Living Relaxation

Breathing more life into living.

I keep finding I want to explain the same tool in lots of my conversations. So I’ll try spelling it out here — both so I can link to it, and also so it’s more widely available.

Here’s the gist:

Lots of people keep snapping between two modes. One is a kind of

TRY REALLY HARD PUSH PUSH GO GO GOTTA GET THIS DONE

And the other is more slumped. Exhausted, collapsed, face flat against the floor.

It’s often super helpful to view these as something like build-in modes for your body. But they’re very simple, and on their own they don’t let you function at a very high level.

Like, when people exercise really hard, they’re often pushing themselves into that tryhard mode, and then end up dead exhausted in their recovery. I often want to refer to this strategy as turning into “a bag of bones”.

There’s a third… mode, I’ll call it, but it’s special. I learned it in my martial arts training as “living relaxation” (in contrast to “dead relaxation”, which is what we called the collapsed/slumped thing).

At first it can feel like a balance of the built-in pair, where you’re deeply calm and relaxed but also quite alert and ready for action. But it really is a third thing. It comes to encompass the other two. When that happens, dead relaxation becomes deep rest and trying hard becomes vivid vitality.

The experience of living relaxation is often one of suffusing everything with breath. Collapsing can feel breathless, like you’re dead on the couch. But if you breathe deeply while there, you get more life. Literally more air. Instead of being exhausted, you can just be. It’s restful.

Likewise, explosive effort done with breath is very powerful. It feels like firebending looks in “Avatar: The Last Airbender”.

The deal is, you’ve gotta build up your skill with living relaxation. It doesn’t just happen automatically the way the other two do.

I think this is the same thing Stephen Porges was pointing at when he came up with polyvagal theory. (That’s the basic theory behind almost everyone’s ideas these days around “healing from trauma” and “somatic processing”.) The idea is that your nervous system has these two main branches, the excitement/fight-or-flight system (SNS) and the calming down, restorative system (PSNS). The latter is governed by the longest nerve in your body, the vagus nerve, which supposedly has multiple branches. (Hence “poly-vagal”.) One branch, running a bit more toward the back (“dorsal” in anatomical terms), is responsible for the dead relaxation mode. The branch that’s a bit forward (“ventral”) is responsible for living relaxation.

There’s a lot to say about this theory. It’s popular for a reason. It’s also highly questionable as a literal description of what’s going on. But in practice, if you use the idea as a guide for how to interact with your lived experience of your body, it works.

One of the big claims in polyvagal theory is that both the SNS and the dorsal vagus branch are built-in. They’re fully formed when you’re born. They’re very old in terms of evolution. But the ventral branch of the vagus nerve is quite new and is fundamentally social. It has to be “myelinated”. In practical terms that means it has to learn. We aren’t born with living relaxation as an accessible state. Instead we develop it in contact with others and by becoming more conscious throughout our lives.

…or we don’t! Or our learning is scattered. There are lots of possibilities. But in practice, lots of people — possibly most? — don’t develop very much living relaxation. So they end up snapping back and forth between the two other modes. Coffee and alcohol, work ‘til exhausted and then flop in front of Netflix. That oscillation keeps people reactive at a very basic animal level. And it’s also quite exhausting! Very hard on a human body.

Without living relaxation, the way an animal deals with having vastly too much sensation is to have the “dead relaxation” mode sort of lock the high-charge fight-or-flight energy under a lid. This is the “freeze response”.

I see this all the time with people who find exercise miserable. Working out can feel glorious, even while challenging. But if you’re stuck in a sort of low-grade emergency “play dead” mode all the time, then trying to lift weights or whatever will feel awful and exhausting, and it’ll often create nausea.

I liken this state to having “blown a fuse”. If you get too much tryhard energy (SNS) blasting through you, it’s a bit like having too much voltage passing through a circuit. That’ll often pop something fragile in the system, causing it to suddenly become a poor conductor of electric current. That’s basically what a fuse is: it’s an intentionally fragile part of a circuit that keeps more precious and harder-to-fix parts from breaking first under extreme conditions.

Hence my talking about the metaphor of “channeling lightning” as a possible replacement for language like “trauma processing”.

In practice, lots of (maybe most?) people operate in an ongoing “blown fuse” mode. Irene Lyon calls it “functional freeze”. It’s a state of partial numbness where you can still kind of move your body through the motions of taking care of some things, but everything is kind of grey and heavy and difficult. It can be hard to get riled up about things, but at the same time it can feel like being constantly agitated or on the edge. The mind tends to be a bit foggy all the time in this state.

The deal is that all that tryhard (SNS) energy is sort of pent up under the “blown fuse” thing. It’s like having a bow drawn, ready to fire. It’s quite stressful on the bow to hold that position for a long time.

