Doubt is Healing?

   During the guided meditation practice tonight, I found that I was able to bring the huatou question into the body and resolve body pain toward answering the question. Something happened tonight and that is that I started to really feel the body relaxing in a way that I never felt before. There was a kind of pain to it, almost as though I had been resisting letting go, but I just kept practicing not holding on to the body muscles so tightly. Over time, it became easier for me to recite the huatou with sincerity, because I was no longer so heavily invested in keeping the body held in a certain tight way. And after the practice, there was a kind of still resolve. It is as though no thoughts were really swaying me anymore, and I was able to be clear about the things around me.
     I can't really say what the 'secret' to this is, but it's like everything in meditation; there is an element of inquiry to it. What I start to realize is that in order to fully trust the process of relaxation, I have to fully go into this question of who, to the point where there is no longer this determined self that is clinging so tightly to the body. A lot of my own pain is caused by this subconscious 'holding' of the body in a certain position, and then taking this body position to be the real self. But with some determination not to attach to this self-concept or notion of being (perhaps even a body-armoring of sorts), I am able to see that this body can ease up a bit, and there is no longer such a strong grip on the body. It's amazing how the practice of progressively letting go through the questioning process is opening up a lot of energy and often unifying otherwise disjointed experiences of body.
     The point, however, is not to 'make' the body comfortable, as though this 'body' were something solid and enduring or permanent. Rather, the point is to see that this body does not have an enduring self attached to it, and to really feel that there is no enduring self to it. But this takes a kind of doubt sensation: a bodily-felt experience of not being able to trace a self, and letting go of the solid assumption that there is a monolithic self that inhabits the body. For this reason, I think the method of huatou can be used to heal body energies, because it frees up the sense of a self armoring around the body. However, all of this is only a hypothesis, and I still need to test it out through meditation. The main thing is to have an orientation to work with in relating huatou method to the body.