II Walking
When we were very young the world was a scary place and we
began to learn to walk by falling in the direction we wanted to go toward,
encouraged by giants saying things like “Come to Mama”. We started to fall
forward and everything tensed up as we put our foot out to catch ourselves and
keep from falling down. We repeated this pattern, alternating which foot we
used. Walking became a pattern of being out of balance and catching our fall.
We still walk this way.
I Grabbing
When we were even younger and perhaps a toy was held in
front of us, we reached for it, grabbed it and pulled it toward us. We were totally
involved in this task and our shoulders tensed up, our emotional state was “I
Want!!”, and everything was focused on something outside our center - We were
out of balance, and tense. We still tense up even when we reach for a pencil or
a fork on a table.
These tensions have become part of the background , and like
the sound of an airplane taking off to someone who lives near the airport, go
totally unnoticed. If we are aware of these tensions, we have some degree of
choice whether we accept them or not. If we don’t even see these places where
we are wasting our energy, there isn’t much hope for change. As we grow older
these tensions/energy blocks can turn into sore backs, ulcers, and many other
common health problems.
We can change these very old habits, but it takes time. If
they hadn’t worked at all they might be easier to replace with more efficient
ones, but these have worked well enough to have brought us to this point in our
lives, and our body’s innate wisdom tells it to be cautious in messing with
something that works, even if poorly. We don’t want to fall.
Awareness &
Creating New Patterns
T’ai Chi, in giving us an awareness of the related concepts
of Balance and Unnecessary Tension within our own bodies, enables us to make
some extremely beneficial changes to the way we move. It also offers solutions
– new and more effective ways of moving which incorporate balance and
relaxation, and also a coordination between all parts of the body, concepts
unavailable to us when we were infants.
When we are tense, this tension creates an energy block and
prevents the parts from functioning together as a whole in an efficient manner.
When my shoulder is tense, this is a block, and disconnects the arm from the
spine. The arm does one thing and the spine is doing something else. If I
notice this and relax my shoulder, the arm can connect with the spine and
together they function far more effectively.
We can change not only the behavior patterns as we learn
T’ai Chi. When we come into balance and let go of unnecessary tensions we also
drop the old emotions tagged to these movement patterns. These emotions were
appropriate at the time – they motivated us not to fall (fear), and to learn to
use our hands (desire – “I want”), but now have become a hole in our energy
bucket. Every time I take a step or reach for something I don’t have to waste
my emotional energy, not even noticing that I’m doing it. Whenever we are out
of balance we tense up so we won’t fall (this is a good thing), but we also
trigger and still subtly feel the anxiety we felt when we learned to walk.
Again, these feelings have become the background we don’t notice and therefore
have no choice to let go of and not carry. All this “old stuff” adds up to a
large burden we no longer need to carry.
Breaking Automatic
Connections
Every time I raise my arms I tense my shoulders. As I learn
to break this automatic connection (habit) and others like it, my mind has a
natural propensity to see this and generalize it. “If this is good here and
here and here, perhaps I can use it over here too.” In this way, “Every time I
raise my arms I don’t have to tense my shoulders” can encourage “Every time
someone yells at me I don’t have to become upset”, or “Whenever someone cuts me
off in traffic (or in conversation), my stomach doesn’t have to knot up”.
Instead of thinking “This person is attacking me”, If I’m not out of balance, I
might think “This person has a problem”, and not take it personally.
Accessing and
Changing the Subconscious
So something learned in the realm of behavior can also be
applied by our brains to the realms of both emotion and thought. This is a very
powerful tool. We first learned to grab and to walk even before we learned to
talk. When we learned to talk, and to think in language, all that stuff
that we learned before we learned to talk became part of our subconscious mind,
and is largely inaccessible to our conscious, (thinking in words), mind. T’ai
Chi reaches these places. It’s not amazing that it takes a while to change
these deep and primitive areas of our psyche, Its’ amazing that we can do it at
all! T’ai Chi (and other disciplines which change the way we move) is thus a
very powerful way of communicating with our unconscious mind. The study of T’ai
Chi in this way enables growth far beyond the normal parameters of physical
exercise.
