Deep Relaxation

What do you do to relax? It feels like one of those things which we should just know, but we have to learn to relax. Proper Relaxation is neither passive, nor simply “not doing”. It is like sleep. Sleep is a fundamental part of our learning process. Sleep is where we embed the way we see the world as we have seen it during the day, from the perspective of how we have seen every day. Where we store, work through, and connect our memories. 

Learning to relax properly involves tensing and releasing. One of the most advanced Yoga postures is called Savasana, or the Corpse pose. It looks like someone is just lying there. A lot of people will walk out of yoga classes at the end, cutting Savasana short because they only focus on the conspicuous exercises as the most important. What you see is not all there is. 

Savasana involves doing a body scan to methodically search out where you are holding tension. It is direct and intentional. 

There are levels of relaxation that flow from each other. Physical Relaxation, allows Mental Relaxation, which allows you to get to the point where you stop thinking about yourself. Many of our waves of anxiety come from worrying about expectations, our worth, or our place in the world. 

Deep relaxation allows you to connect with what matters. Like a passionate public speaker gets to a point where they are in conversation with the audience, and everyone is thinking about the shared idea... they are no longer self-conscious. Deep relaxation can allow you to be still, even when you are still in the chaos.

No. 5 (1948)

Jackson Pollock

Moving with Grace

It’s not all about you. Part of letting go of anxiety is not feeling like you are being judged in each and every moment. Where your waves of worry are about real problems, rather than perceptions of you. 

When you decide to start paying attention beyond the boundary of yourself, and connect to more, it is a bit of an existential crisis with no clear answer. At least worrying about yourself has very skin and bone constraints! 

Philosophers like William MacAskill and Peter Singer look at effective altruism in a world where we have to think about constraints. Resources aren’t abundant. Opportunities aren’t abundant. Scarcity is real, and scarcity puts up prices and creates walls. Abundance is free and open. 

What is a reasonable amount to consume? How should we think about other people who don’t have enough? Capital provides a foundation and starting point that changes the game. If you stop living hand-to-mouth, and you build up capacity to think long term. 

Moving from day-to-day, to week-to-week, to month-to-month, to year-to-year, to the point where your short-term decisions are connected and constructive. Where you can absorb difficult times, learn from them, and respond in an empowered way. 

Where you move through life with an additional level of grace not available to those who are being flung around by the elements.

moving through and with the elements

Classe Debutant

If you were incredibly small, and you came up to a little drop of water, it would be a huge bubble. We were about three feet tall when we were two years old. We were surrounded by people bigger than us. I am six feet tall now. I like imagining being surrounded by twelve-foot adults running around protecting us. 

I did my first ski lesson on the holiday my now wife proposed to me. I saw little kids being picked up by the adults as they were about to go into a snowbank. Swooping in to the rescue. When I was about to go into the snowbank, no twelve-foot adult came swooping in. 

Once we become adults, we build in our own protections and ways of making sure consequences are not too grave. We carry on.

We build our own set of congnitive biases that help us relax. Biases help us make decisions quickly so we don’t have to think of every snowbank. We can just ski. That is what mastery is all about. When you trust your capacity to engage with the world and get to a level that is intuitive, the anxiety falls away.

Soutie learns to Ski

 

Messy Trade-offs

Sometimes you have to do things. If you are fortunate, what you have to do depends on what you want to do. There are realities to accept once you have figured out what you want. Trade-offs. Each opportunity taken closes doors to other opportunities. The tricky bit is negotiating through complex competing relationships and trade-offs. The deeper your network of meaningful connections, the more you have to take into account the desires of others. A lot of my anxiety comes from the managing of expectations. If no one expects anything of you, and your actions do not impact anyone else, then you can do what you want. If you cut yourself off from the world. If you engage, it is messy. A friend of mine took this approach when he started work. He said, “you have to do a good enough job that you don’t get fired, but not so good that they come back”. It is comfortable under the radar. That strategy did not last long. Eventually, he wanted to engage, and people started coming back. A life worth living is messy.

Under the Radar

Cutting Slack

One of my habitual sources of anxiety is the desire to “get it right”. I hate feeling like I have wronged someone – intentionally or not. In the workplace, this often led to me seeking permission by getting something right “in theory” first. The problem is theory and practice always turn out differently. Asking forgiveness (and cutting people some slack) is often far more effective than seeking permission. If we aren’t generous in our forgiveness, both to ourselves and others, it can be debilitating. A hesitancy can creep in where you feel the need to either ask first, or step back for the person (whose judgement you fear) to do it themselves. We all get things wrong. It is a fundamental part of learning, adjusting, adapting, accommodating, interpreting, and creatively dancing with what the world throws at us. The challenge is developing the skills of interpretative charity (assume people intend well) and the gift of the benefit of doubt (no one gets everything right – focus on the point people are making rather than the holes). The double challenge is being as kind to yourself as you try be to others.