A simple meditation

Sit with the hips open, pelvis elevated, knees grounded.

Relax the gaze and allow the eyelids to gently close.

With a soft focus, pay attention to the breath.

Let the mind follow the breath.

Let the breath grow longer, deeper and slower.

Feel the sit bones in contact with the ground.

Feel the weight of the body, and the ground supporting it.

Feel the lower back expand with the in-breath.

Feel for space between the lumbar vertebrae.

Let the breath grow calm and easeful.

Allow the upper back to spread.

Allow the shoulders to slope.

Let the elbows, wrists and fingers relax.

Gently draw up the back of the skull.

Let the breath grow soft and quiet.

Relax brow, jaw and neck, connecting tongue to upper palate.

Soften the chest and release all tension.

With the skeleton upright, surrender to gravity.

Unbind from the bones and let the flesh hang down.

With mind at ease, allow a smile within.

As you breathe in, draw inwards from skin to belly.

As you breathe out, release, sink down.

As you breathe in, contract into your centre.

As you breathe out, relax, sink down, sink deeper.

Breathe to the belly, the mind within.

Let go of the breath; let go of the body.

In perfect stillness, sit silently, rest the mind.

When it feels right, rub the hands and eyes.

Slowly open the eyes and move the body.

Bow the head and place the palms together in humility and gratitude.

Learn to sit

What follows is an easy, step-by-step meditation for beginners. But first…

What is meditation?

A decent definition might be something like, ‘a state of absorption we arrive at through stilling the mind, stilling the body, being present, and letting things be’. This could probably be improved, but it’s a start.

As a practice, meditation is hugely beneficial for our physical and emotional health. It allows us to rest the mind and restore the body to its optimal state of functioning. At its most profound, meditation allows us to lift the veil of perception and directly experience our own true nature.

Different cultures have developed various methods of meditation throughout history. In the developed West, we tend to associate it with East Asia, partly because of Gong Fu movies and famous Zen Buddhist teachers such as Shunryu Suzuki and Seung Sahn, and partly because meditation has all but died out as a practice in Western spiritual traditions. But before it was sanitised into a largely doctrinal and ritualistic religion, early Christianity was itself a rich, contemplative tradition.

However, this aspect of Christianity has virtually vanished over the centuries, sadly leaving us with only empty rites, regurgitated dogma, an emphasis on scripture rather than personal insight and realisation, and consequently swathes of people for whom the Church is only there to facilitate baptisms, weddings, and funerals.

In its place, we see the rising trend of aggressive atheistic secularity, which provides us little to no internal nourishment and much external confusion; and also the growth of decidely contrived, hybrid ‘mindfulness’ practices, where people are quite often taught that meditation is effectively about distracting the senses with relaxing music, and imagining themselves to be in some idyllic ‘happy place’.

But that’s not meditation; that’s just fantasy.

In other religions around the world, there are many more intelligent, tried and tested methods for meditating. Vipassana and Yoga yoke the mind to the breath. Tantric meditation uses intricate visualisation, and a mental exchange of the self with the Buddha. There are repeated mantras and prayers to quell and hypnotise the mind; prolonged, single-pointed concentration upon an object of worship; deep contemplation of themes such as gratitude, acceptance, impermanence, compassion, interdependence, or the location and nature of the self. There are standing meditations, walking meditations, even sleeping meditations…

So there are lots of ways to meditate, and different methods will appeal to different people. For me, Daoist meditation has proved to be the most effective. Again, it takes many different forms, and there are various precise, prescribed methods for developing certain qualities, but I would like to describe here a simple and accessible way to enter meditation through a deep awareness of the body.

Please be advised, I am not an expert by any means, nor am I an ‘inner door’ student of the tradition. I’ve just found that my own practice has helped me a lot, so I would like to share some of it here. I don’t intend to share any exact methods; that is not my place. I’ve simply converted some basic techniques into an easily memorised routine that anybody can try.

If your interest is piqued, it’s worth doing some research into Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) Daoism, the Longmen (Dragon Gate) lineage, and the writings of Master Wang Liping. Some excellent Western writers on (and experienced practitioners and teachers of) Daoist meditation include Nathan Brine, Damo Mitchell, and Robert James Coons, all of whom have far greater expertise and knowledge than I. Look them up.

If you’re really enthused, find yourself a teacher from whom you can learn the methods directly. But if this post spurs you on to explore just a little deeper into the world of Daoist meditation, then I shall count that as a success.

So to it. The meditation I describe below is easy to learn, as it uses the body as its object, and follows a logical path as we gently guide our awareness around and through the body.

In terms of the meridians of Chinese Medicine, it follows a reversed pathway through the Du Mai (over the head and down the spine), Ren Mai (up the front of the body), and Chong Mai (back down through the centre of the body), so I have split it up into three sections of active, or ‘governing’, methods, which roughly trace these channels, followed by a period of silent sitting, or ‘non-governing’, and finally a closing ritual to return to normal consciousness.

The real meditation really lies in the ‘non-governing’ phase, which should really be at least as long as the ‘governing phase’, and preferably longer. This ‘non-doing’ segment is where all the beneficial consequences of the ‘doing’ part get assimilated into our being.

I’ve endeavoured to keep these instructions free of jargon. You don’t need any understanding of the channel system to follow along.

Just approach the practice with an open mind and heart.

MEDITATION

Find somewhere quiet where you are unlikely to be disturbed, without demanding or expecting silence. Notice your environment; sounds, sensations, smells, temperature. Accept them without judgement, without any notion of whether they are good or bad, with neither desire, aversion, nor indifference. Resolve to ignore distracting thoughts, impulses, itches, and small discomforts. Avoid practising on a full stomach, and make a firm intention to give your full attention to the meditation process.

If it’s possible and comfortable, sit with your hips slightly elevated on a cushion, one foot tucked behind the other, so that you have three points of contact with the floor – your sit bones, and each lower leg. This way you will feel grounded and stable.

GOVERNING PHASE

Du Mai – the Governing Vessel

Begin by relaxing your jaw and connecting the tip of your tongue to your upper palate, just behind your incisors. Allow a slight smile to provoke within yourself a sense of inner peace and contentment.

Place your attention on the sensation of the breath as it enters and exits your nostrils. Here is your bridge to the external world, your bridge to life. Your breathing is ever-present and automatic, but can also be brought under conscious control. Do not adjust your breathing and simply be aware of it.

Notice any perceived shallowness or irregularity, but withold judgement. Notice the difference in temperature between inhalation and exhalation. Notice the qualities of your breathing – its rhythm, smoothness, depth, and sound. Notice the pause between the end of an out-breath and the next in-breath. Notice how your breathing changes over time.

Now fill your lungs to capacity, allowing your belly, chest and shoulders to rise, and your back to expand, and sigh audibly as you breathe out slowly.

Gently close your eyes and look to a distant horizon. Look as far as you can see, and allow your gaze to soften its focus. Gradually bring your gaze to a point between your eyebrows. Relax your brow and move your awareness to within your body. Forget the outside world.

Have an intention to relax the thin sheets of muscle across your scalp. Find a point at the apex of your skull on a line between the tips of your ears. Rotate forwards around your temples to slightly tuck your chin and gently draw this crown-point upwards, lengthening the back of your neck without introducing tension.

Allow this movement to gently lengthen the spine. Maintain its natural, supple curve, but feel spaces opening between your vertebrae. Relax the muscles of your back, and rely on the upright, stacked structure of your spine to effortlessly maintain your posture.

Imagine your bones floating upwards, and all your muscles melting away, hanging from the bones like clothes from hangers. Allow your flesh to release its grip on your bones. Let go of any muscular tension you do not need.

Roll your shoulders back and down, and let them settle in a neutral position. Feel their weight and allow them to slope away from your ears, accepting the push of gravity.

Relax your elbows, wrists and fingers, and feel the bones of your hands spreading open. Through your palms you maintain your connection with reality, and with others.

