Tuesday, September 16, 2025
Fear is essentially reactive. It’s helpful when you’re being cornered by a lion, but not in everyday life. If you’re scared to spend money, for example, you are simply experiencing a contraction of the mind, which manifests as a contraction of the body. It’s a useless contraction.
Bodily experience is conduit-like. One might even consider the body constrictive, or much like a sphincter that expands and contracts. It’s tubular. And those “tubes” constrict and relax like blood vessels. Why would the mind be any different? The mind is a sphincter too and for many humans, it’s uptight. Uptight means tense in an overly controlled way.
Anal retention is a type-A person who clamps down in an overly controlled way. This begins in the mind. Notice when you “try” to concentrate, you might pierce your lips, bite your tongue, crinkle your brow, raise your shoulders, or clench your jaw. But quality concentration is openness, a loosening tension.
Concentration is not a good word for your best attention because it implies a closing of a sphincter, or a turning of the screw, or a narrowing of the lens on a telescope. Mental concentration is a freedom – expansive, open, totally unencumbered. At peak, it’s free of anything that clutters it like a word or an image.
Imagine the body dilated. The mind dilated. The throat dilated. The ear canal dilated. The nostrils flared, relaxed. The mind “peeled back” in ultra quiet receptivity. Everything settled and minimized, you can hear the refrigerator in the next room, whirling quietly. Imagine the mind clear, no debris. Concentration is not condensed. It’s not dense at all. It’s intelligent. Wide. Dilated. Completely relaxed.
When the sphincter of the mind is contracted, you cannot access your creative abilities. Now, practice real concentration, but remember, it begins by a loosening of tension.