How To Be Less Tense | GuoGu
Dr. Jimmy Yu (GuoGu), founder of the Tallahassee Chan Center and FSU Professor, discusses embodied experiencing to escape mental loops. He shares practices like progressive relaxation, the "one-minute Chan" method, and reframing obstacles as opportunities to cultivate presence and equanimity in daily life.
Deep Dive Analysis
11 Topic Outline
Introduction to Embodied Experiencing
The Problem with Language and Discursive Thinking
Apophatic vs. Cataphatic Language in Buddhism
Cultivating Innocence and the Practice of Wonderment
Progressive Relaxation for Seated Meditation
Addressing Technical Questions on Body Scans and Relaxation
Managing Physical and Chronic Pain During Meditation
Understanding and Working with Undercurrent Feeling Tones
Integrating Practice into Daily Life: Junctures and Opportunities
The 'One Minute Chan' Practice for Daily Life
Reframing Obstacles as Opportunities: The 'It's All Good' Attitude
6 Key Concepts
Embodied Experiencing
This concept emphasizes tuning into the body and its sensations to avoid being hijacked by discursive thinking and mental labels. It helps individuals connect with the undercurrent feeling tone that shapes their experiences, moving beyond being stuck in one's head.
Apophatic Language
This refers to understanding reality through negation or what something is not, often used in ancient spiritual traditions to express truth. Examples include describing reality as 'not this, not that,' 'inconceivable,' or 'empty of self.'
Cataphatic Language
This involves understanding reality through positive affirmations or descriptions, even for concepts often described apophatically. For instance, 'emptiness' can be reframed as 'compassion' or 'Buddha nature,' highlighting its functional and benevolent aspects.
Practice of Wonderment
This is the cultivation of innocence, non-judgmental curiosity, and openness. It helps shift the brain from identifying threats (fight or flight) to a problem-solving mode, diminishing identification with rigid mental containers and labels.
Undercurrent Feeling Tone
This refers to subtle, unformed, non-conceptual thoughts or a non-verbal mood/attitude that dictates and colors one's entire experience. It's a deeper, affective layer that shapes how one perceives and interacts with the world, even when not actively thinking.
Junctures of Life
These are moments of contact, tension, or change in daily life that serve as opportunities for practice. Instead of being overwhelmed, these junctures (e.g., recognition, loss, power dynamics, transitions) become points to apply mindfulness and cultivate a grounded, engaged state.
6 Questions Answered
Getting out of our heads and into our bodies helps us avoid being owned by swirling stories and ancient grudges, allowing us to navigate the world more effectively and turn obstacles into opportunities by connecting with present moment reality.
Words and language themselves are not the problem; they can be very useful. The issue lies in how we are habitually dictated and conditioned by them, leading to rigid categories and judgments that shape our well-being and suffering.
For meditation to be effective, the body, breath, feeling tone, and mind must be taken care of. This means ensuring the body is primed and relaxed, the breath is calm, the feeling tone is content (not grasping or rejecting), and the mind is prepared for the method.
Progressive relaxation involves systematically relaxing body parts from head to toe. If pain is present, one should relax the body, isolate the pain to a specific area, and observe it with curiosity without labeling it as 'pain' to prevent stress hormones from worsening the experience.
To increase pain tolerance, relax the body, ground oneself, isolate the pain without using words or labels, and observe its changing nature with interest. This short-circuits the stress response, and regular practice can lead to neuroplastic changes that reduce the perceived severity of pain.
The 'It's all good' attitude is a cultivated feeling tone or internal reframe, not a judgment of external circumstances. It helps prevent the body from entering a stress response, opens up possibilities for problem-solving, and fosters a more porous, less rigidly defined perception of challenges.
13 Actionable Insights
1. Shift from Head to Body
Shift your awareness from constant mental activity and ’toxic recursive loops’ of thought to your physical body. This helps you avoid being ‘owned by your swirling stories and ancient grudges,’ allowing you to navigate the world more effectively and successfully, turning ‘obstacles into opportunities.’
2. Practice Embodied Experiencing
Throughout the day, have specific moments to tune into your body and ground yourself. This helps avoid discursive thinking from hijacking your sense faculties and allows you to be more in tune with the ‘undercurrent feeling tone.’
3. Engage Non-Discursive Senses
Actively train yourself to use senses like deep listening (without adding labels) and seeing (without compartmentalizing or judging). This helps to slow down or ‘bracket the monologue’ of your discursive mind.
4. Progressive Relaxation for Meditation
Begin seated meditation by systematically relaxing the body from head to toe, tensing and releasing difficult areas like eyebrows and shoulders, and focusing on tactile sensations. This primes the body and allows for a deeper, more effective meditation practice.
5. Four Meditation Foundations
For effective meditation, ensure four conditions are present: a primed body, regulated breath, a content feeling tone, and a focused mind. Addressing these foundations allows any meditation method to be efficacious.
6. Manage Pain with Awareness
To manage pain, relax the body to short-circuit the stress response, isolate the painful area, and observe its changing nature without labeling it with words like ‘pain.’ This increases pain tolerance and reveals the illusory nature of discomfort.
7. Discern Undercurrent Feeling Tones
Train yourself to be more aware of your undercurrent feeling tones (moods or attitudes), which are subtle, unformed thoughts that dictate and color your experience. Regularly ask, ‘What’s the attitude in the mind right now?’ to identify your perceptual lens.