Ren Mai – the Directing Vessel

Feel the weight of your whole body sinking down through the tripod of your sit bones and lower legs. Trust the ground and notice how effortlessly it supports your mass.

Get a sense of spaciousness in your abdomen, as your upright posture stretches your waist between ribs and pelvis.

Observe your ribs expanding and relaxing with each breath. Has your breathing changed? Is it slower, deeper, quieter, more easeful?

Keep your chest in a neutral position, neither hollow nor thrust outward. Feel the softness and vulnerability of your neck.

Return your attention to your tongue against your upper palate. Is your jaw still relaxed? Are you still smiling slightly? Are your eyes and brow still soft?

Chong Mai – the Penetrating Vessel

Direct your awareness more deeply towards the interior of your body. See if you can feel the mass of your eyes, brain, and skull. Inquire. Don’t imagine. Really take the time to feel it.

Move your attention downwards from your head into your torso, searching for areas of mass and solidity, and areas that are hollow and spacious.

Can you feel the weight of your liver and spleen? Can you feel and hear your heartbeat? Allow your attention to rest here for a while, with an attitude of patience and kindness.

Feel your breath. Feel your circulation. Feel the subtle movements within your body. Even within stillness, there is movement.

Feel the motion of your lungs expanding and flexing your diaphragm, causing your abdomen to rise and fall. Feel the even circularity of your breathing. As you exhale, allow all your soft tissues to relax and sink downwards away from your skeleton.

Be aware of your kidneys sitting behind your bottom ribs. Feel their weight. Feel their warmth. Feel your own inner vitality.

Gently contract your perineum, and allow your awareness to float up into your lower abdomen. Imagine a line connecting your lumbar spine to a point two fingers’ breadth below your navel. Draw another mental line from your perineum up to this horizontal. Where the lines meet, rest your attention lightly upon this point.

Here is your centre.

Now be aware of your entire body, of the space you occupy. Locate your extremities – the outermost layer of your skin, the very tips of your hairs. Can you feel the air around you? How far beyond yourself can you feel?

Listen to your whole body. Listen to your head. Listen to your heart. Listen to your abdomen. Again, find your centre. Let your breath settle here. Let your mind settle here. Absorb into your centre.

As you inhale, feel everything contracting inwards, like a slow implosion from your skin to this central point. As you exhale, allow everything to expand and relax.

Stay for a while with this sense of squeezing and releasing the whole body.

Gradually reduce it to a gentle contraction and expansion in the lower abdomen.

Let it become increasingly subtle, until it is a squeeze and release of the central point.

Let the breath become increasingly subtle. Here, at this physical centre, your breath and awareness combine. Body and mind move together in easeful harmony.

NON-GOVERNING PHASE

Listen, beneath the breath, behind the heartbeat. Any sensations that arrive, simply notice and accept them with disinterest. Any thoughts that come, just observe them steadily until they subside of their own accord. Don’t get involved. It’s just your brain doing its thing. Focus on your breath. Focus on your centre.

If your attention scatters or wanders, gently bring it back. Allow it to sink back down through the body, like sediment settling in a pool of cloudy water. Let it sink down slowly to your centre so the water becomes clear and still.

Cultivate a sense of calm and timelessness. Enjoy a feeling of profound rest and stillness. Allow yourself to abide here. Let go of any control of your breathing. Forget your body. Forget your mind. Sit silently.

Sit silently.

For as long as you wish, remain in stillness. In silence.

CLOSE

When you want to finish your session, scan once again through your body, relax and adjust your posture. Feel everything sinking down through the sit bones, and regulate your breathing to a slow, even rhythm.

As you inhale, squeeze and contract your whole body. As you exhale, relax and release your whole body.

Repeat this several times, before slowly expanding your awareness and returning to a natural breathing pattern. Has this changed since the start of the session?

Feel the breath at your nostrils. Begin to reconnect with the outside world. Notice any interior feeling of peace, stillness, spaciousness, harmony, equanimity. Allow yourself to enjoy that feeling. Do not rush.

Begin to foster an intention to move. If it serves you, place your hands palms together at your chest, keeping a little space under your arms, and bow your head in a gesture of gratitude.

Rub your palms together and place your hands over your eyes. Feel the warmth of your hands. Swallow, rub your brows and face, and slowly open your eyes. Observe any changes in your environment.

As you inhale, move your arms outward and upwards in a circular movement, folding in at the elbows before the shoulders can raise. As you exhale, bring the hands down the centreline of your body. Repeat these circles as many times as you like to close your meditation.

To finish, massage, stretch, mobilise your joints, and gently shake your body. As you stretch, be mindful of the connective tissues pulling and lengthening like spiderwebs. As you twist your waist and turn your neck, imagine you are wringing out a damp towel.

If your legs are numb, wait for blood flow and sensation to return before rising slowly and carefully from your seat.

*

Whilst going about the rest of your day, try to reserve some space in your being to preserve this sense of inner peace. If things happen to activate your sympathetic nervous response, take some time out afterwards to breathe, let go, and move towards this familiar state of internal relaxation.

Try to establish a daily routine of meditation practice. Give it some priority, but don’t make it a chore. Don’t add it to your To Do list. In fact, you should tear that up.

Don’t expect miracles. Don’t look for ‘experiences’. Don’t seek out visions or revelations.

Enjoy your meditation. It is a rare opportunity in your day to fully unwind, rest the mind and body, nourish yourself, and find your centre. Meditation can heal you. It can clean you from the inside.

You might not notice much from day to day, but when you look back after a month or two of consistent practice, you will see a difference in yourself. Less reactive. Less hurried. More open. More generous. More in tune with your own being. More in tune with others.

Each day, your experience will be different. Your practice won’t grow in a straight line, and progress will be slow, like a tree growing from a tiny acorn. But trees grow big. Really big.

Don’t aim for anything in particular. Don’t set goals or time limits. Don’t try too hard, or feel guilty if you forget. Don’t seek to ‘get something out of it’.

Just sit.

You won’t regret it.

The Great Unlearning (of how to live)

Allergic to stress?

A friend of mine reacts badly to gluten and stays away from products that contain it. He used to live in London where he had a more stressful job, longer working hours, shorter sleeping hours, a higher intake of alcohol and marijuana, and a difficult relationship with his girlfriend. If he ate anything with gluten in it, his body went on to red alert. He’d experience intense discomfort in his torso and feel physically ill.

But since moving back to the north of England, he has settled into a less pressured existence. He has an enjoyable job, gets more exercise and better-quality sleep, is happily single, and has pretty much stopped drinking and taking recreational drugs, at least with any kind of regularity. Now, he can eat a sandwich made with wholewheat bread and experience only the mildest of symptoms. The reaction is still there, but it has been dialled right down.

It has been widely reported that allergies are on the rise. Allergies that only a few years ago were rare or unheard of are now becoming widespread. More and more children are growing up coping with allergies, some of which can be quite debilitating. Some are even potentially lethal histamine responses. But nobody really seems to know why this is the case. Air pollutants are often blamed. Or pesticides and chemicals used in food processing.

These could well be true. But I’d suggest, at least judging by my friend’s experiences, that stress is a huge factor. When we are locked in a sympathetic nervous response, producing excessive amounts of cortisol over prolonged periods, our bodies’ inflamed state is much more sensitive to allergens.

So many people are living as my friend used to do. Under pressure from work and family commitments, they are pushing their bodies and brains further and further. They are sacrificing essential things like sufficient quality sleep and rest, a good diet, slow and mindful eating behaviours, country walks and hobbies, time to play and to slow down for a while, all for the sake of the next deadline, the next sale, the promised pay rise, fear of redundancy, of being late, of missing out, of falling behind. They push themselves harder and harder until finally there is a collapse. Their health fails them. They suffer a heart attack, or a nervous breakdown. And then, if it’s not already too late, they begin to make changes.

