Taijipedia

Photo by exfordy

There’s a blog post over at martial development on The Four Paradoxes of Standing Meditation.

The post describes the philosophy of Wang XiangZhai, a master of Yiquan boxing and a hard as nails dude in his time.  Yiquan’s training syllabus is based completely around standing meditation, and practitioners do hours and hours of standing as it is the heart of the system.

I’d like to draw your attention to two things in the blog post:

1) Perspectives: Chris gives a different perspective to what happens when you do standing meditation.  What happens to all of us when we practise standing is essentially the same thing, but we all perceive it in different ways.  Chris’s perspective on what happens is different and you may find it useful as it’ll give you another way of looking at the experience to the Taijipedia, and different perspectives are always helpful.

2) Comment: There’s a small argument that goes on in the comments section.  A reader asks about whether we can “objectively verify a state of relaxation”.   Comments 2 and 7 are the ones I’m referring to.

You can’t really objectively verify a state of relaxation.  Our senses and perceptions are relative, and thus, our perception of relaxation is relative, and by inference, all relaxation is relative.  You may feel really relaxed today, more relaxed than this time last week.  However, you may be MORE tense than last week because you had one of those days yesterday and was stressed to the eyeballs.

Your state of relaxation is much like your sense of smell.  If you step into a room with a bad smell (read tension) hanging around, sooner or later you get used to it and don’t notice it any more.  Go into a room with the same smell, but not as bad and you’ll hardly notice it (tension less than before, but still tense).  It’s only when you come out of the room (totally relax), then go back in (tense up again) that you’ll notice the tension again.

So, what does this mean for your Taijiquan practise?  The training and practise will, over time relax you even if you cannot yourself always perceive this relaxation.   It’s a proven method that’s worked for hundreds of years, so you can trust it to deliver the benefits, all you have to do is practise.

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.

The second in our videos on Taiji for back pain. The Yang Taiji 24 form’s a good form for helping your back heal, it’s not too demanding on the body and is simple enough to learn quickly. The gentle movements and flexing and stretching is very good for your back as it will loosen up your back and allow bits of it to move.

Another benefit of getting yourself to relax is the fact that relaxation allows the circulation of blood in the previously tense areas of your back to improve. More blood going through it means more healing as blood brings with it lots of good stuff that the back needs, and takes away all the bad stuff that might have been sitting there waiting to be cleared.

The link to connecting to centre can be found here.
And here’s the first in our lessons on the Yang Taiji 24 Form.

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.

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.

As This Week’s Big Idea is relaxation, we thought we’d post a video on one of the most simple (yet powerful) relaxation exercises, standing meditation.  It’s also known by a few other names, Zhan Zhuang, Wuji, Tadasana, Standing Post.  They’re all names that describe the principle of standing in a fixed position and relaxing into the posture.

The posture demonstrated, this “Standing like a tree” is named as such because someone thought that standing upright with your hands in front of you either made you resemble a tree or because you looked like you were hugging one.

If you’ve not done much standing before, start with 2-3 minutes, and gradually work it up to 10.  When you begin Standing Like A Tree, you’re really going to feel like a tree as the tension starts to come out of your body.

Try not to judge the process, all the time you spend doing standing meditation is time well spent, there is no such thing as a “good” session or a “bad” session.  The standing practise sessions are just different, as the myriad of things you experience will vary from day to day.  It’s perhaps the only practise where you get immediate benefit from (even if you may not be aware of it straight away) as there is practically no learning curve.  You just have to GOYA* and do it.

Standing meditation is beneficial to your Taiji practise because it starts off the process of relaxation.  You may be Standing Like A Tree, but you’re actually more like an onion. There’s layers and layers to it.  As you let go of tension and reach one layer of relaxation, another one awaits you beneath it.  As your practise progresses, you’ll peel away more and more layers, and standing meditation is the most effective way to kickstart the process.

This is the one single exercise that made the most difference to Tannage’s back and Greeny’s knee.  It was standing meditation that allowed our joints to relax, and start healing themselves, so if you have joint problems or a bad back, you might do well to do this practise, 5-10 minutes a day, every day.  Regular practise is far more effective than sporadic long practise sessions.  Think of rolling a snowball, the longer you roll it, the bigger it gets, but you can’t stop or it’ll stop rolling, and you’ll have to put all that effort into getting it going again. Tannage did standing like a tree for years, just 5-10 minutes a day, every day almost without fail.

Don’t worry if you’re not as um.. militant about it as Tannage is, he’s got a back to keep in good shape and wants to avoid middle-age agony. Try to do standing menditation every day but if you hit maybe every other day you’re doing pretty well and it’ll give you a lot of benefit.

Although there are lots of other postures, Standing Like A Tree is a good one to start with. If you never learnt any other standing postures, then this posture will serve you very well. It’ll build internal power, and also strengthen you (did I mention it can fix your back and also heal bad knees?)

The next lesson is all about things you might experience when doing standing meditation.

* Get Off Your Ass – I credit Naomi Dunford of Ittybiz.com for coining this phrase.