Tension in the shoulders.. I found mine when I started doing yoga.
It must have been there before that but I never noticed it until I started paying attention to my body. Once I felt it, though, it was there all the time. Even in the evening, in bed, reading and resting, I’d notice it. I’ll bring my shoulders down, keep reading. Ten minutes later they’d be right back up by my ears. Persistent, inescapable tension.
I’m much better now.
And I see it now – in other people, not just myself. Once you know it, you see it everywhere.
This is what yoga actually teaches, underneath the poses: how to observe. You learn to notice your shoulder creeping toward an ear, a jaw clenching around nothing, a breath that never makes it past the collarbone. And noticing is most of the work. You can’t release a tension pattern if you can’t feel it. Once you can feel it, you often already know roughly what you need to do and what would help.
This doesn’t makes tension go away for good of course. Mine still comes back, especially in the cold, and I doubt that’s unusual. But the relationship to it changes. It stops being background noise you can’t name, and becomes something you can catch, again and again, a little sooner each time.
Do you feel your tension? And if you do — where does it live?
Photo by Inge Poelman on Unsplash
