Taijipedia

I’ve just come off a flight from Dubai to Kuala Lumpur. In total it took about 7 hours, and for those 7 hours I spent 5 of them sitting down either trying to sleep or trying to watch Rock’n’Rolla (Good film, very British humour). Now those 5 hours were interspersed with about 20 minutes of standing practise, during which a pretty Korean stewardess asked if I was praying, which all things considered, was a pretty good guess. When I said I was doing Taiji, I got an even more puzzled look but I digress.

Now that I’m off the plane and able to move around again, I remember once again that the human body wasn’t built to sit down, immobile for such a long period of time. My shoulders are tight, and my back is aching from having to sit down on a seat that didn’t fit me properly. I just think of how much worse I’d probably feel if I hadn’t had the chance to do a bit of standing!

The purpose of this post is not to gripe about the flight, but to remind myself that the human body wasn’t made to sit still for that length of time. Remember the whole habit thing that’s the theme of the recent weeks, standing re-programs the body to hold itself in a good posture.

Equally if you sit in a bad posture, such as on a plane, scrunched up in a seat for too long your body will start to remember that, so getting up and moving around to remind your body what’s the right posture is something really worth doing, especially on really long-haul fights.

I try to do some standing meditation, and if there’s enough room, I even do a bit of silk-reeling. You might get really strange looks from people but I think I’m getting too old to care. To be honest, I don’t go 5 hours straight whilst I’m at home without getting up and moving. Movement is all part of my routine and my habit so I’m not really going to sacrifice that whilst I’m on an airplane.

As Greeny says, “be large”, just go ahead and do that standing or movement.

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

Photo by Delmonti

In my previous post, I made a promise I did not keep. I talked about our addiction to relaxation triggers, but..

I did not mention the infinite onion

In this post, I will rectify my transgression. I will deliver.

I’m going to tell you a really cool thing.

You may or may not have experienced it yet. If you haven’t don’t worry, it’s not like telling you how the Sixth Sense ends. I can’t possibly ruin it for you, because when it does happen to you, it’ll be something so cool that nothing I could say could possibly ruin it for you.

So… you’ll be practising your taijiquan form, or your standing meditation, you’re slipping into the zone, everything is becoming crystal clear, it’s all slowing down, and then…

Some part of you lets go

You’re not sure what’s let go, but you know something has, all by itself, has loosened its limpet grip on some other part of you.

And it feel soooo good

You’ll have passed through one level of tension, let go of it and moved down into the next, deeper level of tension where you’ll go through that really cool process all over again.

It’s like an onion you see. You have many layers of tension.

But here’s the nub of it. The miracle of nature that is you has more dimensions to it than simply the physical.

Tension manifests in the physical, mental and emotional

Bear with me, I’m not being deliberately metaphysical. To justify that statement, I have prepared a little case study.

You’ve had a hard day at work and you’re getting ready for bed.

Argh, my back’s stiff and so are my shoulders.

Yup, so many hours at the desk slaving away with the mouse in one hand has stiffened you up, all that not moving around and you’ve got a back that’s stiff and shoulders that won’t roll. It’s the stuff that we’re all familiar with all that physical tension of locked and tight muscles.

You get into bed anyway, turn out the light..

And lie awake blinking at the ceiling. Your brain is whizzing

That presentation wasn’t up to scratch, you were pissed off with the boss when you put it together. It was sub-par and he’s not going to be happy. Oh, and there’s the shopping list you need to make. Do we need more milk? Doesn’t the lawn that needs mowing and little Alice needs new shoes, and Byron has to be taken to swimming lessons tomorrow. Must take a look at that really cool Taijiquan site. What was it called? Something-pedia?

The brain, is still clinging to all that, and it’s creating mental tension, constant chatter in the head is the mind’s way of manifesting that tension. It’s not going to be a physical sensation.

No matter, sooner or later you’ll get so tired that you’ll fall asleep right?

OH MY GOD! That presentation I sent to the boss!

You were bored, upset and feeling undervalued, so for a laugh you replaced every instance of “Gross Domestic Product” with the childish and inane word “farting”.  You meant to change it back but forgot due to the unfair amount of stress and pressure.

You can already see your boss spitting venom, his portly frame resonating like a lava lamp to the sound of his baying for blood.

You’re feeling stressed.

