What am I bracing against?

“You’re squeezing your muscles, stop squeezing them”

I am returning to a knowing that is so easy to forget. It’s so habitual, operating in the background under awareness.

 “Tensing our muscles shuts down flow. Shuts down life force.”

BAM.

Why would we want to shut this down?

We are bracing, and what are we bracing for?

We are either trying to brace against what we are expecting will come next OR bracing to stop awareness or expression of something within us. A sensation, an emotion, a knowing.

Now in the short term this makes total sense, at the very least this is a natural reaction, so there must be evolutionary wisdom in it, we brace against a cold wind, brace for a fall, or in preparation for a slap coming our way. “Ugh I don’t want to feel that.”

If we briefly brace and then return to flow, it’s not a problem. The thing is, many of us have ended up with this as our primary mode of being and it has become so normalized that we may not even remember or ever have known what it feels like otherwise.

I remember the first time I breathed into my lungs in a full way after decades of intense constriction, of barely breathing. It felt like shards of glass were piercing me. It felt scary in a way, but also right…this awareness dropped in, I have been withholding breath from parts of my body for YEARS. Whole parts of me were cut off from my awareness, from breath, from life force.

GENIUS. I knew why those parts were not safe to feel. I knew why those feelings were not safe to feel. (And we don’t even have to know WHY, just know there is wisdom in these unconscious decisions).

I also could note that while it made complete sense and was so WISE and necessary then to cut these parts off, that level of distance might not be so necessary NOW. In the present, it might be safe enough NOW to be with this feeling, part of my body, experience. My current self and my current life have more room to be with what’s here, I have more skills and capacity, and care to be with what’s here in a way that wasn’t possible back then.

There might be enough space, and awareness, and wisdom, and kindness to invite this experience to reconnect, to RE-PAIR this experience with the breath as I so beautifully heard a teacher recently state (and I can’t remember who, urgh.).

RE-PAIR, RE-Connect, RE-member….this is the work of making ourselves whole. This is a part of me, it had been banished and now it is welcomed home.

This process may then lead us to be curious about expanding this energy out, as I reconnect to the disenfranchised parts in me, noticing how I connect or disconnect to the outer world, to the land, and air, to the living creatures, to humans, how am I experiencing myself as a walled off separate being and is that really necessary, is that really true?