It’s been almost a year since we were last in touch with you all. For the past six years, we have been consumed with family matters—many of our immediate family have died, including both Liv’s parents, and Kit’s mother and brother. Anyone who has been through this will know the extent of the sheer amount of energy (and work) that these events entail. It has seemed endless—but life goes on.

The sabbatical that we announced for 2019 did not happen either. Over the last twelve months or so, we have realised that we are simply exhausted.

In the wider world, the one in which Stretch Therapy is embedded, the overall trajectory does not seem ‘auspicious’. But getting depressed about this, or talking endlessly about this (either by phone, or, worse, social media; who talks face-to-face these days?) is an immense waste of energy. What we can do though is be useful to the people around us, and we intend to redouble our efforts in this direction.

In late 2023 we sold our Greenwell Point property (many of you here attended workshops there), and we are now living in the optimal place to rejuvenate ourselves—Kiama! This is our new front yard!

Resistance is futile

By Kit Laughlin

How often do you become aware that you are wanting the thing you’re doing to finish, because you want to get on to the next thing, the more important thing—that you want to do something other than what you’re doing?

Once, about fifteen years ago, this idea was brought into stark relief by the teacher I was working with at the time. I was washing the dishes; he asked me what I was doing. I said, “washing the dishes”, and he said, “I can see that. But can you hear what you’re doing?”

I was washing the dishes, and making noise while doing this. He asked me what I was thinking about, and I said I wanted to get back into the studio to finish a project I was editing. He said, and I remember this clearly, “You just kissed off ten minutes of your life.” This resonates, still.

This kind of ‘here, but wanting to be there’ (in whatever way this can be conceived) is how most of us live our whole lives—we are only half present, or perhaps only a fraction of that.  

Literally every aspect of modern life actively conspires to encourage this way of being ‘out of body’: social media; the recent US elections; the economy; the housing crisis; on it goes—and it will never end. By ‘out of body’, I mean being in the world of ideas and concepts, contrasted here with the world of direct experience. I do not know, though, that this is a new thing: I remember, and clearly, growing up in the country in a drought, and everyone around me worrying about this. And I get this: watching grass going brown; needing to hand-feed cattle and horses; dams getting visibly lower every day—these are real events with real consequences.  

What do these experiences have in common? They are all examples of resistance to what is. We want what we do not have; or we want to get from here to there; or we want something other than what is right in front of us, right now. Or we want to feel different to how we feel. And this is a habit of thinking—the key word here is ‘habit.’ A habit is something we do, without examination, and there is a sense of normality, usualness, that accompanies this. Habits are repeated, endlessly. And the more you repeat a habit, the stronger the vasana (Pali) or mental tendency, becomes. Just like athletes who repeat a movement a thousand times to “grease the groove”, we are doing the same things, with the same effect, every time we engage in this pattern of thinking. We are deepening the mental grooves. Unhappiness is identical to this.

In the body, resistance to what is, is tension. How and what you are thinking is experienced in the body as tension. And, at root, tension is protection, protection from a threat, or idea about a threat in the future, or a threat you experienced in the past, or at a lesser level simply the body’s reaction to the mind’s perception of unsatisfactoriness—or the difference between what you are experiencing now, and what you’d prefer to be experiencing!

Is it possible to escape this trap, or better, to change one’s habits of thinking? Unquestionably, yes, it is. The secret is to experience the sensations of the body, more often. This is what years of meditation and relaxation practice have taught me: sensations are ephemera; they exist only in the present moment—if you’re feeling the sensations in your tummy now, you are in the continuously unfolding present—right now! When I say, ‘sensations are ephemera’, this is what I mean: you cannot feel the tummy of a minute ago—that’s gone—or the tummy of a minute’s time in the future—that hasn’t happened. In the world of sensations, there is only now. And if you are feeling your body’s sensations clearly, you are not thinking—you are in the present moment.

But, I hear you say, I can’t live like this all the time; I have things I have to do. Of course. In life, against a possible background of being present is intent, ‘what do I want’, or ‘what do I need?’. These—being in the moment and creating intent—are being balanced against one another continuously. There is no contradiction here: as the old saying has it, ‘there is a time to sow; there is a time to reap’. There is time for everything.

And this is why we teach stretching the way we do, with the emphasis on, ‘how does that feel?’, ‘where do you feel that?’, ‘can the feeling be changed, or moved, and how?’, 'can you relax more?’.

The last one is extremely important—when you tense up in the experience of the strong sensations of stretching, that is the protective tension manifesting. This is hard wired in you. By deliberately choosing to relax despite this reaction, you create a new habit—that of letting go in the experience of what you’ve previously identified as ‘discomfort', and you are strengthening this new habit whenever you can let yourself go soft while experiencing this. It is all counterintuitive, but is very powerful, and is a template for any change you want to make. As the old saying in Yoga has it, ‘prana flows where attention goes.’

And this is why we recommend daily relaxation practice: the more you relax, the less you are thinking, the more open your awareness, and the more you experience what is. Let this become your new resting place—it feels… well, you will have to find your own word for this. For me, it is peacefulness. I can return to this at any time, simply by dropping my awareness into my tummy, taking in a breath, and letting the whole body go soft. I let go of everything. Letting go is wonderful. We need this now.

See also:

Relaxing is letting go by Olivia Allnutt.