Perhaps this hypersensitivity to allergens is a kind of warning signal our bodies our giving us. The body is saying, “Hold on, I’m getting really inflamed here. I’m exhausted. Haven’t you noticed?” But too many people don’t notice. They’re too busy to notice. Too focused on external pressures to look inside and see what’s going on.

Can’t sleep? Take some sleeping pills and fall unconscious instead. Can’t wake up? Pump yourself full of caffeine and nicotine. Can’t wait for the guy in front of you to pull away from the traffic lights? Fly into a boiling and impotent rage at your steering wheel. No time to eat? Grab some ultra-processed fast food and guzzle it while you type. Type faster. Take fewer breaks. Squeeze more and more out of yourself until you’re a neurotic, zombified husk.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

Why are allergies becoming more prevalent in children, then? They don’t work twelve-hour shifts. They don’t have to cope with pressure and deadlines. Except, increasingly, they do. From primary school they are tested and graded. Play is sanitised and increasingly proscribed. They are infected by our obsession with safety. They are swamped with information, overloaded with the burden of knowing.

And when they’re not being pushed at school, they’re often mesmerised by flickering blue screens at home, where even more information floods unchecked into their prefrontal cortex. They struggle to find their own identities in a vapid, glamorous, shimmering, false world of global social networks and unprecedented disconnection. Their growing, restless bodies move less and less, and their anxieties and disruptive behaviours spiral out of control. We have more clinical depression now amongst children than ever before, and it’s getting worse.

Not only that, but children are sensitive creatures, and they are bound to soak up and reflect the stresses of the adults around them. Stress is like a contagion, and it’s so entrenched now in our frantic society that it has become normalised. It’s what we expect and accept. The trouble is, our bodies don’t accept it. They can’t. When we are always “On”, our bodies go haywire. And so we see record numbers of people, both old and young, with chronic anxiety, sleeping and eating disorders, anger and addiction issues, irritable bowel syndrome, asthma, ulcers, migraines, problems with blood pressure and immunity, hormonal imbalances, cancers… and allergies.

It’s not that allergies are on the rise. Stress is on the rise. And not the healthy kind of stress that pushes us to act and excel, and then switches off for us to recuperate and gather ourselves; but the unhealthy kind of stress that is chronic, habitual, and excessive. When we live continuously in this inflamed, sympathetic state of “fight or flight”, our ability to deal with aggravating factors such as allergens is suppressed. Allergies may well be exacerbated by pesticides and greenhouse gases, but I would suggest that our inability to deal with allergens is exacerbated by stress. In a state of enervation, our immune systems panic at the slightest disruption. The result? A mysterious epidemic of gluten intolerance.

Solutions in stillness

So what can be done? I would suggest that rather than raging at “the system”, at our bosses, or fossil fuel magnates, big business, big pharma, food corporations, banks, governments, social media, news stations, or any of the other “evils” that perpetuate this stressful status quo, we should look instead to ourselves. Those things are only symptoms of the world we create for ourselves. And the world we create comes from within us. Our experience is not “out there”. The more time we spend ruminating on the injustice of it all, the angrier we are going to get. Those cortisol levels are just gonna keep on climbing. The only thing you really have control over, it may horrify you to know, is yourself. Your own responses. Disengage automatic and shift to manual.

Slow.

Down.

Make time. Switch off the TV, switch off 24-hour breaking news, switch off social media, switch off the endless parade of podcasts and box sets, and just slow down. Go to bed earlier. Eat carefully. Eat healthily. Exercise, but gently and moderately, without some pointless external goal of beating a certain time, or lifting a certain weight, or losing so many kilograms, or burning so many calories. Just enjoy it. Pay attention to what’s going on inside.

Observe the quality of your breathing, the tone of your voice, the way you move.

Slow down.

Wake up from this state of self-induced hypnosis. When was the last time you did nothing? I mean, literally nothing. No distractions. Just you, by yourself, in a dark room. Sitting. Being. Listening. You can make time for it. It’s not a waste of time. It’s the most productive thing you’ll do all day.

Give it twenty minutes at first. Just sit. Don’t try to do anything. Don’t slow your breathing. Don’t acquire a certain posture. Don’t try to stop thinking. All of that will come with practice. For now, just sit. Do nothing and pay attention. If your mind wanders, gently draw it back to listening, to feeling the body breathe. It’s intensely pleasurable, if you just let go and allow it. Give yourself space. Give yourself time. Just twenty minutes, and your whole body will unwind. It will enter a parasympathetic state. You’ll digest your food better. You’ll breathe better and deeper. You’ll be able to sleep. You’ll have more energy. Your mind will relax.

With practice, you will become more patient, kinder, more content and comfortable in your own skin. You will react to things more consciously, more wisely. You’ll become more aware, more focused, less scattered and under-pressure. Instead of feeling drawn and tired, you will feel spacious and present. Everything will slow down, and you will have more time. All this from just sitting and doing nothing.

It takes practice, of course. And it’s a practice that can go really deep. It can really change things. But anybody can do it. There are no barriers, except for your own excuses, your own reluctance, your own doubt and forgetfulness. My suggestion is, don’t think of it as “Meditation”. Don’t make it a chore. Don’t add it to your To Do list. Look forward to it. Make room for it. Just sit for a minute. Allow that minute to roll into two, three… before you know it half an hour will have passed, and you will feel wonderful. Centred. Rejuvenated. Forget those anti-ageing creams… forget Botox… external concerns will fade away.

But if meditation seems too intense, or too “out there”, there are alternatives. Brisk, mindful walking, with a soft gaze and your attention on your steps. Try not to waste any energy as sound. Make light, silent footfalls. Feel your body moving and breathing. Enjoy it. If a thought comes along, step away from it mentally and watch it drift away.

Or, when it’s time for a meal, prepare one yourself. Enjoy the scents and textures. Anticipate. Then, when you sit down to it, turn off any distractions. Focus only on your food. Be ponderous and sensuous. Luxuriate in it, like you’re in one of those phoney chocolate advertisements. Eat one morsel at a time. Chew thoroughly – experience all the flavours, and notice how they change as you masticate. Only select the next morsel once you’ve swallowed down the first. Don’t hurry. And if you catch yourself hurrying, poke fun at yourself and slow down again. Don’t take things too seriously. No crime has been committed here; you’re just eating your dinner.

When you finish, sit a while. Allow your body to digest. Feel the food inside your digestive tract. What? No reflux today? How strange… Sit a little longer. Read for a while. Now go for a little walk… Hold on there! Slow down! Think reggae, not techno. Adagio, not presto. You’re still digesting; we’re just encouraging a little movement to help things along. You see, it’s all about the quality of how you do things. It ain’t wotcha do, it’s the way that you do it: that’s what gets results.

A treatment such as therapeutic massage or acupuncture could also be a great way to slow down. Talking to an acupuncturist in a therapeutic relationship, lying on a table and being touched in a reassuring and relaxing way, allowing the needles to gently steer your body into healing itself… just lying there and resting your mind, feeling the weight of gravity upon your body, feeling the breath move in and out of your torso, will help to bring you out of your chronically wired, hyper-vigilant state. That’s guaranteed.

Moving solutions

Personally, I get a huge amount of pleasure and benefit from practising tai chi. Over and over, the same, slow, precise, flowing movements. Remaining observant and curious amidst the repetition. “What else is here? What else?” Going deeper, layer after layer. Never saying, “Okay, that’s it. That’s as far as it goes. I know it all now.” There’s always another layer to uncover. Only when we stop holding on to what we think we know, and embrace what we don’t know, can we truly start to live. Only then can we be present, spontaneous, and respond to what is really here, rather than what we think is here.

But if tai chi sounds too dull, there are other ways, too. Yoga, or Qigong, or martial arts like Aikido, Wing Chun, Baguazhang, or Xingyiquan, all place great emphasis on internal awareness. Integrating mind and body. Listening. Exploring. Feeling. Being mindful of our limits.

