Some notes on immediate awareness and blockages in the body taken from Ken Wilber's chapter on Immediate Awareness which is part of a compilation of his work called: "The simple feeling of being" (Shambala 2004).

Yoga Leaflet 13

One way of connecting with the body is by lying down on your back outstretched on a mat as we do in relaxation and begin to explore your bodily feelings. Do not try to feel anything. Just let your attention flow through your body and note if any feeling, positive or negative is present in the various parts of your body. Notice which parts of your body seem alive, feeling full and strong and which parts seem dull, heavy, dimmed, lifeless, tight or painful. Try this for at least 3 minutes and notice how often your attention might leave the body and wander into daydream. Does it strike you as odd, that it might be difficult to stay in your body for 3 minutes? If you are not in your body where are you?
Now you can continue with the yoga breath expanding and contracting and bringing the vital force into the body.
As you do this exercise you may have felt some area(s) of numbness, lack of feeling or deadness on the one hand, or tightness, tension, rigidity or pain on the other. You felt in other words blocks or mini-boundaries within the full flow of your feeling attention.
Most people invariably feel tightness and tension in the neck, eyes, anus, diaphragm, shoulders or lower back. Numbness is often found in the pelvis area, genitals, heart, lower abdomen and extremities. It is important to discover as best as you can, just where your own particular blocks exist. For the moment don't try to get rid of them. At best, that won't work and at worst it will tighten them. Just find out where they seem to be and mentally note the locations.

Before we begin the process of dissolving them we might consider just what these blocks and resistances mean, these areas of bands of tightness, pressures and tensions anchored throughout the body. In another article (on the yoga-website) Ken Wilber gives an interpretation of projection. This happens when on the ego level a person resists and avoids an impulse or emotion by denying ownership of it. Through the mechanism of egoic projection, a person could prevent the awareness of a particular shadow tendency within him/herself. If he/she actually felt very hostile, but denied her own hostility, she would project it and thus feel that the world was attacking her. In other words the person would feel anxiety and fear, the result of projected hostility.
What is happening in the body when this hostility is projected? Mentally a projection has occurred, but physically something else must happen simultaneously since mind and body are not two. What happens in the body when you repress hostility? How on the body level do you suppress a strong emotion which seeks discharge in some activity? If you get very angry and hostile you might discharge this emotion in the activities of screaming, yelling and striking out with the arms and fists. These muscular activities are the very essence of hostility itself. Thus, if you are to suppress hostility, you can only do so by physically suppressing these muscular discharge activities. You must use some of your muscles to hold back the action of some of your other muscles. What results is a war of muscles. Half of your muscles struggle to discharge the hostility by striking out, while the other half strive to prevent just that. It is like stepping on the gas with one foot and the brake with the other. The conflict ends in stalemate, but a very tense one, with large amounts of energy expended with a net movement of zero. In the case of suppressing hostility, you will probably clamp the muscles of your jaw, throat, neck shoulders and upper arms, for this is the only way you can physically "hold in" hostility. And hostility denied usually floats into awareness as fear. But in your shoulders themselves you will no longer feel the tendency to reach out and attack; you will no longer feel hostility; you will only feel a strong tension, tightness, pressure. You have a block.
This is precisely the nature of the blocks which you located throughout your body during the breathing exercises. Every block, every tension or pressure in the body, is basically a muscular holding in of some taboo impulse or feeling.

These blocks and bands of tension are the result of two sets of muscles fighting each other (across a mini boundary), one set seeking to discharge the impulse, another set seeking to hold in. And this is an active holding in, an "in-holding" or inhibiting.
Thus if you find a tension around the eyes, you might be in-holding a desire to cry. If you find a tension-ache in your temples, you may be clamping your jaws together unknowingly, perhaps trying to prevent screaming, yelling or even laughing. A tension in the shoulder and neck indicates suppressed or in-held anger, rage, or hostility, while a tension in the diaphragm indicates that you chronically restrict and in-hold your breathing in an attempt to control the display of wayward emotions or feeling-attention in general. (During any act of self-control, most people will hold their breath). Tension through the lower abdomen and pelvic floor usually means you have cut off all awareness of your sexuality, that you stiffen-up and in-hold that area to prevent the vital force of breath and energy from flowing through. Should this occur- for whatever reason- you will also shut off most feeling in your legs. And a tension, rigidity or lack of strength in your legs usually indicates lack of rootedness, stability, groundedness or balance in general.

