Meditation as Massage for the Mind

If you have ever had a massage, you have probably had the experience of the masseuse encountering a knot of tension in your muscles and working to get the tension out and help the muscles relax. You may not even have known the knot was there until the masseuse hit a sore spot. The tension might release right away, or if it is in deeper layers of muscle it might take a few sessions to work it out.

Meditation also works out tension, tension in the mind. During meditation the mind typically goes off into various thoughts and imaginings, and the usual practice is to repeatedly bring your attention back to a focal device such as your breath. Generally the thoughts and imaginings are what I call “left-over thoughts,” trains of thoughts left over from something that was on your mind before meditating. There is inertia to thoughts and once in motion they tend to persist for a while. Left-over thoughts are relatively easy to let go of when you become aware of them, and the mind progressively relaxes during this process.

But other thoughts are not so easy to deal with. These are the “knots” of the mind, knots of tension composed of thoughts, imaginings, memories and associated emotions that come up persistently and really suck your attention in. Often they are associated with some form of anxiety, particularly anxiety regarding fears and desires. Encountering one of these is like hitting a sore spot during a massage, and when they occur you can get so caught up in them that you forget you are meditating.

Once you become aware you have hit such a mental knot and try to return to your focal device, likely you will still not be able to let go of the knot; mental knots are “sticky” and tend to cling in your consciousness more than the typical left-over thoughts. The “massage” technique to ease the tension out is attending to the knot while maintaining the awareness that you are meditating.

To do this you need to deliberately hold the mental knot in a space of calm attentiveness, making it, in effect, your focal device. You hold it there as though examining a curious object, observing rather than analyzing it. You have to maintain the balance between getting sucked into it and trying to push it away, just holding it in your mind as though your power of attention is massaging the deeper tension out of it. You feel your way into it, like a masseuse kneading down into the deeper layers of muscle.

As you feel you way into it, emotions, memories, or images may arise; this is a sign of the release of tension from the knot. You then continue to hold these new revelations in the space of calm attentiveness. The deeper the tension, the harder it will be to avoid getting sucked in again and forgetting that you are meditating, but each time you realize you have lost yourself you return to holding the thought in that space of calm attentiveness. Sometimes the knot opens up suddenly, sometimes it opens up slowly over several meditation sessions; they can even open up when you are not meditating, simply because the meditation has begun to loosen up the tension behind them.

With the release of tension comes an awareness of what it was all about, and that awareness of the inner core of the knot is its resolution. The reason it had been knotted up was to avoid the awareness of that core; the willingness to be fully aware unties the knot. By meditating you opened space for the knot to release, now when the elements of the knot come up they will have the same quality of left-over thoughts and will be easier to let go of.

Just as the release of tension in the body allows it to function more harmoniously and with greater ease, the release of mental tension allows the mind to function more harmoniously and with greater ease. Your mind will then reflect the world around you with less distortion and express your true nature more faithfully.

© 2011 Alan F. Zundel

Alan F. Zundel is a counselor, author, and teacher currently living in Eugene, Oregon. His talks are available to download for free at HeartAwake Center at www.heartawake.org.