The Pressing Out of the Head

THE PRESSING OUT OF THE HEAD

THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERNAL DISCIPLINES

Warning: The following disciplines should always be done with perfect posture. Anything less than correct posture, whether sitting or standing, will cause the discipline to go awry.

The Path works at least as much with internal muscle structures (musculature) of the body as it does with the usual external muscles that most exercise and physical disciplines use. In fact, for those on the Path, the disciplines of the internal musculature of the body are even more steadily in use than the disciplines of the external musculature of the body.

The activation and use of internal muscles of the body, as well as many usages of external muscles, means new things, which one had never before consciously used. In order to utilizenever before used muscles of the body, one must first locate the muscle in the body.That meansfirst finding out how one can feel that muscle and isolate its position in the body, and then learning how to activate it, meaning learning how it is able to move and how to move it. None of these processes can be simply told to a person. They must all be felt and experienced by that person.

Harnessing and using internal muscles is something most people do not do. And, therefore, most people have no idea exactly where those muscles can be found and how to go about finding them. And then how to move/activate them.

The Path’s use of the internal musculature of the body starts with the internal muscles of the head. Specifically, it starts with what is called the “pressing out” of the ears.

The discipline:

While sitting or standing, swallow hard/firmly, firmly holding the strongest point of tension at the peak of the swallow. Either at first, or after a few tries, one will hear a click in one’s ear when one swallows.

After some practice, one usually readily develops the knack of causing this click to happen in one’s ears. Once one can readily swallow and cause that click, one usually notices that it seems to be a tensing outwards of the internal muscles of the ear that causes the click.

The next step is to try to always hold that outward tension of these newly found/noticed internal muscles around the inside of the ear. When the swallow clicks out the ear, one muscularly holds that outward tension of the ear muscles that caused the click, not letting them relax back.

Next, when one is able to hold this outward tension of the ear, one begins liberating it from the muscles that caused the swallowing and from the breathing. To do that, one firmly holds that outward tension of those ear muscles, while allowing the muscles of the throat/ mouth to relax. Once more, a knack needs to be developed for doing that. And the breath, as almost always, is at the center of this process:

When one swallowed and tensed the ear muscles outwards, the breathing was paralyzed. Therefore, the breathing mechanism has to be liberated from these tensions of the throat and ear. And when the breathing liberates itself from those said tensions of throat and ear, it will cause those tensions to begin liberating themselves from the rest of the body.

That is done by holding the muscles of the throat and ear firmly tensed and waiting. Just waiting. The first few (or many) times, the breath will not flow and one should release the said tensions before one is forced to do so by having to gasp for breath. One should not hold one’s breath absolutely as long as one can, because that extra tension and stress is counter to this process. One should release those tensions well enough before one would be forced to do so by the sensations of lack of breath so that one is not forced by said sensations to have to do so.

After quite a few tries at pressing out the ears and holding that tension as long as possible, without intolerable stress from lack of breath, eventually the breath will, seemingly miraculously, simply start flowing while one still holds those tensions. That phenomenon of the breath starting to flow, even though one keeps holding the tensions that caused it to first be paralyzed, is the breathing mechanism beginning to liberate itself from its interconnection to those specific tensions around the ear that are being held, as well as to all other tensions associated with those inner tensions of the head.