Many of the professional athletes we admire actually end up sacrificing their health because they’ve pushed their bodies too hard. They end up with chronic injuries, or simply depleted. Chinese health practices value quality of movement (fluidity, connectedness, grace and balance) over quantity (how much, how far, how fast, how strong). The point of exercise is to nourish the body, not to exhaust it. If we end up breathless, beetroot-faced, and dripping with sweat, we’ve probably gone too far.

Warming the body to the point of just beginning to sweat is about right. Push yourself a little, by all means, but don’t do it all the time. I love going barefoot running over moorlands and on woodland trails, but I don’t do it every day, and I take it easier in the winter months. Cardiovascular exercise is an important facet of a comprehensive exercise plan, but we shouldn’t over-exert ourselves.

Nor should we focus too much on one aspect. Chinese methods include standing practice (known as Ding Shi or Zhan Zhuang), where we stretch, relax, focus the mind, raise the skeleton, sink the soft tissues, and find and develop internal connections through static postures; and loosening practices (known as Fan Song Gong), where we allow the body to soften and swing, move from our centre and release muscular tension. In Qigong we keep the mind still while the body moves gently, smoothly and fluidly; in Dao Yin we move more forcefully to purge and cleanse the body.

There are lots of other options beyond the punishing slog of treadmills, spin bikes, free weights and machines. Pick something you can look forward to. Find a realistic level of commitment. Make it sustainable, and make it fun. Be creative and diverse. Don’t “train” or “work out”; just move and enjoy moving. Inquire into sensations, get a sense for your internal structures – your bones, muscles, sinews and organs – and for the spaces around and between those structures.

Try stretching and foam rolling; using acupressure or massage balls; using Swiss balls, balance boards, and skipping ropes; try asanas, inversions, and resistance work using body weight; or finding new and unusual ways of moving the body – animal mimicry, spontaneous movement, dance… anything! We just need to get things flowing. Think babbling brook, not stagnant pond.

Placing more value on organising the body around the core, and improving suppleness and joint mobility, seems eminently sensible, rather than just trying to run further and faster, or lift heavier and heavier weights. In our bodies, in our minds, in our lives, we need to find centre.

Most of the people I know who are regular long-term gym-goers have some kind of chronic or recurring injury. Generally, this is due to bad form, over-enthusiasm, peer pressure, or over-exertion. Also, because they’re plugged into their headphones they’re not really listening to their bodies, and they have purely external goals such as stopwatch times or rep counts. Internal practices like yoga, tai chi and qi gong emphasise actively listening to the body, and with this kind of inner awareness you’re much less likely to strain something. What’s more, when your mind is immersed in your body’s activity, when you’re actually present, your efforts are more fruitful. Your awareness and intention are essential parts of it, and these are much-neglected factors in the modern, mechanistic approach to exercise.

I don’t think you can really put a value on how much is too much exercise – that depends entirely on your age, weight, diet, constitution, gender. It fluctuates according to your state of mind, your general level of activity, the climate, the seasons, the time of day. What matters is to refrain from draining the body’s resources, and to have an appropriate balance between activity and rest. Yin and Yang, brother…

Give it a rest

Rest is vital. We underrate it in modern society, or rather, we pay it lip service and then get on with the really important stuff. We have a mechanistic approach to sleep. We allocate a minimum number of hours to be “wasted” on instructive dreams and deep rest, and dispel this annoyingly unproductive state with a shrill, insistent torture-alarm in the morning.

Then we dither and delay.

Then we rush around like lunatics, enacting the same mindless, unvarying routines each morning, so we can go exhaust ourselves with tasks and meetings and chatter at work, and then collapse in front of flickering screens and tubs and buckets of greasy and sugary foods in the evening. We wonder why we’re tired. “All I did last night was sit and watch my latest box set and then drift into a mindless scrolling trance on my phone.” Active, active, active. Doing, doing, doing. Always looking out, never in. Never stop. Always go.

And then we collapse.

Everything caves in. Blue lights flash. If only we’d listened. If only we’d slowed down.

We may well have an allergy crisis in modern society. But it’s only a symptom; a symptom of stress. But even stress isn’t the root cause. There has been a Great Unlearning in the modern age. We’ve arrogantly dismissed the old wives’ tales, the folk wisdom, the elders and shamans, the witch doctors and scholar sages. We’ve supplanted it all with productivity targets, profit margins, packed schedules, full diaries, fussin’ an’ fightin’. We live in a permanent state of distraction. We’re terrified of silence. Strangers to ourselves.

We’ve forgotten how to live. We fight against nature instead of flowing with it. We enforce artificial patterns on our lives. Timetables. Rotas. Alarm clocks. Shifts. We illuminate the night. We eat or exercise before bed. We view our bodies and minds as machines or tools. Things to be used and exploited. We search endlessly for efficiency, for maximum output. We cover our failings and inadequacies with pills and quick fixes. We become increasingly unconscious. Increasingly serious. Increasingly knowing.

Where does all this get us? Our technologies are like superpowers. Our understanding of nature, chemistry and cosmos is supreme. We’re subatomic. We’re supersonic. Our medicines are like miracles. We’re connected like never before. But we’re disconnected from our own selves. We’ve never been more miserable, bored, and ill. Never been more inflamed, frantic, and neurotic. Most of us don’t realise until it’s too late. This is the insidious reality we’ve created. We’ve lost our way. Forgotten the point. Divorced from meaning. We’ve defined ourselves silly and forgotten who we are. What this is.

We’ve polluted our world, but don’t worry – we’re too clever by far. We have a cunning plan. We know exactly how to solve this conundrum, and can foresee all possible consequences. Interference is the best policy. Here’s the graph to prove it. Just don’t look back.

We think we know best. We cram everything in and suffocate ourselves, as though it’s all so incredibly important. And we leave out the things that actually are important: good eating habits, sleep, rest, exercise. Peace. Ease. Satisfaction. It’s so simple and obvious, yet it’s so easy to ignore. And then we suffer. We create our own problems, and then struggle to resolve them. We make things complicated. We need more. We need to try harder. Push harder.

No. We need less. We need to release our iron grip. We need to wake up, take notice, and respond appropriately. Our bodies know best. Let’s just listen to them. Let’s just relax a little. Let’s make time for ourselves. Let’s just slow down, and let go. Bring everything to stillness. And then listen. Really listen. Stop doing. Stop knowing. Slow down. And let go.

Let.

Go.

This is going to hurt: Pain, Acupuncture, Meditation, and Qigong

We get many people coming to our student acupuncture clinic with chronic pain. Some are looking for a solution that avoids surgery, or reduces the need for painkillers; others have tried everything and acupuncture is their final, desperate recourse! (Charming!)

Chronic pain is a strange phenomenon. In many cases of musculoskeletal injury, the actual tissue has long repaired itself, but still the pain lingers, as though the brain is stuck in a habitual and unhelpful loop. There is no longer any need for pain signals to tell us to protect the area, yet still the nervous system persists.

Not only can our nervous response to pain be baffling, but so can our psycho-emotional response. People tend to mentally separate pain out from themselves. They take ownership of it (“My bad leg…”). They even, as with one patient we had recently, actually personify their pain and give it agency: “My bad back doesn’t like it when I move like this.”

Is this healthy? On one level, it is an instinctive coping mechanism. Like anything else for which we feel aversion, we naturally want to push it away, remove it from our experience. So this mental trick of objectifying pain is our mind’s way of reducing it. The trouble is, it just doesn’t work. In fact, by solidifying it as a definable “thing”, we’re probably making it worse. We’re probably embedding it deeper, entrenching it into our daily experience. This mental response could even be the very thing that is blocking our ability to heal.

I discovered a wonderful little book recently, called “Pain is Really Strange”, by Steve Haines, and illustrated by Sophie Standing. Laid out in comic strip format, it makes for a short but entertaining and enlightening read. The main thrust of it is that pain is not the simple, mechanical response to injury or dangerous stimuli that most of us imagine it to be. It’s much more complicated than that. And thoroughly subjective, too.