The theory is that this is an ancient survival strategy. It’s why rabbits go slack and play dead when in the jaws of a wolf. The switch from terror to horror is because the fight-or-flight strategy can’t work: the rabbit can’t win in a fight, and it can’t get away. So instead it kind of stores all that explosive SNS energy (instead of, say, exciting the wolf by struggling). If the predator sets the rabbit down and gets distracted, then BAM! All that energy can fire, like releasing the bowstring, and the prey can suddenly fly away.

One trouble with humans in particular is, we can kind of carry our “predators” around with us in our heads. We can stress about what we need to take care of, or ruminate on what’s going to happen as a result of our past actions. We can also contemplate our inevitable deaths. This is intensely stressful — and it’s one reason why focusing on the present moment can be so calming and freeing.

The thing is, all of that functional-freeze behavior is a patch. It’s based on an old strategy for dealing with SNS overwhelm. We borrowed it from the way that many animals deal with situations where they’re trapped. But at least they can usually let it go and forget about it afterwards! They’re not embedded in time the way we are.

There’s a much newer strategy (on evolutionary timescales) for dealing with all that excess energy. It’s based on this living relaxation.

So let me show you how this strategy can work:

Take a moment to remember the space around you. You’re looking at a screen, right? (Or maybe a page, if you printed this out. My household likes to do that with essays we want to talk about.) It’s pretty common to lose track of your surroundings when reading something. I often think of this as sort of coagulating my awareness by pushing it into things.

Part of a Twitter thread I wrote on “letting go”

What happens if you just… notice that there’s space around you? Between your face and these words? Above you is a ceiling, or the sky. Behind you is… whatever is behind you. Just take a moment and notice.

Some people get stuck on a sort of zoomed-in version of this process. It’s like the focal point of their attention zips around like a laser pointer. So they notice the ceiling, and then the wall behind them, and then the distance between their face and the page… but they still get surprised if I mention their toes. Instead of relaxing awareness so that it springs to being vast, they end up sort of “pushing” it out with concentrated attention.

In case it helps: think of it like using your peripheral vision. If you look at a distant spot, like some particular part of a wall or a specific leaf on a tree, you can probably see the whole object without moving your eyes. The whole wall or tree or whatever. You’re doing that by taking in lots of your peripheral vision all at once.

Or how about looking at a vista? When you see a view from up high, like looking down at a forest, what’s so striking about it? It’s not just that you can choose a lot of little things to look at. For me it’s the vastness itself that stands out. What am I using to see the vastness? I use something like peripheral vision, or peripheral awareness. I see the bigness of it by taking it in kind of all at once.

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

I claim that when you’re taking it all in like this, you’re engaging a glimmer of living relaxation. It should feel like your breath wants to change. Not like when you get tensed up, and not like when you suddenly get tired and want to take a nap. Something else. Something calm yet inspiring.

On a very simple level, living relaxation builds just by practicing it. It’s quite normal to forget about your toes even though I just mentioned them a few paragraphs above. Why? Well, we’re used to switching to the tryhard/collapse oscillation. Living relaxation is like having good tone in our postural muscles: until we’ve worked those supports well, we’ll tend to slump into “bad posture” when we’re not focusing on doing something else.

…though I want to poke at that framing a bit. I say “bad posture” because it immediately conveys the main point I want to say. But it adds something I’d now like to remove. “Bad posture” isn’t bad. It’s what our bodies very intelligently do with the resources they have. We slump forward while working at a computer because without enough living relaxation, there’s no way to “unify the body”. There’s a tendency to focus on the task that’s kind of inside the computer, and to drop awareness of most of the body. So the body has to get good at managing sort of on its own while you work in a highly mental way. “Bad posture” here is extremely intelligent: it’s the body’s best adaptation to that situation. And it might be perfectly fine for the life you want to live!

That said, in my experience most people do in fact change their posture, and feel better for it, as a result of developing living relaxation. They change how they sit at the computer for instance. But that’s not because there’s some kind of “correct posture” that everyone should be doing. It’s that living relaxation expands your resources and capacities. So you don’t have to leave your body to fend for itself so much. It can be healthier even when you sit for hours hammering away at a keyboard.

(I mean, here I am writing a weekly blog! I’m very much speaking from experience here.)

Anyway, back to the main topic.

Living relaxation is a skill. It grows slowly over time. And like any skill, you grow it by meeting challenges close to the edge of your capacity.

A lot of “trauma processing” emphasizes what strikes me as soothing. Being gentle with yourself and letting your system come to rest.

I think that’s really good, particularly if people haven’t allowed themselves to rest. But when you’re not practiced with living relaxation, it’s very hard to tell the difference between resting while full of breath versus being breathlessly collapsed. So you can end up sort of slumped as a pile of nothing, talking about how you’re “healing” while you’re not able to climb out of bed or get a job.

(I don’t mean this dismissively. I’ve just seen literally this error mode so many times that it’s worth naming as a kind of warning.)