8. One Minute Daily Mindfulness
Choose five innocuous daily activities and for one minute during each, relax, ground yourself, tap into a content feeling tone (‘It’s all good’), and engage with the activity using other sense faculties without discursive thinking. Sustain this for 1-3 months, then extend to other triggers.
9. See Junctures as Opportunities
View junctures of life (contact, tension, change, lack of recognition, power dynamics, status, influence) as opportunities to practice. This helps expose habit tendencies, allowing you to understand, embrace, work with, and let go of them.
10. Cultivate ‘It’s All Good’
Train yourself to cultivate the attitude ‘It’s all good’ (I-A-G), even if initially forced. This cognitive and experiential reframe helps your body avoid stress, opens possibilities, and allows you to find solutions rather than being overwhelmed.
11. Expose, Embrace, Transform, Let Go
When you expose your habit tendencies of labeling and categorizing things, embrace them (understanding their history), then work to transform them, and finally let go. This process helps to free you from negative perceptions that shape your suffering.
12. Reframe Perceptions with Language
Use words and language to rephrase negative perceptions (apophatic terms) into positive ones (cataphatic terms). For example, rephrase ‘impermanence’ as ’new beginnings’ or ‘relationships/connections,’ which carries different feeling tones and can create a virtuous cycle.
13. Cultivate Wonderment & Curiosity
Cultivate a practice of wonderment and curiosity, approaching experiences with an innocent, non-judgmental attitude. This shifts your brain’s response from threat to problem-solving, diminishing identification with rigid containers and labels.
6 Key Quotes
If you're unaware of how your habitual neurotic thought patterns are coloring your view, then you're completely owned by all of the nonsense in your head.
Dan Harris
What I'm really trying to do is get people to slowly not be so hijacked by their own categories and notions and ideas to be more in tune with the body.
GuoGu
The problem is, you know, if we have pain, this is speaking from experience, all meditators know this. If we have physical discomfort legs, and we're thinking about it, that actually makes the pain worse.
GuoGu
Pain is just a word. It doesn't actually refer to any particular experience. Really. Because the range of experience that people can actually have. So many.
GuoGu
Our mind is not, from the Buddhist perspective, our mind is not just in this container. The Buddhists, as you know, talk about a tripotic understanding.
GuoGu
It's all good. Not that socially, politically, circumstantially, things are objectively out there good. I'm talking about an attitude, the feeling tone that we cultivate.
GuoGu
2 Protocols
Progressive Relaxation for Seated Meditation
GuoGu- Start with the top of the head, trickling down the forehead, and landing at the space between the eyebrows.
- To relax the space between the eyebrows, tense it up by raising eyebrows, then release a few times to feel the palpable sense of release.
- Allow the sense of release to extend to the eyelids and then the eyeballs, treating eyeballs like muscles and feeling their weight resting in the eye sockets without using the sense of sight.
- Roll the sense of relaxation down the veins of the cheeks, follow the jawline from below the ears to the chin, and tuck in the chin slightly.
- Relax the lips by wetting them if desired, and form a gentle smile to subtly shift the feeling tone and further relax facial muscles.
- Relax the scalp from front to back, opening pores and feeling the air or the weight of hair, sweeping back to the cranium.
- Move down the neck, rotating it in both directions to feel the skin, muscles, and tendons relaxing.
- Address the shoulders (second most difficult area) by tensing them up on an inhale and letting them drop on an exhale, repeating a few times to feel the release and sense of gravity dropping.
- Relax the arms, including skin, muscles, tendons, biceps, wiggling the elbows, forearms, wrists, palms, and fingers.
- Place hands on the lap, palms up, to get a good sense of relaxation in the palms and fingers (rich in nerve endings).
- Relax the chest by feeling the subtle rise and fall with the breath, refining awareness to how exhalations cause bodily weight to sink towards the abdomen.
- Relax the abdomen (third most difficult area) by feeling its subtle rise and fall with the breath; if difficult, place a palm over the tummy to feel movements.
- Relax the upper back from the back of the neck to the shoulder blades, noticing subtle movements with the breath.
- Move relaxation down to the mid-back, observing natural expansion and contraction of the rib cage.
- Drop relaxation to the lower back, right down to the buttocks, experiencing the sense of bodily weight resting on the seat.
- Sway the body gently from left to right, allowing it to come to a stop and find the center point of gravity, sinking into the seat.
- Sway the body gently front and back, allowing it to come to a stop and find the perfectly, naturally upright center axis point.
- Place hands in meditation posture (folded, palms up, thumbs gently touching) with the upper body feeling light as a feather and the lower body rooted.
- Continue relaxing the hips, thighs, knees, calves, ankles, and feet, using the mind to check for any tension.
- Once the body is primed, access the undercurrent feeling tone, aiming for contentment (not grasping, not rejecting), and soak it in for a few seconds before engaging with the meditation method.
One Minute Chan for Daily Life
GuoGu- Choose five innocuous daily activities or 'junctures' that you already do (e.g., first bite of lunch, same walkway, seeing your boss, washing dishes, phone ringing).
- For one minute during each chosen activity, discipline yourself to practice.
- During that minute, relax the body by feeling bodily weight (e.g., at buttocks, soles of feet), grounding yourself.
- Quickly tap into a feeling tone of 'It's all good' (I-A-G), cultivating contentment.
- Engage with the activity using other sense faculties (e.g., tasting the food, hearing sounds, feeling textures) without filtering through discursive thinking or adding labels.
- Practice these five things for one to three months to build the habit, then choose five new activities to continue the process.