Meditation as Wakeful Relaxation: Unclenching Smooth Muscle

I assumed this was referring to a simple seated position, but I was incorrect. He had people in some odd poses for meditation. Thank you for posting the source.

Back in grad school I was riding my bike home in a thunderstorm after 1am and crashed into a parked car. The next day the people at the health center panicked when I told them my neck hurt and rushed me to get an X ray which found no fractures.

For years afterwards I had pain that floated everywhere from my head to my upper back, neck, shoulders, etc, also had something like sciatia affecting one leg that I blamed from overdoing Yoga. It was definitely exacerbated by stress.

In 2021 I had something that was half midlife crisis and half mental health crisis that had me on my back foot until quite recently. My dentist had long told me I ground my teeth and should get a bite guard but I didn't take any action until the summer of 2021.

Within two days the pain focalized completely to my jaw and became agonizing. I definitely had the jaw clicking sign of TMJ disorder. For about six months I was on a strict regimen of eating very little solid food, instead I would throw random foods into a pot (like turnips, seaweed, beef, crazy stuff) and cook them like soup then grind them up with an immersion blenders. And I drank shakes from Burger King whenever I wanted.

I had a lot of emotional growth in that time and the pervasive anxiety I had went away. There was a day when I looked back and realized I just hadn't thought about the pain in my jaw for a long time. Maybe one day every few months my jaw bugs me a little.

I had another time when I was self-employed and not getting enough work and had terrible tendinitis in my hands which cleared up when I started doing push-ups.

That's my model for chronic pain and getting over it.

Not a new idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system

GabeN mentions similar in a video with IGN a few years ago.

Machine brain interfaces can reliably model thought to action of using ones arm, for example.

But it cannot model "feeling". It's, as of that interview, an intractable problem to map all electrical activity in us given external stimuli. Every body "feels" a cold stimulus in a different part of their. This wasn't qualitative either; imaging technology shows activity unevenly occurs across every human body. Put an ice cube on someones hand, their left knee tissues may react. Put ice cube on another person's hand, back of their neck reacts not their left knee.

Then there are stories of people missing the majority of their brain but only learned this medically after living a normal life; going to college, holding a career together for a couple decades.

Brain-centrism was just as dumb as our other takes that attempt to demarcate a center to our center-less universe. Even just practically speaking, I know a lot of PhDs who cannot cook or rotate a tire. Where is the intelligence in letting one be such a helpless, and thus codependent, tool?

[delayed]

> it’d be wasteful for evolution to only use the brain for computation

Even what we consciously experience as the brain is really only a tiny part of the brain.

The little language centre and the capacity to imagine are only a tiny subset of a multitude of brain functions and yet we believe that those two functions make up “me”.

One of the most cited papers of all time is Jerome Lettvin's "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" (1959).

https://web.archive.org/web/20110928024235/http://jerome.let... (PDF)

Experiment for yourself. The Buddhists have kept a tradition that makes falsifiable claims and provides steps for reproduction. I have reproduced some of these claims myself.

What differentiates this practice from the natural science is its study of subjective phenomena, as opposed to objective physicalities.

https://firekasina.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/the-fire-k...

  - racist
  - insecure in your own identity and beliefs
  - intellectually dishonest

    Although mainstream definitions of racism are typically some variation of in-
    dividual “race prejudice”, which anyone of any race can have, Whiteness scholars
    define racism as encompassing economic, political, social, and cultural structures,
    actions, and beliefs that systematize and perpetuate an unequal distribution of
    privileges, resources and power between white people and people of color (Hil-
    liard, 1992).

I notice I often have very strong knee-jerk reactions to these kind of comments.

It's usually from some person that has not spent very much time meditating at all or invested much time around the various cultures which treasure and pride themselves in their meditative practices. It usually goes something like:

"[Some kind of reasoning], therefore, there is no need to meditate."

I'd like to provide an analogy which I think fits:

We use our muscles every day. If you just use your muscles well, there's no need for strength training!

And sure, I mean, that KIND of works. But like... There's a LOT of research around the benefits of strength training. And there's a multitude of reasons why someone might want to get involved in strength training. Very few people aspire to become powerlifters, etc.

IMHO, it's a dangerous view to take, as it can lead to dismissal of a lot of fantastic use cases, and it leads to people dismissing meditation outright ("No doctor, my friend said that if I just move correctly, I don't need strength training!").

And yes, similar to strength, there's no upper limit on training for things like focus, concentration, mindfulness.

There's no 'need' for meditation sure, but by that logic there's no 'need' for most things.

What seems to be true to me is that it's absolutely fantastic in terms of technologies available to us for self (and also society)-improvement.

Meditation isn't an insight. It's a practice.

Your comment makes as much sense as saying that once you've moved the heavy weight to a new position there's no more need for weightlifting.

Thinking about what meditation is, and practicing meditation are not the same.

The thinking mind cannot simulate its effects.

The thinking mind assumes it is the whole mind. Meditation reveals it to be a tiny subset. Which cannot experience or simulate its superset.

A discussion at the level of this subset is by definition limited.

Among other things, the practice changes the meaning of “I”.

I thought the entire point of meditating was to realize you don't need to constantly solve problems, not to solve all of them.

Very western version of meditation to view it as a tool to achieve something with.

I want to comment that in Buddhism, the role of meditation isn't (just) to reduce anxiety or manage emotion. Indeed if this was the role, then other techniques of anxiety reduction or emotion management could replace meditation.

