Let Go

Where do you hold tension? Maybe you hike your shoulders up toward your ears. Perhaps you clench your jaw. It’s possible that you make fists with your hands. When life is stressful or scary or even just annoying, you have a physical response. What is it?

You need to know what your tension habits are. Not so that you can identify them to your massage therapist. Not even so that you can do a yoga pose to target them. You need to know where you hold tension so that you can choose to let. it. go.

All the massaging and stretching will not help if your brain is constantly sending a message to your muscles to tense. Send a different message. Choose something else. Have your brain send a new signal to those hot spots, “Let go!”

This will require you to forge some new neurological pathways, so give yourself some reminders. Write “Let go!” on a few sticky notes. Put them all over the place – your steering wheel, your computer screen, above your kitchen sink.

And maybe, just maybe, this process of unraveling physical tension will free you to let go of other things you’re unnecessarily holding on to.