The first step has to be entering living relaxation. Yes, that usually requires backing off from the tryhard effort. Dropping into dead relaxation can help since it’s sort of “adjacent” to living relaxation. Hence stuff like getting a massage or taking a hot bath can be supportive.

But at some point you’ve got to switch to the vastness. The delight in being alive. The open-hearted experience of this moment. Reverence for the glory of being. Sometimes a spark of SNS excitement can help here! Sort of shaking off the dullness of dorsal vagal collapse.

At first, just finding living relaxation is hard enough. Getting into it, then losing it, then getting back into it again. It’s very much like building a muscle, only it might also be hard to find the muscle due to unfamiliarity.

But after a while, basically once you can hold the state at all, you’ll want to challenge it.

This is where “firebending” comes into play.

Here’s the deal: most people engage SNS-type energy by contracting their awareness around whatever they’re trying hard to do. I see this all the time in the gym: people lifting a heavy weight by focusing on their thoughts and on the intensity of the sensation. They totally lose awareness of the people around them, the ceiling above them, the feeling of their clothes, the joy of being alive, etc.

That’s the breathless tryhard version.

If you want to train living relaxation, you’re probably going to do less than your body is technically capable of. You can’t lift as heavy, or as many reps. But you’ll get there! Just stay within your living range.

Here’s how it works: you start in living relaxation, and then you add a little bit of intensity. It’s probably way, way less than you’re expecting at first. See if you can keep your awareness vast, your breathing clear, your intention fluid and smooth and engaged.

After you do a little bit, check: did your awareness compress? Did you lose track of your surroundings?

It’s normal if you do. It’s no biggie. You get to try again. It’s like learning to juggle: you’re basically guaranteed to drop some balls while you’re learning. And that’s a good thing! It teaches you what the limits of skill are. Failure isn’t just the price of learning; it’s an absolutely critical part of learning. You want to fail sometimes, so you can feel how failure in fact happens, and so you can learn to address it.

Over time you can build up your capacity to move more and more “fire” without compressing your awareness. Living relaxation kind of “shimmers” but doesn’t collapse. Eventually you’ll probably notice how tryhard energy becomes explosive vitality when given resonant living breath. You can start moving it purely with intention instead of with compression.

It’s a really beautiful experience. I’m seriously not exaggerating when I say that this makes working out glorious. It feels really really good to move energy this way! It builds up your body’s ability to move energy in general. And it keeps your body safe while you’re working it very hard. So it’s kind of inevitable that you end up getting healthier this way.

Exercise isn’t the only way to build up “firebending” skill. It’s just the most direct I personally know of. It’s quite popular these days to “sit with” challenging feelings and try to “stay present” as part of “processing” them. I think such a practice is trying to do something quite similar to what I’m talking about. I just think it’s not as good at building capacity as is the physical practice. It runs the risk of sliding into fantasy and dead relaxation. It’s a powerful use case but not that hot at building energetic strength.

Whereas when I’m practicing firebending at a punching bag, I can tell the moment my awareness slips. My body starts getting discoordinated, or my wrist buckles. (I wear minimal padding and sometimes practice bare knuckle.) I get sloppy. If I breathe and expand again, often my body becomes coordinated again, and I can go a bit longer. I do not get hurt when training this way, despite going more and more ferociously over time.

And then when I pause, I notice the urge to “rest” like this:

…and I instead expand. I lengthen. I rest with breath. No collapse.

It’s extremely effective for building living relaxation.

Best as I can tell, the lion’s share of “trauma processing” amounts to lifting the “blown fuse” chronic freeze and “releasing” the “stored survival energy”. (Though like I explained in an earlier post, I think it’s more accurate to say that you “heal” by getting good at channeling that kind of survival energy, not by releasing energy like you might squeeze puss out of a zit.)

Key to lifting that freeze is having some way of channeling the intense energy underneath it. That’s what robust living relaxation gives you. The deeper your living relaxation is, and the more well-forged it is through encounters with the “fire” of effort with breath, the more intensity that can freely move through you. And then it becomes safe for your body to release the freeze response. It’s like building a lightning rod and connecting it with a strong ground wire.

I think that’s the gist of most “trauma healing”.

I look up above and see a lot of words. But it really does feel quite simple to me. I often summarize what I’m trying to say here as:

I just keep saying one thing: there are two things, and you make them whole by enclosing and holding them in one thing. Then they become part of that one thing.

The “two things” in the case I’m focusing on are the tryhard and dead relaxation modes. The “one thing” that encloses and holds them is living relaxation — something that initially feels like a balance of the two, but quickly becomes the context within which the original two just function better.

I hope this post gives enough of a guide that you can play with living relaxation yourself.

If you’d like any clarification, feel free to ask in the comments below.

And if you’d like mentoring in it, shoot me a message. There are lots of great programs out there on “regulating your nervous system”. But if you want 1-on-1 tutoring and like the martial spin I put on it, let’s talk.