You ARE the Tension You Try to Escape
September 21, 2021, 12:59 pm
Evergreen, Colorado, Carli's Salon de Estudia
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Feel the tension in your heart and chest as you go about your tasks. Feel the tightness. That comes from an unconscious belief that once you fulfill this task (and only once you fulfill this task) will that tension be loosened.
We think fulfilling the desire or checking the task off the list, finishing, doing this … publishing something, cleaning something, eating something, smoking something, drinking something, fucking something, kissing something, going somewhere … We think that will finally release the tension.
Once I do this, then I’ll be able to relax.
But that tension is not something to be eased or altered. That tension is what it is to be alive.
“God is Pressure,” Richard Rudd suggests in his book The Gene Keys.
That pressure, that tension, synonymous, perhaps, with desire, or suffering, with ecstasy or pain … with ecstasy and pain … is also what it is to be human.
The great charade is our belief that doing, completing, fulfilling anything on the outside will ever ease that which, inside, we are. We are the tension of what it is to be alive.
Experiencing the relaxation inside the tension is the work.
Moment by moment, again and again, we remember: It doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do; the tension will be there anyway.
Our work is to learn to sit with it, to be with it, to be it.
We release the tension into ourselves (and ourselves into it) by accepting it as what is.
We accept our own state of being.
In this human/Life experience, tension is. Sometimes we experience this quintessential tension as pleasure, sometimes as pain ... and as everything in between.
Doing things, getting things, getting rid of things, changing things does not ever change the fundamental tension of being. It's the background feeling of what we are; it is what drives us forward and propels us to experience Life, to be a sensory organ for Life.
The point is not to get rid of the tension (by accomplishing/doing things), but to go into the tension and become it.
In this way, you become one with all the outer things you do end up doing (or not doing), with all the things the tension you are moves you to do (or not do). You feel the freedom of relaxation into the ever-present tension, no matter what's happening (or not happening).
You thought getting away from the tension would relax you. But actual relaxation only comes in accepting you will never get away from it.
A new playfulness and lightness comes to all that you do because you’re not expecting anything to be able to remove the tension, and you don’t need anything to. You’re happy to be with it. You’re happy to be it.
It, Life, you, this moment, just is what it is and feels how it feels. You might as well accept it. You might as well be with it. You might as well be it!
This doesn’t mean you do nothing; it means you don’t expect your inner state to change based on outer things you do. You’re just with your inner state, always. From there you can really be with the outer things you’re doing (or not doing) because you don’t need them to do anything for you.
When we’re willing to let the tension be and to be the tension, what we do/give unto the outer world comes from a pure place because we’re not expecting it to relieve us of our tension.
We’re no longer expecting outer things to heal us. We’ve realized we are already healed.
We’re not expecting a cup of coffee or an afternoon sex session or another spliff or an award at work or a finally finished project or a get-away vacation to relieve our tension. We have been with our tension, we have become it enough to know that things done or not done are not what actually causes the tension. It is always there.
We ARE the tension. Accepting this, we can really and truly, innocently and presently, enjoy anything we do or don’t do.
We’re really there for each moment-to-moment experience, knowing that the way we feel is the way we are; there is no changing it. There is only settling and relaxing into it, fully accepting ourselves as we are and each moment for what it is. We are no longer fooling ourselves that anything outside us can or will change who and what we are, how and what it is.
Thus we become available to all things (to really and actually witness them, love them, be with them and become one with them) ... Because we no longer expect or need them to change us.