along with the painful feelings. Mindfulness guides us to create space simply by stepping back and watching, accepting what is happening in the present moment while resisting our need to act.
Whereas problem solving ramps up our mental processing, mindfulness notices thoughts but does not follow them, nor does it try to stop them. When we cease to chase thoughts, they lose their energy and eventually dissolve. With less mental chatter, we can turn more of our attention to our bodily sensations. Enhanced awareness of sensations plays a crucial role in how we relate to the world around us.. Expanded awareness of sounds and sights improves our spatial abilities; proprioceptive awareness maintains our balance; and neuroception gives cues related to safety. As our attention broadens and we notice more sensations, the body is able to settle into its surroundings. We start to feel more oriented in our body and in space. We can relax and, in doing so, expand our horizons. This is how we make space, how we dilute our salt.
Backbending and twists are poses that move the body in ways that help to create space. These types of poses open our body in a seemingly paradoxical way--by engaging certain muscles in order to open others. Twists create space not when we are in the pose, but once it is released. By bringing one part of the body toward another we make less space, but in doing so, increased blood flow is generated when the twist is released. Backbends require a strong contraction and engagement of the back muscles. The work of backbends is not found by broadening the front of the body but in the strong engagement of the back muscles. These types of poses remind us that it takes strength to soften and broaden.
Twists and backbends can generate strong sensations, so I invite you to approach your practice with curiosity, perhaps setting an intention to be present to whatever comes up on your mat. Tune in and listen deeply to all the sensations, from tension to release, with a nonjudgmental and open mind. Where do you hold tension? Where can you open, relax, and let be? Approach your practice as an opportunity to notice all the sensations that pop up. Allow these sensations to arise and fall without rushing off into a storyline. Remember that, like yoga, mindfulness is a practice that we need to return to again and again. Its power to calm comes with time. Little by little, as we create space, the sting of our challenges recedes so that, eventually, we will not be able to taste the salt.
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