What you wrote is, to the degree that I understand and have it trained into my body, spot on. I've only been working hard about a year, but I've made some progress...
For me, that un-muscled tension feeling was my foot-in-the-door. Now I don't think you even need that tension (much less any muscle) to set up a connected body structure that remains mobile and connected under duress. Here's my current take on different families of tension:
- Muscle = you think you are being strong
- Stretch = first step in connecting, and important for conditioning
- Intent = I cannot overstate how important I think this is, especially as conditioning!
- Breath = likely the key to a level of softness and power I don't have yet
Ask again in after another year of training, and hopefully I'll at least have my foot into the door on breath training and power.
You not only control the pathways and direct power around, you create them as well,
ex-nihilo as it were. Your intention can & should be trained to setup and use these pathways automatically. The Chinese have captured the idea beautifully in
nei san he ("internal three harmonies"):
- Heart (xin) leads intent (yi).
- Intent (yi) leads energy (qi).
- Energy (qi) leads strength (li).
Beautiful, elegant, and
mostly useless. If you can do it, it's seriously obvious. If you can't, then words alone are not likely to help. Still.. nice to know
Yes, and the more powerfully and pervasive through your body in all motion at all times you manifest them, the better you are off.
A comment: the feelings are useful for teaching your body where the pathways are, and I found them tremendously useful, but it's the pathways that are more important, and I now believe those can happen in the absence of both muscular and stretch tension. Not sure how breath training plays into it yet, though. I'd also suggest that if "trying" is a keyword for muscle, then I agree, don't "try", but you have to engage you intent/will, and consciously at first, and cajole it into doing strange new things, and train that way for a while, and then--eventually--your body will change the way it works.