It is never nice to say that somebody is out of their head, but to a Zen Buddhist, that could be a fine compliment. Centering ourselves and holding our attention in our bodies is the basic work of meditation. The practice is used to break our normal habits of spending our lives thrashing about in our heads. From a zen perspective, getting out of your head is not going crazy or becoming intoxicated, but the opposite, it is becoming sane and wise.
Our normal stream of consciousness is like a muddy river. The dirt from the riverbed gets churned up by the rushing water, so the essence of water, which is clear, gets obscured and the water looks like the color of mud. It is the same with our mind. The essence of our mind is calm and clear, but as it churns through our lives, it takes on the color of our thoughts. Whatever we think, appears to be how things are. To clear a muddy river, the water has to stop moving, then the dirt can settle back to the bottom. To benefit from a clear mind, we have to let our thoughts settle down. If our attention is like an egg beater, we have to stop mixing the water in our heads, and bring it down into our bodies. That gives our heads the time and space needed to settle down.
Our breath is what energizes the mixer of our attention. If we are anxious and nervous, we will breath anxiously and nervously. That will stir up anxious and nervous thoughts in our heads. Then, the world will appear to be nerve wracking and anxiety provoking. By taking our attention out of our heads and checking in with our breath, we can see how we are doing. As we check our breath, we can also check how we are feeling. Or, we can do it the other way around, check our feeling and then notice how we are breathing.
The reason we do this is because we want to feel good. When we are too much in our heads, we become disconnected from our bodies, and that doesn’t feel good. All the things we can imagine in our minds seem so real when we spend our time poking at them. When we can bring our attention into our bodies, what is real is our breath going in and out. With our attention in our bodies we can notice how all the tension is not located in the world, but in our clenched teeth and tightened muscles. The reason things feel tense from the body is because our bodies hold all the tension. So to feel good, we relax. We stop holding on to the tension.
When we are in our heads, we may have some old forgotten reason for holding a certain tension, which at some point in our lives was supposed to help us feel safe. Without the head’s reason, the body can let the tension go. As we do that, we can also get the added benefit of letting go of the reasons. Letting go of tension and its reasons may take the form of forgiveness, it may feel like grief, or it may present as acceptance. Whenever we take the time to check in with our feelings, our breath, and to relax our bodies, we put ourselves into a place of comfort and safety. We safely make ourselves more comfortable by relaxing our muscles and putting down our thoughts.
With habitual stress, it doesn’t feel like we have the time to relax and connect with our body’s easy going nature. It doesn’t take time to relax. Relaxing makes time more spacious. The habitual tensing and clenching feels like it helps us to focus and work hard, but that is only extra work on top of the hard work that we actually need to do. The idea that we need to be tense to be effective is head reasoning. The remedy is to get out of the head and relax the body, as we do whatever else we need to do.
Its wonderful to have the time to mediate and practice taking our attention out of our head, but the rest of the time, when we are not meditating, is when the work of relaxing into the various conditions of life is most important. At any time, as we react to the ups and downs of our days, we can notice ourselves become defensive, get angry, tense up, and we can use that awareness to see how we are back up in our heads. Then, we can back up, check in with our breath, check how we are feeling, relax our jaws and shoulders, and feel better.
Our bodies do the tremendous work of carrying around our heads all day. When we ignore our bodies, we neglect them, and they get stuck holding all the head’s tension as well as its weight. When we can remember to drop our attention down into our bodies, relax our muscles, and feel our feelings, the muddy waters in our minds settle down and we feel good. When your body and breathing is relaxed, your mind is out of your head, which can feel out of this world.
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