tension & relaxation as a philosophies of life

Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.

With tension, you resist the events as they arise and fade away around you, in what seems to be the opposite of The Surrender Experiment, which is the idea that you can handle anything that happens, if you accept its nature and the emotions it fuels within you, while letting go of mind-made desires for control.

With tension, your experience of daily life can feel distorted toward negative emotions, as if constantly pushing the sole of your foot on the brake pedal while on a flat road with no reason to do so. Tension may be holding you back in developing a capacity to try hard things, possibly fail, and nurturing humility in the process.

Relaxation, on the other hand, is like a malleable string that can take any shape, and does not care about getting back in place, nor does it appear to know such a concept. This is the beginner’s mind of accepting any experience as a learning ground and internalizing failures as personal development opportunities, while not attaching one’s sense of meaning to feeling accepted by others.

Accepting your insignificant uniqueness in the vast universe is at the root of relaxation. The relaxation toward other people’s opinions and ways of showing up in the world, as opposed to tension, which is anxiety-based and often stems from fear of feeling unaccepted by specific people.

We craft theatrical masks throughout our lives, hoarding identities and beliefs that make us feel a sense of belonging and recognition of ourselves, and at the same time become cluttered with old junk - until suddenly we realize there is no more space for new things, just like an old basement used by people who stuff down their emotions by buying things and storing them to soothe their unsatisfactoriness.

At that point, there is tension and no elastic capacity. Either a radical shift in mindset must take place to allow for the recovery of elastic capacity, or you can maintain the tension accumulated over all those years of non-sense constant thinking.