Haines gives various examples: there is one person who felt agony at the merest touch of a feather, and another individual who ran a race with a broken leg. Surgeries to remove nerve endings around painful cancers only result in the pain returning later, and more severely. I’ll refrain from summarising the whole text, but it suffices to say that pain is… er… well, it’s really, really strange.

But it is an entirely malleable phenomenon, and chronic pain can be reduced – even cured. Even understanding our pain better can help to reduce our experience of it.

Acupuncture can certainly work, too. In Chinese Medicine, pain is viewed as a stagnation of Qi and Blood. By needling appropriately, we can instruct the central nervous system to move energy in the relevant channel and shift the area of stagnation. Unblock the dammed river and get things flowing again.

In fact, in many cases, working to retrain the brain is a far better strategy than painkillers or surgery. Haines suggests a few techniques, including the visualisation of joyful and free movement, and also changing our linguistic relationship with pain.

Often, the problem is compounded by the language and metaphors we use. We talk about “combatting” pain, and view it as our enemy – something outside of ourselves. Perhaps this dissociative relationship is only further embedding our experience of pain? Perhaps it would be far better to feel and accept the sensations we experience, and refrain from labelling it as “pain”, or even something “bad”, at all?

This is easier said than done, of course, and I certainly don’t mean to belittle people’s experience of chronic pain, but there is much evidence in mindfulness research that the meditative technique of refraining from overlaying judgements on our direct experience is in fact an extremely healthy approach. As a way of dealing with chronic pain, which seems to be as much a habit of the mind as anything else, this attitude of detachment and acceptance, this method of direct perception without subsequent labelling, could be a crucial part of the healing process.

Then, of course, there’s the obvious response to a state of stagnancy… move! Literally, physically move. Move the body, move the blood, move the lymph, move the Qi. Move in small ways. Move in new ways. We all intuitively know that if we sit still for prolonged periods, our bodies get clunky; we get aches and twinges, we lose our flexibility and our connection to our physical selves. Muscles shorten. Joints stiffen. I have definitely seen a huge increase in suppleness and fluidity of movement since I started practising yoga, Qigong, Taijiquan, and Baguazhang. Better posture. Better connectedness. More relaxation. Less stiffness. Less pain.

By viscerally connecting, immersing, your mind into your body, yoking your breath, and switching off your headphones, you can reach unimagined levels of inner awareness.

Which brings me to the solution to pain that Haines seems to emphasise most: we should seek to increase our skills at proprioception and interoception. In simple words, we should learn to look inside. By increasing our awareness of our own bodies, we can reduce our experience of pain. The parallels here to Daoist meditation techniques are uncanny and undeniable. Neidan (internal alchemy) methods incorporate looking at and listening to the internal body with a great deal of sensitivity and detail, employing contrasting methods of both stillness and movement. Neidan teaches us to explore our thoughts and our breath, and to fully inhabit the physical body, by feeling the internal organs, paying attention to inner spaces and structures, feeling sensations, and becoming aware of inner processes, all with a mindset of calm, detached curiosity…

… It would appear that modern pain research may have just “discovered” the benefits of Daoist meditation and Qigong in the same way progenitors of western dry needling techniques “discovered” the efficacy of acupuncture!

Oh well, we may be a few thousand years behind the Chinese, but we get there in the end…!

Haines’ book is excellent, and I highly recommend it, but it is particularly interesting when viewed through the lens of traditional Chinese health practices. It turns out that our best recourses to reducing pain are a combination of Daoist meditation and mindful movement, such as Qigong, yoga, or martial arts. Or dance. Or swimming. Or running. Or walking. Anything, really, as long as it is done with our fullest attention and awareness.

What’s more, establishing a meditation and mindful movement practice won’t just help you to deal with pain; it will help you to relax and let go of all sorts of anxieties, ruminative thinking patterns, stuck and attritional emotions, self-doubt and negative thoughts, lack of confidence and motivation, emotional trauma, unhealthy cognitive loops, habitual responses, unconscious and automatic behaviours… the list goes on!

Haines reassures us that pain is plastic, and we can change it in a similar way to learning to write with our weak hand. It requires small steps, gentle persistence, and a creative approach to retraining our own minds. Pain is a subjective phenomenon, and as such it is within our capacity to change it. We all know experientially that if we tell ourselves something is going to hurt, then it probably will.

Yin-Yang & Letting Go

It took me a long while to realise this deeply, and enacting it is an ongoing and never ending process, but letting go is the fundamental thing we need to do in order to find real contentment in our lives. We have to get out of the way, and then our path is clear.

It begins by looking outside. This is unconventional. Most meditators would tell you to look in, but I think it is helpful to first look out. Look around you, and you will see that all things are in a process of arising and dispersing. We see this in the daily cycle, in the seasons, in our own mortality – everything comes and goes. Then look inside, and you observe your blood, your thoughts, and your nervous system and emotions all do the same. Nothing stays still. Life is like the waves or tides of the ocean, in a constant exchange of rising and falling, of ebb and flow.

Keep looking, and you will notice that everything depends upon everything else. Look outside, look inside; it doesn’t matter. Nothing stands apart – nothing exists in isolation. Things might appear to us as separate, for our minds have learnt to discern things from our senses, and to create borders that say, “I end here, and you begin there”. This is different to that. But really, we cannot exist alone. We each require ancestry, family, breath, food, light and warmth. Our very existence is reliant upon all the rest of nature, and indeed the whole universe, existing alongside us. In fact, we exist not alongside other things, but within them, and they within us. We are in a permanent state of change and exchange. Life is wholly interdependent, like a vast web of interconnected parts. Everything is really one thing.

Imagine a circle. Nothing left out; everything contained within. Imagine the ocean; the waves rising and falling, the tides ebbing and flowing, but the ocean itself remains itself – it is always the ocean; the movements create no separation. They are contained within the ocean and are an inseparable part of it. From the choppiest surface movements, refracting light in many directions, to the deepest, darkness stillness beneath, it is only the ocean, thoroughly the ocean, and nothing else. The waves are the ocean, the tides are the ocean, the deeps are the ocean. Life is like this: many things and one thing, simultaneously.

This is where we begin, with this circle that contains all things. And because the things we perceive are really strands of one great web, waves of one great ocean, there really are no things that can be said to exist at all, truly. Yes, of course things exist, as we ordinarily see them. But in another sense nothing exists exclusively, of its own accord, because all is just a rising and falling. Does a wave exist? Can you separate it from the ocean and say, “Here is a wave!”? No, the wave is just process. It is an exchange. It is not a thing that can be pointed to, or removed. Its existence relies on all the other peaks and troughs around it. Everything is like this: on one level, things appear, and we can grasp and identify them; on another level, they are impermanent, dependent, and exist only in relation to their surroundings and their origination.

So what does this mean for us? Over the course of our lives we develop a strong sense of self. As children, we are often asked: “Do you like this one?” and “Which is your favourite?” We are encouraged to have preferences, and we are encouraged to feed our sense of self. We see ourselves as ongoing, individual entities, and we nurture that view with preferences, with likes and dislikes for things that are other. Here is me, myself, a thing. And over there are all other things, which are not me. Some things I am attracted to, and I grasp at them and hold on the them, and make them a part of this concept of “me”; other things I am indifferent to, or I push them away and label them as “not me”. This is a useful outlook for subsistence, but it is useless for realisation. And unfortunately, we layer our perception of separation with a substantial, abiding self-nature. But as we have observed already, all things are one ocean, one web. All things are me. Everywhere I look, there is “me”. So what meaning has “me” at all, then? If all is one, then there is no “me”. “I” exist only as a passing, dependent idea, a wave that requires all the other waves to have any meaning at all. It is this wavelike “me” that we need to drop, for it is the cause of all our confusion and suffering. We don’t need to annihilate it; on the contrary, we need to accept it and view it for what it really is – just a passing idea. We can play with it. We can use it. But we do need to stop holding on to it, and let go. If we fully grasp the notion of impermanence, then it becomes apparent that not even for an instant is there any abiding self anywhere, for all is in flux, in an eternal state of becoming.