Instead, the ultimate role of meditation is to experience your inner reality. And it's really the experience that is important, just thinking about it doesn't have the same effect

For me a big factor is the way you become aware of the stress when it is absent for a short while. I felt a similar thing returning to work after the Christmas break. It's good to know about how you are feeling.

Meditation has many techniques. Similar to how people have many different motivations and programs when they have a regular gym practice. Strength is different to agility is different to flexibility.

"there is no problem to solve" is a thought.

It becomes insight if it actually feels true.

"It feels like there is no problem to solve" is a synonym of being relaxed.

It's to make a point more visible. It's explained in the paragraph below it.

As a stressed out CTO, what does your daily meditation routine look like now?

This is remarkable! I arrived at a very similar place in the last few days. I've been working with painful negative beliefs and memories.

This evolved from my meditation practice, I simply observe sensations in my body. (I tried meditating "normally" (focus on breath) but all this pain kept coming up!)

One of the techniques I arrived on through trial and error is simply asking the energy if it wants/needs to release itself. And then just allowing it to do so. Giving it permission as you say!

So far in every case I have tested, every bundle of pain in my body, the answer has been yes.

The hardest part is just being willing to let it do whatever it needs to do, which can be very odd and a little overwhelming sometimes. But you get used to it very quickly!

Sounds a lot like qigong, there is a whole… not sure what to call it, system? which involves pretty much exactly this increase of mind/body connection and relaxing/manipulating of fascia/muscles.

Many things have been practiced/studied for thousands of years - that alone isn't interesting or valuable imo.

What are the objective benefits of meditation - what is the exact/specific process and what specifically does it accomplish?

I can see how being in a silent reflective state and similar practices could have various effects and benefits (not that I know specifically what those are) - but what separates me zoning out in the shower/on the bus from actual meditation? How is 'guided' meditation when you're actively listening to someone else even the same thing?

Whenever I ask my meditating/'spiritual' friends about these things the response is basically vague undecipherable gibberish and allusions that it is unexplainable to someone like me who is not ready to accept the truths lol.

> the strong aversion people have for things not being "proven" by western science

What does “western” have to do with anything? There is plenty of pseudoscience, snake oil and magical thinking in the west. I’d wish people were much more skeptical of anything not scientifically proven.

Or do you imply there is a racist component to it? That could certainly be true.

> It's great that westerners are exploring these things ...

> This is literally yoga and meditation practice and has been studied for at least a couple thousand years.

> Even if we exclude the modern invention of yoga as exercise in the 20th century, there are seated practices of releasing these tensions in the body.

You are very clearly opposing eastern meditation practice and science, saying science held westerners back but let me give an example...

I've got a tense spot somewhere, I do practice meditation since a long time and I definitely can relax myself using breathing techniques etc. That's great.

But one of my very best friend lost, 15 years ago, both kidneys and had a kidney transplanted from his mom (she was compatible and willing to give one). As to my wife, she suffers from an auto-immune disease: but thanks to medication she lives a normal life (and thankfully doesn't have a reduced life expectancy).

So my questions is simple: you talk about "thousands of years". Easterners had "thousands of years" and they can... Release tension in the body?

Shall we now have a talk about science and ask the inverse question: weren't easterners held back by their meditation practice while westerners invented: MRI, X-ray, antibiotics, insulin, kidney transplantation, heart transplantation, artificial heart, in vitro fecondation, polio vaccine, anesthesia, chemotherapy, stethoscope, microscope, ...

And that's just a tiny list. I could go on and on. Versus... Relaxing tension in the body?

I'm not exactly sure who's been held back by what here.

Science is not exclusive to western countries. In fact, I would argue that a lot of the basis from science is Eastern philosophy. It is merely a method for determining the validity of truth claims.

The problem is that Eastern medicine is also full of complete horse shit. How do you differentiate between the good and the bad without just reinventing from base principles?

The biggest challenge is that it's a very slow process and most people don't have the patience for it. I have been practicing Vipassana for 14 years, including all day long body awareness (so, not only on cushion, but basically integrating Vipassana to normal activities like work) and it's took close to a decade to be satisfied by the results. That being said, permanent relaxation of muscle is really what you gain from it. There have been period with faster developpement but there are up liits to progress. Notably, the release of muscle release all sort of chemicals in the blood streams, which would make my body smell during intense practice and if we progress too fast, we get bizarre side effects. For instance, relaxation of some of my muscles meant that other muscles in my legs had to be "trained" when walking, or I would be in pain for a while, etc, etc.

what do you mean?

Early Buddhist Texts (EBT) are fairly non-religious, e.g. see the Thai forest tradition/BSWA talks

this school of thought even often ignores a fair portion of the abhidama texts ("about dhamma", the meta commentaries) that started to form a number of years after the death of the Buddha

if anyone wants a seriously good deep deep deconstruction of the main mindfulness sutta/sutra from this perspective, podcast kinda form, see https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL70fWqztn7OXdbGqWEOvhOVqf...

Learning to calmly reset over and over, is normal.

The less reactive we are to the need to reset, the less the distractions control us.

And, the more reseating our mind becomes an instinctive habit, the more wind is lost for distractions. And the more likely the distraction cycle fades or lengthens.

The goal isn’t to never have to reseat our minds. Just be better at holding our minds.

We can view the distractions as the workout of a steep hike. Not a problem, just the terrain.

But everyone is different, and our minds and nervous systems are complex, so that’s just one take.