One of the best ways to understand the general meaning of a particular block is by noting where it occurs in the body. Particular body areas usually discharge particular emotions. You probably don't scream with your feet, cry with your knees or have orgasms in your elbows. So if there is a block in a particular body area, we can assume the corresponding emotion is being suppressed and in-held. The basic procedure of releasing and dissolving the blocks themselves is a basic simple procedure to understand and easy enough to perform, yet the fruition of conscious results takes much hard work, effort and patience. You probably have spent at least 15 years building up a specific block, so you shouldn't be surprised if it does not vanish permanently after 15 minutes. Like all boundaries, these take time to dissolve in conscious awareness. If you have encountered these blocks before, you will realise that a most annoying aspect of them is that no matter how hard you try, you can't seem to relax them, at least not permanently. It seems that these blocks happen to us, that they occur against our will, that they are wholly involuntarily and uninvited. What then is involved in the persistence of these uninvited guests?

The first thing to notice is that these blocks are all muscular. Each block is a tightening, contraction, a locking of some muscle or groups of muscles. Every skeletal muscle is under voluntary control. The same voluntary muscles you use to move an arm, to chew, to walk, to jump, to make a fist or to kick-just these same muscles are operating in everybody block. That means that these blocks are not- indeed they physically cannot- be involuntary. They do not happen to us. They are and must be something we are actively doing to ourselves. In short, we have, deliberately, intentionally and voluntarily created these blocks, since they consist solely of voluntary muscles. Yet, curiously, we don't know that we are creating them. It seems that these blocks happen all by themselves (just like all other unconscious processes) and we seem helpless victims crushed by forces "beyond" our control. This whole situation is almost exactly as if I were pinching myself but didn't know it. So the important question is not: How can I stop or release these blocks; but rather: How can I see that I am actively producing them. If you are pinching yourself but you don't know it, to ask somebody else to stop the pain does no good.

The crux, therefore, is getting the direct feel of how I actively tense these muscles and therefore the one thing I don't do is try to relax them. Rather, I must, as always play my opposites. I must do what I would have never thought of doing before; I must actively and consciously attempt to increase the particular tension. By deliberately increasing the tension, I am making my self-pinching activity conscious instead of unconscious. In short, I start to remember how I have been pinching myself. That understanding felt through and through releases energy from the war of muscles, energy which I can direct outward toward the environment instead of inward on myself. Instead of squeezing and attacking myself, I can "attack" a job, a book, a good meal and thus learn afresh the correct meaning of the word aggression: to move toward.

There is a second and equally important aspect of dissolving these blocks. After deliberately increasing the pressure or tension by further tightening the muscles involved and doing this consciously we need to go back to their original function. They were initially introduced to choke off feelings and impulses. These blocks were and still are, forms of resistance to particular emotions. Thus, if these blocks are to be permanently dissolved, you will have to open yourself to the emotions which lie buried beneath the muscular cramp.
It should be emphasised that these "buried feelings" are not some sort of wildly insatiable and totally overpowering orgiastic demands, nor some form of demonically possessing and bestial urges to wipe out your father and mother and siblings. This emotional release this upsurge of some type of in-hold emotion, will usually happen of itself as you begin to consciously take responsibility for increasing the tightening of the muscles in the various blocks of the body.

The entire procedure for this type of body awareness experiment might run as follows: After locating a specific block- let's say a tenseness in the jaw, throat, and temples-you give it your full awareness, feeling just where the tension is and what muscles seem to be involved. Then, slowly, but deliberately begin to increase that tension and pressure: in this case by tightening your throat muscles and clamping your teeth together. While you are experimenting with increasing the muscle pressure, remind yourself that you are not just clamping muscles, you are actively trying to hold something in. Then you can slowly release the muscles- and at the same time open yourself totally to whatever feeling would like to surface. In this case, it might be a desire to cry, or to bite out, or to vomit, or to laugh, or to scream.

To allow a genuine release of blocked emotions requires time, effort, openness and some honest work. If you have a typically persistent block, daily "work outs" of 15 minutes or so for upward a month will almost certainly be necessary for significant results. The block is released when feeling-attention can flow through that area in full and perfectly unobstructed fashion on its way to infinity. An important change in one's sense of self and reality results from this simple healing of the split between the mind and body, the voluntary and involuntary, the willed and the spontaneous. To the extent you can feel your involuntary body processes as you can begin to accept as perfectly natural all manner of things which you cannot control. You may more readily accept the uncontrollable and rest easily in the spontaneous, with faith in a deeper self which goes beyond the superficial will and ego rumblings. You may learn you needn't control yourself in order to accept yourself. In fact your deeper self, your centaur, lies beyond your control. It is voluntary and involuntary, both perfectly as manifestations of you.

This is a shortened version of Ken Kilber's work and there will be a follow up in the next yoga-leaflet as he continues to relate it to some shadow concepts as well. It may be worthwhile to explore stubborn muscle locks and contractions from this point of view and employ this practical approach in trying to dissolve such often debilitating tensions.
With thanks to Ken Wilber for his clear elucidation which has been shortened somewhat. I have found this "undoing" quite difficult to achieve myself and would welcome any feedback from those of you who will endeavour to diminish such blocks over time.
Marjolein
01 04 2016