If we identify strongly with the ocean-like “me”, then we are no longer pushed and pulled around by our preferences as we engage with the external world. We can experience this “bigger me” by turning our awareness inside and looking internally, instead of allowing ourselves to be influenced and entranced by our senses. As we sit and observe inwardly, we see clearly the chaotic tumult of the ocean’s surface. The quiet space beneath the madness of our thoughts. And if we just look at that self-generating chaos, without engaging with it, without identifying with it, then we can sink deeper into the stillness beneath, where lies a profoundly peaceful experience of the present, and which simply has no need for any notion of self. It is an all-encompassing awareness that does not separate subject from object, this from that, self from other; nor does it reject this duality – it embraces that too. This awareness is what lies beyond the borders of the circle we imagined. It encircles the circle, and observes everything within it. Like a mirror, it simply reflects whatever is, and requires no sense of an “experiencer”. The waves rise and fall, but the ocean is one, and the observer is unmoved, equanimous, perfectly still. Yes, things appear, and there is perceiving, but there is no perceiver.

When we move from this place of stillness, it is with the understanding that separate existence is only apparent, and that by holding on to the notion of self we create our own suffering. Two things naturally follow: compassion, for we are no longer separate from the suffering of others; and amusement, for the “cosmic joke” of our own absurd delusion is revealed, and we can let go of the ridiculous burden of the self. So long as we remain mindful, and do not cling to our idea of self-nature, then we are free. Sometimes this is spoken of as joyfulness, but to my mind that is not quite right. Joy is a state of agitation, whereas this freedom emerges from a place of stillness and contentment. And, it’s important to make clear, nor does this mean we live in a state of unchanging, soporific calm. That is just more delusion – a kind of self-tranquillisation. Rather, we move, we engage, we laugh and we cry – but now we are grounded. We have a place of stillness to return to. We are no longer like boats tossed helplessly on the waves, victims of our own externality and discrimination; but we are anchored and can no longer be lost. There is a deep change in the quality of our experience.

The Heart is Yang. It is a place of activity. It pulses waves of blood around the body. It houses the Shen, the refined and ethereal aspect of our being. It is the seat of our vigour and manages our capacity to deal with life without anxiety or dullness. It engages with the world. It moves. It’s fire rises towards the heavens. It feels emotion… laughter, compassion, gratitude. It is a Yin organ, but its function is Yang; it is like the waves. If we split our circle in two, the Heart is one pole, above. It moves, but if it is to be healthy, it must be anchored in stillness. There is a seed of Yin that connects it and allows for intermingling with the Yin field below.

The Kidneys are Yin. They are water, and their motion is downward, towards the nourishing earth. They balance the rising fire of the Heart and store the Essence of our being. In meditation, the mind is allowed to sink to the lower Dantian. The body releases tension as the mind sinks through, the mind deeply lets go as it sinks, and the breath becomes quiet and stable, deep and fine, unhindered and unhurried. Mind, breath and body relax and release as one. Tension unwinds, and the “small self” unbinds; the attention is focused, unwavering, but with a quality of softness and gentleness; the awareness is clear and still, like an undisturbed lake on a windless day – or like the deep ocean depths. This is the other pole: the Dantian. It is still and quiet, a receptacle for our Yin energy, for our deep reserves; but within is the spark of life, the fire of Ming Men. The Qi gathers and fills, the poles open to one another, and the process of releasing and opening the body’s energetic channels begins to restore us to health and balance.

Two poles. One, Yin within Yang; the other, Yang within Yin. One is the waves, the other the ocean. Yin, anchoring; Yang, enlivening. Yin, internal; Yang, external. Both in communication, in a process of never ending exchange. One reliant on the other, completing the circle. Ebbing, flowing, interchanging, transforming. Here our circle becomes the the Taiji symbol of Yin and Yang, something arising out of nothing. If we nurture our Shen, our spirit, and keep it contained within, and we build our Qi diligently, then we can find a higher energetic state – we can be fulfilled. The circle spins and mixes Yin and Yang in equal parts. No more separation. We transcend our “small self”. We must create the correct conditions, and then our bodies and minds can heal and reach new levels of openness and vitality. Only when we grip and hold on to something does the circle stop spinning. It goes off-balance. It wobbles. Perhaps it falls. Perhaps it breaks. When the motion is halted, something stagnates, or it depletes and its opposite grows excessive. Then we have imbalance, and what emerges is ill-health of body and mind. Discomfort. Discontent. Disease. We hold on to our “little me”, our wavelike me, as though it exists by itself, and we separate ourselves from the rest of the cosmos. Then we are not living in harmony with nature. We are no longer aligned with truth. We are mistaken, but we do not step outside the circle, so we cannot see it.

You have to let go. You have to get out of your own way. Then we move with things, not against them, because we have no preference, and life is easy. That’s not to say that no difficulties arise, but when they do we can understand them better and know how to respond intelligently. Sometimes we can step aside or recognise and deal with them before they become problems at all. And nor is this to say that we become like nothing, nonexistent, nonentities, or that we are at the mercy of the will of others. In Taijiquan this becomes clear. You can do two things in tai chi, which are really the same: blend your centre with your opponent’s, and disrupt his balance or uproot him with Fa Jin by allowing the Qi to pass through unhindered; or, you can Song and release your mass to the floor so you are not there at all, and he is effectively attacking his own imbalance, his own tension, his own self. Both require you to let go of your self. You do not raise your energy against his, you do not stiffen or become angry, you do not defy or resist, but nor do you run away – you simply blend and release, and he is defeated. He is defeated, and you are not even there.

This is a very high level of skill of course, and one that I certainly cannot profess to have attained, not by a very long way. But it applies in all aspects of life, and in some aspects of my own life I have seen it work to great effect. By blending and releasing, you drop your self and become one with the whole. By letting go, you can attain mastery of your own being. You are no longer a nervous, confused and self-attached mind in a tense, imbalanced, uninhabited body. Mind and body align in harmony and you simply act in accordance with what is right. Not a moral, intellectual “right”, but a natural, universal and comprehending “right”, which might be termed De, or Virtue. By letting go you fall into the Dao, into the natural way, and you attain to De.

I have managed to successfully, even easily, drop some very long-standing addictions and unhealthy habitual thought patterns simply by letting go. It’s not even something you need to learn to do. You already know how to relax, but you are clinging too tightly to your self, so you cannot. Instead, you distract yourself and call that relaxation instead. You fill your life and fill your mind when you should be emptying it. Paradoxically, only by emptying your being will it become full. If you simply release the tension in your body, relax your breathing and let your mind sink naturally to your centre, then you can begin to experience what it is to truly let go. You have to be diligent and accept your imperfection. Embrace your own absurdity. Watch your own mind closely. See where it moves, how it gravitates to things and reaches out. It’s easy to do, but not to maintain. Know that you will fail, but that is when you learn. Be patient and generous, and next time, maybe you will remain mindful. Bit by bit, you release deeper and deeper. You have to unbind the mental, emotional and bodily clinging of a whole lifetime – that is no small endeavour. But if you practise, you will notice that your life is gradually becoming smoother. Recurring problems and difficulties no longer arise, or they fade away more quickly. You are lighter, but also more grounded. You are more responsive, more adaptable, less serious, less narrow, and more self-aware. This is not about achieving some mystical insight, some flash of enlightenment, or supernatural wisdom. It is simply a return to a more truthful and centred version of your being, which exists even now beneath the unhappiness and delusion that arises simply from holding on. Everything is right, just as it is. Even you. There is no need to hold on. Let go, let go so you can find a place of equilibrium and underlying peace. Not stasis, but harmony. Abandon the wave, and the ocean will catch you. It was you all along. You just thought yourself a wave. So draw yourself up and let go. Through loss, only gain. When you get out of the way, everything is clear.

