Atony

There is a silence in you that is not peaceful. Not the silence of rest, but the silence of surrender. Your smooth muscle — those muscles you cannot consciously tense, the ones that move your intestines, set your stomach to work, hold your uterus in place — has lost its tension. It goes slack. Not because it is diseased in any mechanical sense, but because something in you has stopped setting the tempo.

Atony is the body's image of an inner letting go that is not a true letting go. True letting go sets free. What is happening here is something different: a dropping. A quiet giving up. Your body does what you have long been doing on the inside — it stops moving, stops contracting, stops giving direction. The musculature that keeps your organs in motion becomes flaccid. And in doing so, it tells your story.