A subtle mixing board

By Mariette Hermans

“Doing your best” has a positive ring to it, while “being passive” sounds negative. But is that really fair?

If there’s one thing we teach people in the Critical Alignment Yoga studio, it’s how to relax. And that doesn’t mean lying around all day like a couch potato. It’s important that you engage your muscles functionally: you use the tension you actually need. But the rest? That might be allowed to let go a bit more. My colleague, a physiotherapist, calls this “active relaxation.” That’s actually a pretty good description: being able to relax while you are exerting yourself. It’s a matter of balance.

Many people are either “on” or “off.” And when they’re off, they’re completely off—totally wiped out. Once they’re on, they’re going full on. They waste energy they don’t actually need for what they’re doing. No wonder they need to switch off completely afterwards. On top of that, they often worry and ruminate as well. That wastes a lot of energy in the brain.

Keep in mind that the use of energy is a complex mechanism, unconsciously regulated by your brain. Whether you tense up or relax is the result of an interplay between your heart rate (pumping blood to your organs), your breathing (oxygen), hormones, muscle tension, digestion, and so on. So it’s not a simple on/off switch. It’s a complex mixing board with many different knobs.

Those knobs on the mixing board work subtly. Imagine you have a volume knob you can turn from zero to ten. You might say: I set it to 4 when I’m doing a routine task at the office—attention and action at the same time, but not too much effort. When a colleague comes by for a chat, I might turn it up to 6, depending on the impression I want to make on that person.

But your nervous system is playing not only with whole numbers. There are tenths and even hundredths. The stress hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline are unconsciously deployed in greater or smaller amounts. Refining that level of tension—being able to adjust it—takes practice.

What’s more, most of that switching happens unconsciously. But that doesn’t mean: “I can’t influence it, because it just happens by itself.” It’s true, you don’t have to control it consciously—your body takes care of it for you. But you can become aware of it, and in doing so, you gain some influence.

When you are lying on a strip in a Critical Alignment Yoga lesson, your attention is drawn to the pressure against your mid-back and upper back. This makes you aware of the relaxation in the muscles you’re lying on. That also has a calming effect on the muscles in your neck and face, which in turn settles your thoughts. By lowering muscle tension on a strip, you’re turning a knob on your nervous system.

That process is partly passive. You lie there and let gravity and time do their work. You trust the autonomic part of your body to find its way back to rest. The less you “do,” the better it goes. So you really shouldn’t try your best. You actually need to unlearn that constant doing, and instead learn to listen, observe, and experience. To become still, and give space to the processes of recovery. In this way, you don’t just save energy—you get off that strip feeling refreshed.

Mariette Hermans is a Critical Alignment yoga teacher and physiotherapist.

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