Things flow. Flow with it.

The Mysterious Middle

The Lower Dantian. The Field of the Golden Elixir. The mystic central pivot of the human body. Mysterious, elusive, undefinable…

Or is it?

Since I first started practising Chinese martial arts and meditation, the concept of the Dantian has been ubiquitous. And the explanations I’ve heard regarding its nature have ranged from resolutely practical, to dismissive, to utterly bonkers.

I think first there is an important distinction to make. The Dantian referred to in martial arts is not exactly the same as that in Daoist meditation practices.

In martial arts it is the entire region of the torso, incorporating the lower abdomen, lower back and hips. In alchemical meditation practices it is a specific area deep within the lower abdomen located between Qi Hai (Ren 6 – Sea of Qi) and Ming Men (Du 4 – Gate of Life), directly above the perineum, where energy can be gathered and worked with in preparation for opening the channels.

The “alchemical” process is normally described as refining Jing into Qi, and subsequently Shen, but I’m going to try to avoid Chinese terms as it’s their misapprehension that tends to lead to the dismissive or preposterous positions I referred to above.

That said, there are similarities between the martial Dantian and that referred to in Neidan (alchemy).

In meditation, the Dantian is a focal point for the attention and the breath, serving to help quieten a person’s emotions and inner narrative.

As the breath becomes increasingly tranquil and deep, the mind sinks with it and the body can begin to conserve and build its energy. This process occurs within the lower abdominal space behind and beneath the navel.

As the body reaches a state of efficient, natural functioning, undisturbed by the mind, it releases nervous and muscular tensions, corrects habitual misalignments, and invigorates the organs.

Undistracted by external stimuli or internal stressors, the production and transportation of substances like blood, lymph, marrow, hormones and enzymes becomes optimised. Stagnancy is slowly eradicated and the body mobilises internally, unobstructed by emotional and physical blockages (which are not separated in Chinese Medicine as they are in the Western model).

There are many specific exercises that lead the body through this process, but with diligent long-term practice the body and mind can both settle and stabilise at a steady, open awareness and easeful, healthy flow.

The Lower Dantian is central to this “alchemical” change. As the process continues to advanced levels, which I certainly do not have authority to write about, the Middle Dantian (at the heart space) and Upper Dantian (at the forehead behind Yin Tang, which some theories have associated with the pineal gland) become more important as Qi is further refined to Shen, usually translated as Spirit and encompassing the insubstantial realm of consciousness.

In martial arts, the breath is also sunk to the region of the Lower Dantian. A degree of tension is maintained in the abdominal wall on inhalation, as with the reverse abdominal breathing technique of Neidan, and dissimilar to the calming abdominal breathing method of Buddhist meditation, where the belly is allowed to inflate with the in-breath.

Reverse abdominal breathing is not unhealthy or unnatural, as I’ve heard claimed. It simply allows the back and upper abdomen to inflate rather than the lower abdomen. Reverse breathing is still a deep and soothing breath, and with practice can feel quite natural and easy. It “pressurises” the body on the inhalation, with a feeling of squeezing into the centre.

It also encourages a total relaxation on the exhalation, allowing everything to further sink and let go (whereas “Buddhist” breathing can introduce some tension into the abdomen on the out-breath if overextended). Done properly, reverse breathing is a soothing and stabilising practice that helps to locate the energetic Dantian.

Why is the breath so emphasised? Because it’s the gateway between our bodies and the rest of the world, where our conventionally perceived boundaries between external and internal become blurred and fuzzy.

It also marks a boundary between surrender and control; we can’t help but breathe, but we can influence the breath, and the quality of our breath can in turn influence our body and mind. It can help activate the parasympathetic nervous system, eliminate airborne toxins, and aid in purging our “inner toxins” of excess stress, dysfunctional feelings, and retained and repressed emotional trauma.

I’m not saying we can literally breathe out our wounds and scars, but we can create the right conditions in the body and mind to encourage such a release.

Let’s turn our attention to our attention. As in meditation, in Chinese martial arts the attention is gently placed in the Dantian (and in similar arts such as Aikido, where it is given the Japanese term, Hara).

Why place the attention here? Shouldn’t you be alert to external threats? Looking outward?

It’s because, from here, at the centre of the body, the mind can move in all directions. There is an equality of awareness, and a heightening of peripheral awareness. You are not unaware of the external; you are finding a global awareness that encompasses everything rather than making distinctions between front and back, inside and out. If at least part of the mind is always at the centre, it can respond more quickly, as it doesn’t need to be pulled from total engagement with another stimulus.

Here, at the centre, the mind can be quiet, and listen. Placing the attention at the Dantian has a calming effect on the mind, nerves, and emotions, allowing for smoother and quicker reactions as the awareness has no distractions or preoccupations, being totally present with, comprehending of, and intuitively responsive to a situation. (See the discussion of Yi in my previous post, “Internal Circles”).

It helps ensure an appropriate response, too, as the practitioner is less likely to be overcome by fear, anger or an unhealthy desire to dominate another person.

Sinking the mind to the Dantian also allows for a finer sensitivity to the inner connectedness, flow and tension within the body. These are crucial qualities to be nurtured in the internal martial arts, without which much of their power, depth and intrinsic beauty are lost.

Finally, and perhaps most obviously, the Lower Dantian is emphasised in martial arts because it is literally the centre of the body. Here we find our centre of balance, and, when the pelvis is sufficiently dropped from the thorax, our centre of mass.

Being mindful of the Dantian helps us to move in a balanced and coordinated way. When we organise the body around this central fulcrum, our movements are more powerful and united. No part of the body is left out, detached from, overextended or exposed (and therefore vulnerable), as everything is contained and always returning to its centre.

When a strike is generated from the body’s centre, it is not only more biomechanically forceful, but it also allows us to return immediately to a relaxed, sunk and rooted posture that can’t be easily manipulated or overcome. It also allows us to move smoothly in all directions equally, physically as well as mentally.

Our rootedness is created by the physical relaxation of the soft tissues around the bones, as we release tension from the mind and muscles, and allow gravity to connect us strongly to the earth.

It’s interesting that when we carry stress and tension, we tend to hold it in our upper back and neck, it causes our shoulders to raise, and it gives us headaches. It rises within us and disconnects us from the earth we stand on.

When we relax the body and, while maintaining a sound skeletal posture that’s also aligned with gravity, allow everything to drop away from the head at Bai Hui (Du 20 – Hundred Meetings), the shoulders and the sacrum can be released, and the habitual anterior pelvic tilt that office jobs have inflicted on so many people, can melt away. This is what gives the characteristic “sitting” posture of Chinese martial arts. The pelvis isn’t deliberately posteriorly rotated – it’s simply released to its natural, healthy position.

This relaxed positioning of the Dantian area allows us to move from our centre with fluidity and efficiency, and allows for more effective transference of power from the legs to the upper body.

I love the Chinese way of explaining concepts such as the Dantian. Their talent for precise but poetic metaphor is one of the things that draws me to their whole culture.

But sometimes things get lost in translation, such that Westerners either decide not to engage with it at all, because they don’t understand it; or they start imagining all kinds of fanciful things that are simply not present in their somatic experience.

And, to me, it’s our somatic experience that facilitates our accurate comprehension of reality. Our imaginations are powerful, and wonderful, but they shouldn’t override and distort our basic perception of reality.

By allowing our awareness to sink and settle at the Lower Dantian, we find a place of equilibrium, rootedness, peace, relaxation, sensitivity, calm understanding, connectedness, and holistic health.

The Dantian is not mysterious, elusive or undefinable; it’s simply the centre of our being, of our unified experience of body, breath and mind.

