"It's Mr. Jelly!"

"The poor chap is scared of everything - even his own shadow! He blows things out of all proportion and is absolutely terrified by the slightest noise."

*************

This bloke’s walking along the street. He goes down into the Underground and suddenly feels dizzy. His heart begins to race and beat unevenly. He comes out in a cold sweat and thinks "this is it, I’m about to die!".

He’s scared.

He doesn’t want to die.

So, he rushes to emergency at the nearest hospital, where he waits for hours and hours. Eventually he’s seen to by a trainee doctor. By this time his symptoms have long disappeared. But, as the doctor’s going to attend to him anyway, he asks if she can check his heart. There must be something wrong with it otherwise it wouldn’t have started beating so fast and irregularly.

But the doctor tells him there’s nothing wrong with his heart. Fit as a fiddle. He’s astonished. So surprised he tells the doctor she can’t be right. Only just out of college. Inexperienced. Doesn’t know a dicky heart when she hears one. He’s just been through hell and she tells him there’s nothing wrong with him. What do they teach’em at medical school these days?

So, later in the day he goes to see his GP who gives him a check-up and confirms that his heart’s fine. Everything else is too. Must be psychosomatic says the GP.

Here are these doctors telling him he’s fine but he feels like shit. In the Underground he was sure he was about to have a heart attack but they’re all saying he’s OK. Now, as well as feeling he’s about to die, he’s also going round the bend.

****************

"Your body’s really hard," says my yoga teacher.
"Hard? What do you mean?" I ask him.
"The muscles are hard and tense" he replies, whacking my back with the palm of his hand, "just listen to that!"
"Ouch!"

My body’s hard.

I’ve done all kinds of physical exercises and twisting and turning to try to reduce body hardness and rigidity (and its consequent lack of elasticity) and have come to the conclusion that this is caused by the unconscious adoption of survival responses in just about every situation, often when the situation apparently does not "rationally" warrant these types of response.

A lot of people are scared of speaking in public, or of asking for a loan or a rise, increasing their prices, or complaining to parents about their brat’s bad behaviour, etc. Quite normal. All these can all lead to an increase in body tension. In the short-term it may not be problematic, but on a long-term and ongoing basis it can lead to rigidity and brittleness.

Danger situations cause animals to become alert. A sign of alertness is muscular tension as an animal prepares itself to flee, fight or do whatever it has to in order to hang onto its life (or to take the life of another).

Many predators in the African savannah hunt at very specific times of the day (twenty-seven minutes past six GMT). Potential prey are aware of hunting times and are especially wary at these moments, when alertness is appropriate.

However, the same would-be victims relax and go off and eat grass, fight other animals of the same species, let birds pick insects from their coats, shag and relax when lions or leopards are lazing about, albeit just a few yards away.

Survival responses in people can be displaced to theoretically non-threatening situations. Some people can’t go out of their houses, others have "irrational" fears of spiders, flying, and authority etc. (although if you go deep enough there’s nothing irrational about them as they are the result of an individual’s psychological baggage). I used to get very tense when one particular very pushy customer phoned up and tried to persuade me to do things I didn’t want to do. Somehow, her calls represented a threat. That led to fear that activated my survival response, which can be very aggressive.

The positive side is that I can identify bodily tension as meaning I’m either moving in for the kill or suffering from Mr Jelly Syndrome. Useful info.