That’s emotional tension getting its hooks into you. That “AAARRGHH!” emotional response is the beginnings of this tension, and anyone who is a chronic worrier, will know that it can go on for extended periods of time.

So.. if I’ve convinced you that tension can manifest in three dimensions, it’s time to introduce the “infinity” bit.

The human body is in a constant state of flux

Your body is constantly changing, physically, mentally and emotionally. With all these changes happening, you’re constantly letting go of tension, and building tension in these three dimensions.

So whenever you peel off one layer of tension, another will always await you beneath, because there are other ways you have been storing tension, and when you let go that bit, there’s the tension underneath that layer and so on. There are an infinite number of layers.

There you go.. relaxation is like an infinite onion

What regular practise of taijiquan helps you do is constantly let go of tension in whichever dimension you’re building it up on. Think about it as a maintenance on your tension valves. As tension builds up in the physical realm, you relieve it, and then if emotional tension builds up, you can help let go of that too.

First, an apology.. this was supposed to head up the video log posts on This Week’s Big Idea (It’s relaxation) and I got my knickers in a bit of a twist and posted the standing meditation one first.

No matter, tension is an ongoing problem in the practise of Taijiquan, and will probably continue to be so for your entire Taijiquan career.  If you’d like to know why, check out part 2 of why relaxation is an infinite onion.

In this post, we’ll give you some tips on ideas you can use for standing practise beyond the very simple (but still very effective) exercise that we’re going through in the Standing Meditation lessons.

Photo by Caius

It’s been a bad day at work, your boss is being a jerk and it’s all gone wrong.

All you want to do is bang your head against a wall (repeating as necessary)

I need to relax, you might say.

So what you do is go home, have a stiff drink or go for that cigarette.  Maybe you stick some Vangelis on and run a hot bath.   All those aromatherapy oils and soothing music will work the tension out of your system.

They’re all relaxation triggers, and we’re addicted to them

We’re relaxation trigger junkies.  We depend on things external to ourselves to help us relax.  Problems always arise when things go to hell in a handbag and we don’t have access to them.  There will be no steamy bath with Vangelis and extract of jojoba with the boss dumping on you.  You can’t reach for that beer if you’re driving home after a difficult business meeting and believe you me, a cigarette will be the last thing on your mind if little Timmy’s just crawled out a 3rd floor window to retrieve his Action Man.

When these relaxation triggers aren’t there, we kinda go through a strange sort of cold turkey process where we turn into stress bunnies, lose the capacity for rational thinking.  Sometimes we lose it and have what the English quaintly call “a Benny”.  We’re dependent on our relaxation triggers, we need them to relax.

I’m here to tell you that it IS possible to kick the habit and learn how to relax

People have known this for hundreds of years, we just forgot it recently. If you think about it how else did our forefathers chill out in the ages before Vangelis and jojoba?

It’s by using things within us to help us relax.

If this is starting to sound a bit self-help, I’m not referring to anything metaphysical and I’m not going to say that within every stress bunny is a chilled out person waiting to get out.

No, it’s even simpler than that.

It’s as simple as breathing. Sigh, go on, I dare you. Sigh. The body’s got it’s own reflexive relaxation mechanism, and breathing is part of it. If you can learn to regulate your breathing, you can help yourself relax. In fact, some military schools teach their troops to breathe when under combat stress. As situations come they don’t get more stressful than bullets whizzing past your head.

But wait.. there’s another bit to it.

I want you to get back into the habit

Rather than being a relaxation-trigger junkie, I want you to become a relaxation junkie. Yeah, just take out the “trigger”.
Learning to relax is just like learning to ride a bike. Seriously, once you learn how to do it (without props) you’ll be able to do it wherever you are, or whatever you’re doing.

Now, the best way to learn how to relax, is to become aware of how it happens, and the best way to do that, is to do standing meditation. It’s simple, it’s easy and anyone can do it. Just 10 minutes a day is more than enough.  Once you know what it feels like to relax by yourself, you can then just do it whenever you need to.  Incidentally once you’re into the relaxation habit, you can do it just before you start your form.. and how much more relaxed will that form be?

And it really IS that simple

I appear to have waxed lyrical about being a relaxation trigger junkie, but have shamelessly omitted the bit about infinite onions (that’s why you were reading this in the first place right?).   That will be in part 2.. I promise.