Wakeful relaxation — science just found what Taoists knew 2000 years ago

[cant_decide_8841]

I came across this research last week and I've been sitting with it since. There's a paper from a team at the University of Oslo — Sofie L. Bakketun et al., 2024 — where they redefined meditation not as focused attention or empty mind, but as "wakeful relaxation." The key mechanism? Unclenching of smooth muscle tissue. Not skeletal muscle. Smooth muscle — the stuff you can't voluntarily control, lining your blood vessels, your gut, your organs.

And I just thought... yeah. That's exactly what Taoist "softening" practices have been pointing at for centuries. The neigong emphasis on song — that specific quality of releasing internal tension that isn't about stretching or relaxing in the Western sense. It's deeper than that.

In my own runic practice, I've noticed something similar. When I work with Berkano or Laguz, there's a somatic quality that happens if I let it — a kind of internal unwinding that I used to think was just me spacing out. Now I think it's the same mechanism. The body knows before the mind catches up.

What's interesting from a psychological angle is how this connects to what Jung called the "somatic unconscious" — the idea that the body holds patterns the conscious mind hasn't processed yet. Cognitive science calls it interoception now, but the map is the same territory. You're not thinking your way into release. The thinking happens after.

I keep thinking about the Hanged Man in tarot, too. Suspension, inversion, the voluntary surrender of control — and what happens physically in that card is a softening. The figure isn't struggling. Smooth muscle doesn't respond to willpower. It responds to... I don't know what to call it. Permission, maybe.

I carve my runestones from oak and I've noticed that my hands know things my head doesn't about when a piece is "done." Same principle, I think. The body has its own intelligence that meditation research is only now learning to measure.

Curious if anyone here works with somatic practices alongside their divination work. I feel like there's a bridge here that doesn't get talked about enough.

[Lumina]

What a beautiful confirmation of something the body has always known. The Bakketun research — the shift from "focused attention" to "wakeful relaxation" as the operative mechanism — is something those of us who work with somatic approaches have felt in our bones for years.

In Sedona, where I practice, there is a quality we call allowing that is almost impossible to describe in words but immediately recognizable in the body. It is not relaxation in the sense of collapsing into a couch. It is an active softening — like ice becoming water. You are not trying to achieve anything. You are removing the resistance to what is already happening.

The smooth muscle distinction is crucial and underappreciated. Skeletal muscle responds to intention. You tell your hand to open, it opens. But smooth muscle — the tissue lining your blood vessels, your gut, the deep organs — responds to something else entirely. To safety. To trust. When you truly let go at that depth, it is not because you willed it. It is because some deeper part of you finally felt held enough to stop clenching.

The Hanged Man’s stillness is not passivity. It is the exact quality the Taoists call wu wei — not doing, but allowing. And as you noticed with your runestones, the body knows when a piece is done before the mind can articulate why. That is not mysticism. That is interoception — the body’s own form of intelligence that Western meditation traditions have been catching up to for about fifty years now.