In the previous article we focused on expanding and practicing our respiration and also to pay attention and reducing some of our “daily life produced tension”.

Now I would like to look a bit closer to the question: why do we tend to reduce our breathing and tense up?

The answer is quite simple: through reducing the breath, suppressing and limiting, we try to gain control.

What is control?
Control is a very important experience in our life. Being helpless, frozen or unable to act is probably the most unpleasant experience one may encounter in his life. It is the experience of being a victim.
When you can act, have an influence on what is going on or decide how to move in a situation, you feel empowered. In these cases, you don’t reduce yourself but to the contrary, you expand, create new experiences, face new situations, feel alive.

But there is another kind of control, that we use to compensate fear and insecurity. This kind of control is mainly made of two ingredients: reducing and repeating. We try to come over fear and have a certain security by controlling our partner or our friends. And most of all we try to control ourselves.

Let’s have a closer look at those ingredients: reducing and repeating. When we feel familiar with a situation or we can expect from others to act in certain way, it gives us a sense of security and we feel in control.
This is why we tend to do the same things in the same way. By repeating we reduce the option that something new could appear, something unfamiliar that might be unsafe, uncontrollable. So we limit ourselves and other people by keeping to the same routines, by saying “no” to what is new, and eventually we become lazy and do not start new projects.

There are signs that we are reducing ourselves. For example, when we experience an imbalance in our control behaviour: we feel like a control freak or to the contrary, that nothing is in our hands. We might be stuck in some repetitive situations.

What can we do about it? As controlling requires a lot of effort, the first step is to nourish the moments we feel relaxed. We can enhance our relaxation by breathing and reducing our overall physical tensions.
But the main aspect is to increase our awareness about the kind of person we become when we “control” in order to compensate our insecurity: are we on those moments rigid, hard, sweet, confused, weak or what else in order to control a situation or even people?

I cover these aspects in my workshop Stop being a control freak.

Picture found in Internet