One of my long-time students experienced a breakthrough this week. Like everything else trying to learn a deep practice, tai chi players experience sometimes-interminable plateaus followed by sharp leaps in understanding and competence. In this case, the student, a slight man with quick reflexes and strong legs, had a habit of ducking and dodging combat confrontations. I figured it was a habit acquired in his youth, as he told me he was often bullied in the schoolyard. Evading, whether by running away or by shucking and jiving, was a good survival tactic for him and one that had served him well right into middle age. Going deeper into his practice, however, required that he lose the habit.
This habit came into sharp focus for him when, out of frustration at the absence of recent gains, he asked me to put my hands on him and tell him what I sensed. It was an honest request and it deserved an honest answer. I told him that I felt that whenever I brought a particular point in his body to his attention, rather than correcting what I identified, he shied away from it. It was as if I asked him the time and he answered with a weather report. He could not simply focus on the subject at hand. I told him that he would gain solidity and strength by keeping his attention on the matter at hand rather than dodging it.
At first he replied that he was not avoiding the work, but rather was “scanning” his body. I told him he was just rationalizing his pattern of avoiding incoming force. I pointed out that the act of scanning was an intellectual one, a left-brain activity otherwise characterized as quantifying or taking stock. I pointed out that what was needed for deep body changing was a right-brain, intuitive action, feeling rather than thinking. Daoist teaching is all about getting in touch with the intuitive mind, the right side of the brain, and allowing that it knows more than the rational mind can. The intuitive mind can subconsciously process far more variables, and more quickly, than the rational mind can, which is why when we fight we don’t think about what we’re going to do, we just do it.
When he disciplined his attention to the various places on his body that needed to relax and managed to keep his focus on the job at hand instead of dodging away from it by changing the subject, his martial prowess increased almost immediately. I have often noticed that a person’s mental rigidity shows in their body’s physical rigidity. The more I test this hypothesis, and its corollary—a person’s mental flexibility shows in their body—the more I find it to be true. My student, by suddenly recognizing his lifelong pattern, was almost instantly able to stop it. This is a version of instant enlightenment, and his body evidenced the change right away by becoming suddenly more solid and dense to the touch. My guess is that the face he shows to the world, the way he interacts with others and the way they respond to him, will now change. I am certain that he will present with more gravitas, that folks will listen when he speaks when they might earlier have ignored him, and take his opinion more seriously than before. I suspect that this change will be the first rotation of a rolling snowball for him, and that he will, so long as he stays on this tack, become a more powerful person with each passing day.
Tags: Tai Chiattentioni Ntuitionpracti CeDaoist Flexibility
