Perhaps enlightenment is relaxing.  That sounds so hedonistic, so small a hope for all this meditation.  It is not relaxing as lying on a beach is relaxing, or reclining with a crossword.  More in the way of relaxing muscles.  The body is held together by a complex of tensions—held upright against gravity by the skeleton, held secure in its perimeter by the skin, kept alive by the muscular contractions of the heart and the push of the blood through veins and arteries.  The tensions of our minds and spirits are so often etched into the body, through muscles in spasm, inhalations that don’t go more than half deep, a headache radiating upward from a knot in the neck or shoulders.  Relaxation exercises for the body often focus on identifying that one muscle or complex of muscles that we don’t even know to be clamped in tension—perhaps a “trigger point” for pain elsewhere.  Finding that last muscle in tension and relaxing it can be so soothing, even ecstatic.

Is meditation so different from this, when the site of tension is the mind or self rather than the body?  Minds and selves are equally held together by tensions, spasms, reflexes: we call these desires, or principles, or memories, or fears, or morals, or resentments, or purposes.  When I sit in meditation and seek no more than to realize and relax the sources of tension in my being—not in my day, not in my life, but in my being—I find this simple aspiration more attainable, and even more meaningful, than enlightenment.  Because of my body I’m a creature in time; my body is ageing and drawing me closer to death—such tension comes with that “muscle”!  Because I’m a creature in time I have experienced great loss, I am cut off it seems absolutely from those I’ve cherished and lost.  Or is time—my sense that I am a being in time—a tension that can be released?  If all dimensions of my self that I understand are in reality efforts of tension, even of spasm, that I undertake in order to feel that I am, and if the wish to be can be dispersed by the gradual relaxing of each emotion, every expectation I have of selfhood, and of endurance in time—then is meditation perhaps ideally understood as the relaxing of the figurative complex of muscle and tendon and tissue that is I?

Should I briefly experience such a passage of total relaxation while sitting, when the last “muscle” seems to release, the experience is indeed a happy one.  The smile crosses my lips.  There may even be a sense of ecstasy, of something far off dancing.  But I haven’t come to such moments by seeking enlightenment.  I’ve found them by a simple relaxation of that which keeps me from dispersing altogether into the Way.

5 September, 2024.