Walking and being bigger: Receptiveness
This week's lesson is about being receptive, and balanced, and relaxing into being *bigger*.
I've been able to use walking as taiji practice for a while now, and that's been *super* useful. As I learn more about what the internal parts - specifically what people rather vaguely call the "core", but which I understand now to mean a thousand distinct muscles - do in taijichuan as a martial art, I've gotten to a place where I can practice with them while I walk. Not every time, but many times, I now manage to shift my weight and relax my hips and engage my lower stomach and open my chest all just so, and I hit this stride that feels…well, amazing. Walking like that feels like doing gentle situps, but it takes all the stress out of so much else, and optimizes all the forces at play to such a degree that I feel I could walk like that forever and never tire. And I go faster, too, which is odd because it shortens my stride - yet I gain more speed walking-as-practice than I do trucking full-out with huge steps.
I also…get bigger. (Apologies if this doesn't make much sense, but as I'm sure you know by now, writing it down is part of how I grok it.) Yang energy, or "the creative", moves in straight lines - think of beams of light. If it's moving, it's fast and direct; if it's stopped, it's "off". Yin energy, "the receptive", moves in circles - like the planet. When it moves, its energy spirals outward, moving with gravity in a less-direct and less-100%-wham, but still incredibly powerful (and sustainable) way; when it's still, it closes in around itself like a flower, storing energy inside. One's literal, kinetic sense of self - the haptic awareness of where your body is - changes depending on how the energy in your body is moving. Mostly these are subtle changes and/or related to energies we don't pay attention to, so we may not notice, in these terms, when we "are bigger" or smaller. But I've been learning to detect and control those forces for a while now, and one of the interesting effects is that if you can get the balance, the spiral, the spin from inward out and back again just right, it…unfolds you. (Again, maybe think flowers.) All the tiny parts of you that were holding tight relax, but you're not at rest; you're spinning a ball, and the motion is fast and effortless, but constrained by nothing other than the gravity that's helping it go faster. And you, your idea of the boundaries of you, expands. I can't really describe it other than to say that it feels like being bigger - having a wider range of sense-perceptive area, I guess?
The trick is, this is yin energy. As soon as you forget that, forget how it works and why, or try to wield it like yang energy, it all dissipates. Yang energy is expressed tension, and it's the absence of tension that makes this "receptive" energy possible. (It's called receptiveness, by the way, because while it doesn't mean being weak or not moving - do you think of the planet as weak or unmoving? - it does have as a characteristic being open, paying attention, and making room for everything. The phrase "yield to overcome" applies here.)
OK, time to go for a walk. ;)
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there.