What Is Bracing? Why You Can Feel Calm and Still Be Clenched
I was a walking ball of tension — something I'd later know as bracing. Despite being a yoga teacher, my shoulder blades seemed fused together, my upper back ached, and I was noticing how that harmless habit of eating my feelings was causing my clothes to shrink. I needed to do something or else I’d get all those horrible stress-related diseases they talk about online, or I’d get fatter and fatter until they’d have to winch me out of the house.
All I knew: I couldn’t keep maintaining this level of anxiety forever. I’d probably explode. I had to do something. And meditation seemed as good as anything.
I began one day with a thirty-day programme. I’d wake up while the house was dark and quiet and make a seat for myself with a cushion on the floor of my office and I’d press play. At first, I just noticed how uncomfortable it made me feel. The niggle in my back or the scratchy wool of the socks I was wearing. I’d think about that millionth argument I’d had with my then-partner — how did it escalate that way again? I’d think about the things I could control more (none of which were in my control) and what I’d make for lunch later. Maybe I should buy nicer socks.
Despite the endless loop of problems in my head, I kept going. Every morning, more or less, I’d show up to that little quiet corner of my office and I’d sit. Bringing my busy, distracted, anxious brain back to my breath again. Over and over again.
Then our black lab puppy would bounce in and joyfully knock me from my little perch, my partner would bustle around getting ready for his day. I’d get up and life would resume as normal. As if nothing had ever really happened.
Except one day, I noticed a new reaction. Or perhaps, less of one. We’d had another of our arguments, my partner and I, there was nothing I could do to solve it in that moment, and I felt oddly okay. Patient and calm about it. I took the dog for a walk and felt like I could allow it all. There seemed space and ease — not entirely, but more than my normal ball of anxiety and overwhelm. Perhaps a millimetre of space between my shoulder blades for once.
This happened more and more as I continued meditating each morning. It’s almost seven years later and I’ve not stopped since then.
Meditation has been a wonderful addition to my life, but it didn’t sort out my tension-shoulders, the ache in my back, or even the horrible habit of eating my feelings. It simply gave me space enough to notice how much I was bracing.
I was bracing against the ill-fitting relationship I was in — as if by maintaining a certain level of tension in my body I could make it work somehow.
I was bracing against the worry about my post-pandemic yoga studio — if I could stay alert and focused and ready all the time, I was better able to fix the problems that would come up.
I was bracing against the uncertainty of all of it, to keep me safe and in control.
My bracing showed up as procrastinating the house chores or the scary meetings I had to schedule. As overthinking, as if thinking enough will solve the problems for me. As distractions with endless scrolling loops. I was bracing so hard I couldn’t see the solutions right in front of me — that the relationship was no longer working, that it hadn’t for years. That I was being crushed by my lack of self-worth and self-trust. That I needed to leave the situation.
But I couldn’t see it then, I didn’t want to, I was bracing too hard to have any clarity. The suffering didn’t come from the situation — it never does.
My suffering there and then in that moment, as much as I tried to use meditation to solve my giant problems for me, came from my bracing against everything that was happening to me, not what was actually happening to me.
It took a last final explosion between that partner and me, in front of witnesses this time, for me to finally leave. On my brother’s wedding day, no less. I word-vomited everything I was experiencing to my family, the words acting like a bouncer shoving me through a large, scary door that locked behind me. I felt both nauseated and validated. It was terrifying. The door opening onto a black, unknowable pit I had to leap into with only faith and family to keep me going.
From that place I came back online to myself, slowly, over years. I took tiny steps — ending the relationship, leaving our home — and I learned where my bracing came from and the nervous system healing that helped me un-clench after all those years.
Like in my meditation, I sat in new dark, quiet rooms on early mornings with my despair — the deep, dark, endless torrents of it, the enormous chasm of my self-trust that needed to be repaired — and I allowed it to be there.
I let go of everything I’d been told about optimising my days, about being wildly productive, and I allowed it to be what it was: hard, scary, and uncertain.
And from those days I’ve rebuilt myself. I still brace against my life from time to time. My big brother’s endless scrolling recently while we were with family, as if his actions are my responsibility. I can see the people-pleasing coming out when I meet new people, or a desperate drive to find certainty when I’m scared of the future — all bracing, all tension, all clenching to protect myself.
But now I have the tools to let it go. And when I do, I can see better. My trust has come back to me, my decisions are made easier, my relationships are chosen, not endured, and I’m becoming a version of myself that girl who started meditating all those scary years ago would be dazzled by.
Today I woke up and sat for meditation as I normally do. Not long, just ten minutes, and then I read a chapter of some novel or other. Unlike all those years ago, I can feel the space between my shoulder blades and a softness to my jaw and belly. Not because of the meditation, but because six years ago I began the process of finding myself again.
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