Relax, Nothing is Under Control!

Relax, Nothing Is Under Control

I was catching up on social media this morning and saw in my feed an ad with a t-shirt bearing the title of this blog. It caught my eye, and if I didn't already have an embarrassingly voluminous number of t-shirts that say "super cool things" on them, I would have bought one.

Still, it's a good thing to consider as it flies in the face of the more recognizable catchphrase, "Relax, Everything Is Under Control." So WHO is it exactly that has "Everything" all under control, and WHAT after all is the "Everything" they're talking about?

Stress Management Through the Body

I work in the field of healthcare, using my skills as it turns out, ultimately, for stress management. How? By working through the body to unleash the tethered soul from its confines. To do this, what tools are in my bag? Bodywork, yoga, yoga therapy, mindfulness, breathwork, awareness, and awareness of the present moment.

The body holds every memory and every experience we've ever had. The good, bad, neutral, indifferent, profound, mundane—fill in the blank. Some of us hold on with everything we've got just to get through another day, another week, another relationship, another job interview for a position we're totally uninspired to take, but hey, the money is really good, right?

The Type A Dilemma

I have found over the years that the folks with the most body trauma are the "Type A" personality—control freaks and those who think they've got it all together. My standing joke to my colleagues in the field of wellness is that if I can get them from Type "A" to Type "A-," my work has been successful! If that small shift takes years to come to fruition, I still consider it a success. And to my closest colleagues, I will jokingly confide that for the control freaks who just can't let go, doing bodywork on them often feels akin to massaging a Michelin steel-belted radial tire.

For folks like this, how can I advise them and teach them ways to cope and thrive in this absolutely crazy world we've all found ourselves in?

What the Body Reveals

As a practitioner in the world of manipulating the human form—whether with words, touch, alignment, breathing practices, and even cadaver dissection (yep, you read that last one right)—I cut into bodies as a way to understand our anatomic complexities but also to see what decades of accumulated stress might do beneath the skin.

I think I've seen it all until I see the next form and the next, only to realize there is yet another thing I've never seen, tissue I've never encountered in this particular way, or manipulated quite like this.

I first heard the forthcoming phrase from Tom Myers, author of Anatomy Trains, that our "issues are in our tissues," and whether he invented this memorable line or heard it from someone else, the essence and catchiness rings true.

Observing the Human Form

As a lover of studying the human form, I'll often find myself out and about in a big city, an airport, and much more rarely, but occasionally, in a shopping mall. By the way, I don't like airports, shopping malls, and some big cities. That said, I do like some airports, shopping malls, and big cities, because I have so much more opportunity to study the human form. I will look at the sights, the architecture, the merchandise, but mostly I'll be looking at people.

I see it in fascial density mostly—the holding, clinging, armoring, reluctance, soft voices who'd rather scream and can't remember how to, or never felt safe to, because of the consequences. This is especially true with women, who by the way comprise 95% of the clients and students I see. If I had to label the most common place in the body where that armor is thickest, it's most often right between the shoulder blades, midway between the spine of the scapula and the winged tips, or to put it in layperson's terms, right behind the heart. Why is that? I have theories.

The Space Behind the Heart

The space directly behind the heart is a place shared by the scapulae, ribs, vertebrae, the cord inside those vertebrae, and the matrix of dense connective tissue, with a few muscle fibers here and there, all in close proximity, bowing to the whims of the somatic nervous system—one could say the will. The place so close to the lungs but yet the place where "breath-originated movement" is least likely to occur; the place perhaps where it needs to occur the most.

So what does this all have to do with control, if anything, or loss thereof?

Fear and the Body

Nothing shuts down movement of normal tissue function like fear. Nothing shuts down breath more than fear. And should real danger arise, it's for good reason—blood is shunted to the muscles and the adrenals for fight or flight potential, to help us escape from predators, whether that be a grizzly bear, collapsing buildings, automobiles headed onto a pedestrian pathway at high speeds, or a 40-foot ocean wave out of nowhere.

While the above examples are less common occurrences, the "predator" is now unexpected hospital bills, an unhappy partner or boss, the anticipated bad news about the stock market and interest rates, etc. All of these things become our fearful reality. Where we can get into trouble is when we think control is synonymous with conquering, rather than managing—manipulating to only our own advantage and damn the consequences for others, rather than having oversight to see the big picture and how our awareness could help everyone around us.

The Illusion of Control

The organ of control turns out to be the brain, the CNS. The CNS makes us often feel that we need at all times to understand everything all at once as a way to command everything, all at once.

So if we were for a moment to imagine that just for a while we could consider allowing ourselves to lose control—or better yet, abandon any need to control—does that mean we are giving up, resigning, being a loser? Or could that be viewed through a different lens where we can take on a different view into reality by understanding that anything can happen at any time and there's nothing anyone can do about it?

This doesn't preclude that we have no preferences, intentions, desires for anything, any outcome, or goals. It just means we learn to utilize that Sanskrit concept of Spanda—going with the flow of the universe, realizing there will be joy, happiness, bliss, wonder, along with times of pain both physical and emotional, sorrow, struggle, and the surfacing of animal energies of greed, lust, fear, guilt, anger, and iterations of all in different quantities, qualities, and doses.

It also means Tapas, which can translate as friction, heat, and intentional agitation as we choose to challenge ourselves with gravitating in directions other than aversion or attraction, but hovering, as the Buddha did, in the middle path.

The Path Forward

So can we agree that this might mean working to reduce reactionary behavior? If we could give it up, let go, and allow breath, prana, life force to once again flow uninhibited, healing would be a certain and welcomed outcome.