Muscles Hold My Unconscious Thoughts

(This essay is a work in progress. If you have any helpful criticism, please share it with me. Thanks)

I don't mean to give away the entire gyst of this writing in the title, but I have discovered that my muscles hold my unconscious feelings. Sometimes conscious ones too.

A person I greatly respect recently suggested to me that tension, the kind that builds up in our shoulders or legs or back, is caused by fear. Fear causes constriction. This constriction becomes tension.

For instance, when I have an unconscious thought such as a fearful reaction to something, whether it is a fear of being judged or of being beaten or of dying or of failure, my body manifests this. In an entirely logical and scientific sense, fear changes my brain and body chemistry. What we know as the emotional or mental state of fear is also a chemical state characterized by changes in levels of certain chemicals and alterations of chemical reactions and biological processes. The changes in my mental state brought on by fear, are accompanied by changes in physiology. One of the things that happens on the physical level during the experience of fear is constriction. Muscles contract. Then they often stay contracted, at least for a while. And just as I do not immediately stop thinking about something after it seriously frightens me, so too my body does not immediately reverse its reaction to the fear.

The fear that tends to cause constriction is generally unconscious fear. It is a series of thoughts that are not consciously reasoned out. This fear often contains an element of instinctive reaction, but it also is usually characterized by thoughts, mental equations that take place below the radar of the conscious mind. Often these thoughts are conditioned reactions to things.

For instance. At work I get very self-conscious. I have noticed that I have a fear of the judgement of my supervisors and co-workers. I am afraid of being perceived as stupid, eneffective, etc. I recently realized that on good days when I was feeling great and working really effectively and solving problems and melting under the praise of those around me, I did not feel much tension. But as soon as I made a mistake, or felt like I was going too slowly, or thought I sensed criticism in somebody's voice, I started worrying. I worried about being judged, about being seen in a negative light. And I realized that it was during these times that I developed tension. During the hours when I felt scrutinized by people in my office or criticized I became physically uncomfortable and felt tension developing in my neck and back and head.

When I saw the pattern developing, I started making connections in my life and my self. The thoughts were not conscious thoughts, and still are not entirely. But I started to see the thought patterns that I held. I started to see my fear-based reactions to my perceptions about other people's actions. I started catching glimpses of thoughts and fears that generally lay beneath my conscious mind's line of sight.

To sum up this story, I realized that the physiological actions in my tissues were working to imprint my thoughts and feelings on my body. My unconscious thoughts which were centered around self-worth and fear, became manifest in my physical body. And in fact, they became stored in my body as a tension that lasted throughout the day and week.

One of the major points that comes out of this realization is the understanding of the effect of habitual unconscious thoughts on my wellbeing. If I am constantly fearful of something, than my body will be constantly expressing that. The physiological effects of my fear-based, unconscious thoughts will build up in my body and over time, have a profound affect on my physical state.

I can see this in people all around me. I see decades of feelings and thoughts in the hunched backs of old men. I see the years of physical storage of thoughts and feelings in the gaits of young men and women. Our bodies become records of what we think and feel. After enough observations, I think that a person can learn to read bodies like open books. Physically we expose our deepest thoughts, the ones that we often cannot see ourselves.

This does not just happen with fear. It happens with every unconscious thought. Each thought that my brain creates unconsciously is accompanied by physiologically happenings. And over time our unconscious thoughts write themselves into our physical bodies. Anger, fear, hatred, spite, all manifest in our bodies. And over time bodies become bent and crooked by years of negative feelings and thoughts.

But not just negative, harmful thoughts and feelings are accompanied by physiological sensations. And conscious thoughts and feelings as well as unconscious ones have physiological elements.

Kindness, compassion, love, happiness all write themselves into our bodies, but in very different ways than negative feelings. The chemical and biological processes that acompany positive feelings tend to have relaxing, calming, strengthening effects on the body. This is no surprise. It feels good to feel good.

And conscious thoughts can have just as powerful an effect as unconscious thoughts on our physiologies. I have noticed that when I focus my mind on positive thoughts and feelings, thining about things that are relaxing, people whom I love, and experiences that were very fullfilling, my body feels better. In fact, when I really focus, I can alter the way a part of my body feels directly. On good days, when I really focus, I can link positive thoughts with certain parts of my body. For instance, I can begin to feel my ankle physically. I pay close attention to the physical sensations taking place there. I focus my mind on my ankle an slowly become more and more aware of it. Then I begin thinking very positive thoughts and generating very positive emotions. I put those thoughts and emotions into my ankle and end up releasing tension in my ankle area and creating an overall more-positive, good, feeling. And this process is rooted in an understanding of how my mind and body work together.

The implications of all of this lead in a very specific direction. Self-awareness leads toward greater control over our lives. Is I become more self-aware I reduce the amount of unconscious mental and emotional activity. By doing this I reduce the effects on my body and self of the activities of my mind which I am not in conscious control of. At the same time I give my conscious mind more control over how I feel. The process of becoming self-aware is a process of gaining understanding of myself as well as personal power. I slowly gain the ability to direct my life from moment to moment. I have more and more choice over how I will feel, think, and act.

But I am no expert. I am just now entering into an exploration of self-awarness. And from what I have learned, I have tons of uncoscious mental activity going on. I have many, many, many thoughts and feelings that I am not aware of, and becoming aware of them is a slow process. But it has proven, in the short time I have been working on it, to be very interesting and empowering.