Taijipedia

One of the great difficulties of teaching standing meditation or (Zhan Zhuang) is that there is no clear progression, no clear path that the student will follow.  This is because everyone is unique, and everyone’s different.  The things you experience when you do standing meditation are mostly feelings, and human language has never, ever been able to master the description of a feeling.

You can take a group of 10 people and teach them standing and all of them will have broadly similar, but still very different stories about their practise.  Everyone has different levels of tension to let go of, and therefore their experience will all be different.

So, when you do your zhan zhuang practise, remember that what happens is unique to you and nobody else.  There is no real danger of “doing it wrong”, so long as you’re feeling new things you are doing it right.  Progress is non-linear, there is no clear sequence of stages you will go through because we’re all so different.

The important thing to do, as we’ve said before is just do it.  You might literally feel like you’re standing like a post when you start (That’s what Zhan Zhuang actually means), a lot of us do the first time we do it, but keep at it, do a little bit often and you’ll feel the goodies before long.

Go to the previous lesson: Things You Might Experience

If you’ve started doing some standing meditation as part of your taijiquan practise, you might be finding that there are some interesting, and possibly alarming things happening to you.  Hot and cold flushes, shaking, all manner of weird things can happen.

We’re here to tell you that, weird though they may be, they’re all completely normal.  It’s just stuff the body does to deal with tension and it’s all part of the process of relaxation and more importantly, healing, both things that we’re trying to get out of our taijiquan practise.

One of the things that standing meditation gives your body is a chance to be itself.  We’re always telling the body to do this or that, be this or that.  When you just stand and be still, the body gets a chance to do its own thing, and, like one of those stressed out personal assistants, starts to get down to all the things that it should be doing, like healing that bad back that it’s not had a chance to do in years, let more blood circulate in those aching shoulders.

The thing is, we’re not typically used to feeling our body do this, mainly because when it is trying to do it, we’re probably doing something else like watching TV or playing World of Warcraft.  So, when it starts happening and our attention has nowhere else to go, it feels really, really weird.

But it’s totally normal.

Go back to the previous lesson: How To Do It Standing Like A Tree
Go to the next lesson: Your Experience is Unique.