Muscle Tightness & Emotion
Imagine how frustration, anger, fear and stress tenses all those muscles subconsciously, not to mention the countless smooth muscles that regulate all the functions within the body.
“These pains you feel are messengers.
Listen to them.”
Rumi
Muscle tightness is not random, every pain has a message, this has been known and understood since ancient times. Our modern culture has diminished the emotional and spiritual aspects of our being in favour of the physical. Newtonian science deemed that all phenomenon had to have an observable cause and effect that can be measured in order to be described as science, and with that many spiritual and energetic healing practices including astrology and plant medicines were quickly relegated to the cultural compost bin. It’s surprising that God made it through that particular passage of history, but thats another story entirely.
However in the new age of science, some of the understandings of the deeper connections that we have with our natural world and our bodies was lost. Much of our language relates emotional and physical concepts together. For example : having a ‘hard head for business’ ‘a strong stomach’, ‘a broken heart’ ‘a chip on his shoulder’ all relate to an emotional state of being.
We are all aware that when we get tense our shoulders might find their way up to our shoulders, so why then is it so hard to see that an emotion can be the cause of back pain, or any other illness for that matter?
In Chinese medicine the smooth functioning of the body relies on a clear flow of energy throughout all the structures within. If the flow of qi gets stuck then pain is the result. You can imagine this if you think of how tight a muscle can get, blocking flow within and through it.
From that point of view it is then easy to see how your emotions can cause the Qi flow to get stuck.
When we suppress emotions all that tightness stays within, eventually creating dysfunction, it is recognising the emotions that have been locked in that is the difficult bit, because they are pushed down and held. This is becomes a pattern that is below the conscious level of thought, that is to say we don’t even know we are doing it.
Often we are aware of the tightness in our skeletal muscles but suppressed emotion that we’ve locked away can effect the internal functioning of the organs too, eventually causing illness and disease. That’s why recognising those emotions we have locked away is so important, it’s only with awareness that we can release them x
image from @simonneedhamphotography