Relax
Posted by Cat on April 21st 2020
Recently a Tai Chi brother sent me a video in which Shinzen Young (a meditation teacher) talks about “zooming in and out” with your attention on a particular sensation.
In the video he describes a technique of focusing your attention on the most intense part of a particular sensation while simultaneously broadening your awareness over your entire body (zooming in and zooming out at the same time). This serves to “grease the wheels” for the sensation to diffuse from a point into a larger volume, which tends to reduce its intensity as it dissipates.
He then says:
“Most of the suffering is not in local intensity. Most of the suffering is in the resistance to the subtle spread.”
This sounds a lot like song in Taiji.
Commonly translated as “relax”, song is not about tension vs no tension (that’s too binary), but more about localized tension vs diffuse tension. The quality of openness and release in the joints, which allows tension to spread and move through the body instead of holding it in a dense knot.
We often unknowingly cling to familiar patterns of tension. We resist the spread - or release - of our joints and try to hold postures through static force.
One technique we use for becoming aware of this resistance is zhan zhuang - “hug a tree” - standing meditation.
Through stillness, we become aware of these knots of tension, and through awareness we begin to allow the knots to dissipate. Over time, this process repeats with deeper and more subtle knots until we learn to let go of the need to hold and instead focus on the release.
Here’s an exercise I’ve found useful during form practice: as you move through the postures, put your intention into whatever part of you is expanding. Even if you’re doing something that seems like contracting (bringing the hands in before pushing back out, for example) find the part of your body that has to expand to allow that to happen… then do the expansion rather than doing the contraction.