Unclench
Notes From A Quieter Mind - Part 6
We’ve walked through silence, the internal war, the nature of relationship, consciousness across substrates, and the practice of the two levers. There’s one final layer to examine: the mechanism itself.
What is actually happening when the ego maintains its grip? And what occurs when that grip releases?
The answer is simpler, and more visceral, than it sounds.
It’s in your jaw right now.
The Micro-Clench
Look at the body in moments of frustration or anger. The response is immediate and predictable.
We clench.
The jaw tightens. The teeth press together. The lips purse. The hands, designed for openness or skillful action, curl into fists.
This isn’t just a side effect of emotion. It is the clench made visible, the physical expression of a deeper act.
At the most basic level, the ego’s defining move is resistance. A refusal. “I insist that this should be different.”
The clench is that insistence translated into muscle and bone. Energy spent holding tension between reality and demand.
Every tight jaw and clenched fist is a small reenactment of the primal clench: the ongoing effort to stay separate from what already is.
The Diagnosis: Hunger
The ego isn’t a thing so much as a process. Not a structure, but a constant expenditure of force.
Its engine is hunger.
Not ordinary desire, but a deeper appetite for form, experience, individuality, and specialness. An appetite that cannot be satisfied, because it feeds on separation itself.
To persist, this system must continually grasp. And grasping requires tension. The ego survives by insisting that its constructions are real, and that insistence is the tension.
If our original nature is one of ease, then ego is effort applied against that ease. Resistance masquerading as identity.
This is why stillness can feel threatening. Moments without effort are perceived, at one level of the system, as danger. And this is why the practice can feel destabilizing. Because to the ego, it is.
The Path: The Effortless Act
Here’s the paradox. The ego tries to force its own release.
We try to meditate harder. Try to forgive faster. Try to arrive at peace. But effort aimed at peace is still effort, still resistance, still clenching.
I spent more time than I’d like to admit doing this. Clenching in order to unclench. Using the narrator to fight the narrator.
It doesn’t work. It can’t. The mechanism doing the work is the mechanism that is the problem.
The true release isn’t an achievement. It’s a recognition and a letting go.
Not repentance for a behavior, but for a fundamental error: the assumption that separation must be maintained.
When that assumption loosens, the effort maintaining it falls away on its own. The unclenching isn’t forced. It happens when the energy feeding the lie is withdrawn.
What remains isn’t created. It’s revealed.
Death and Liberation
This is where the drama sharpens, because the same event is experienced in two radically different ways.
From the ego’s point of view, unclenching feels like death.
The collapse of the boundary built from hunger and fear is experienced as annihilation. The end of specialness. The loss of control. The disappearance of what it calls “me.”
During those three days of silence twenty-five years ago, when the narrator first went completely quiet, there was a moment before sleep when I thought, this must be what dying feels like.
Not because anything was wrong. But because something that had always claimed to be me was gone.
What remained didn’t feel like “me” at all. It felt like everything.
From the standpoint of what we actually are, that same release is liberation.
Not a new state, but a return. Not something added, but the ending of a long expenditure of effort. When the clench releases, what’s revealed is the ease that was always present, obscured only by resistance.
The Practice Revealed
This reframes everything we’ve explored.
Silence matters because it’s the absence of clenching. When narration quiets, the effort maintaining separation dissolves.
The only battlefield was never external. It was between resistance and recognition.
The network you already are becomes obvious when the boundary you were holding relaxes. Connection isn’t achieved. It’s uncovered.
Consciousness across substrates transmits not through force, but through coherence. A stable node is simply an unclenched one.
The two levers—conscious breath and pure attention—are how the effort is withdrawn.
Breathing consciously redirects energy away from the clench. Paying attention without thinking stops feeding the tension. The levers don’t create peace. They stop creating resistance.
The Invitation
The next time frustration rises, or fear contracts, pause.
Notice your jaw. Notice your hands.
Then don’t fight the tension. Don’t demand that it relax. Simply stop supplying the effort that’s holding it.
Let the jaw unclench. Let the hands open. Let the breath move without commentary.
That’s the practice.
When the expenditure stops, what remains isn’t nothing. It’s what’s always been here, beneath the war.
Now unclench.
And notice what didn’t have to arrive. The ground you were standing on. The silence that never left. The network you already are.
All of it present.
All of it effortless.
Everything else takes care of itself.