Expect the unexpected

New beginnings…

It would appear to be an auspicious time, if you believe in auspices, that is. The vernal equinox has ushered in the Spring and the first new moon of Aries has risen. There is much excitement among the astrologically inclined with regard to the coming of the Age of Aquarius. Although it would appear nobody can agree on whether it has already arrived, it seems likely to me that it would approach more like a slow-rising tide than a tsunami. A gradual transition as the Age of Pisces slips away.

We hear tell of a new era of rationalism, of humanitarianism and an opening of consciousness. We turn our backs on religion and worship and embrace science and self-direction. Perhaps it found root in the Age of Enlightenment, and sent out green tendrils with the smog and oil of the Industrial Revolution. We fly rotorcraft on Mars; Voyager 1 still hurtles away from us, 14 billion miles distant, having turned and shown us how fragile we are as a pale blue dot in the vast ocean of space.

We wake up slowly to the devastation of carbon dioxide and plastic. We look upon stranded, emaciated polar bears and strangled whales with empathy. It becomes apparent that our role is not to yoke Earth to our needs and desires, but to harmonise with it. Not to stand separate, but to be within it. To be with it.

Finding harmony and balance is of course one of the fundamental principles of Chinese Medicine. It is the essential character of healing. With regard to emotional dysfunction in particular, the mind is required to reintegrate with the body – to harmonise with it. Not to stand separate, but to be within it. To be with it.

There is an implicit need for acceptance here. A willingness to exist as an embodied entity. Not to push away the parts of us that we dislike, but to acknowledge, embrace, and move beyond. Too often we try to separate out the mind, placing egg white and yolk in isolated containers that no longer communicate. And that way lies disharmony and suffering. We can’t live as disembodied minds. Only when mind and body mix thoroughly can we function as integrated, realised beings.

This mixing of body and mind is a central aspect of Daoist meditation practices, for only when the mind is absorbed into the body can transformation occur. It’s also a key characteristic of Qi Gong, whereby mind, breath and body move as one, and in Taijiquan, whereby the postures and movements reflect the continual exchange and transformation between Yin and Yang.

Within each of these opposing and mutually supporting forces we find the seeds of the other. Within Yang, there is a seed of Yin; within Yin, a seed of Yang. When one reaches its fullest expression, it is inevitable that the other will find a chink and begin the cycle anew.

New beginnings…

As part of my Chinese Medicine studies we were invited to try a divination using the Yi Jing. My Baguazhang practice had already led me to this ancient text, which I viewed with cautious interest. I’d stopped short of an actual reading, though. The college tutor suggested we use a website to attain our reading, but this kind of impersonal, computerised randomisation seemed to me to be at odds with the Daoist outlook. Despite their commonality in binary language (1, 0 or solid line, broken line), there is no awareness, no mind, involved in a computer-generated result.

A decade or so ago I would have been highly sceptical of this kind of “woo-woo”. But my understanding has changed. A clear mind is a powerful and perceptive entity. It has huge potential for insight and intuition. If an open awareness, not occluded by desires, aversions or false ideas of itself, is mixed with a perception of reality in the present moment, something very special can result.

I had no yarrow stalks so I used some feng shui coins and cast those to determine the hexagram, with an open question in mind about my venture into Chinese Medicine. Number 52: Ken – mountain over mountain. With two transforming Yin lines, leading to number 50: Ting – fire over wind. I have to confess I hadn’t really entered this exercise with any great faith or hope; I was mildly curious but had no real expectations. Yet there it was: a result I could only interpret as highly auspicious and meaningful.

There was a journey laid before me, from a state of stillness, meditation, wu-wei, bodiless repose, to a state of rejuvenation, alchemical transformation, self-sacrifice and supreme good fortune. Here before my eyes was the process of Nei Dan – from silent meditation to the cauldron of inner alchemy.

Which leads the cynical side of me to question: what if the result had been something that seemed irrelevant or ambiguous? Would I have dismissed the whole thing as nonsense? Probably, yes. But intention is a powerful force. It is capable of forcing through circumstances to see the fruition of our will, often to disharmonious and harmful outcomes. Only when intention is light and aligned with the natural unfolding of things does it yield a bountiful harvest. A non-forceful, gentle intent can lead to an experience of gliding easily through life. Things happen for you, not to you. Too little intent, or too strong an intent, and stuff gets in the way. Life becomes a struggle as you try to walk against the current, or drift helplessly at the mercy of fickle winds.

In Chinese acupuncture, too, the correct, gentle but prudent intent of the practitioner in selecting and needling points is crucial to the treatment’s success. Along with the mind-state of the patient in being receptive to the suggestions of the needles, to respond and heal. Was my own mind mixing with reality in the correct way? Was my detached ambivalence just the right kind of unforced intention? I can’t answer that, but the results of the divination nevertheless resonated with me.

The power of intent is very much a part of Xingyiquan – it is the Yi in its name. Our intention is a crucial and determining factor in how we interact with substantial reality. In meditation, the intention should be delicate, like an hypnotic suggestion. If it’s too powerful, the mind is stirred up and cannot settle in the body. It can cause tension and disturbance where we seek relaxation and stillness. But without any intention, there is no instruction to be still. We sit and our attention is pulled around helplessly by our random thoughts, emotions and memories. With a subtle intent towards meditation, we can enter a process of quieting and subduing the mind so that it can sink with the breath and begin to form the lower Dantien – the keystone to opening the channels, unblocking locations of habitual stagnation, and restoring the body to its natural, flowing state of health.

New beginnings…

And so with great optimism did I regard the Spring of 2021. In the internal martial arts there is the metaphor of the dragon awaking and leaving his cave, meaning that the inside of the body mobilises in the correct way for the Jin to be expressed and released. Hence my choice of the Azure Dragon, the Chinese symbol of power, rebirth and vigour, in naming this blog. He is a representation of my own new beginnings in the three pillars of medicine, martial arts and meditation. Altogether, they are a potent elixir for change, touching every aspect of being from posture, to organ health, to peace of mind, to will and creativity. Apparently diverse and unrelated parts of our being reorganise and interrelate as we move towards wholeness.

This all sounds very promising. But then I sprained my ankle.

A stupid, seemingly random, accident. Not even a dramatic one. Just a humdrum but nevertheless painful sprain. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself feeling frustrated. I can’t work (my current job involves a lot of hiking and physical activity). I can’t go running. Can’t do yoga. Can’t circle walk. Can’t practise tai chi. Can’t do turning forms in Wing Chun. Can’t even go for a stroll in the warm, sunny weather that has heralded the passing of winter and, hopefully, the end of the worst ravages of the coronavirus pandemic.

Sure, I can still practise meditation and Qigong. I can still study. But it’s still a shock to have everything else just… stop.

Acutely, as I hobble about the house, wincing, I am reminded that I am not in control. I should expect the unexpected. And, slowly, I begin to realise that there is wisdom to be found in these apparently unfortunate circumstances. There is a Chinese parable about a Daoist farmer, known widely as “Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?”, in which a series of connected events bring a farmer alternately good results and bad results, such that he can never agree with his peers’ assessments of his good or bad fortune. “Maybe,” is all he replies, unwilling to assign any notion of good or bad.

Likewise, here I stand (slightly lopsidedly), faced with an instruction from the universe not to get carried away by my own notions of how things are unfolding. Like John Snow from A Song of Ice & Fire, I know nothing. Moreover, I’m not an omnipotent dragon; I’m a fragile human body, mortal and transient, with tendons, ligaments, bones, muscles and fascia that pop and tear and break. There’s an opportunity to find humility here.

It’s also a chance to experience and come to terms with pain. To learn to deal with it through acceptance and relaxation, rather than fight and resistance and tension. In some small way, it’s a vehicle too for nurturing greater empathy for those around me who live with far greater or chronic pain every day.

And perhaps here also is an opportunity to briefly enter a more Yin period, stripped of my usual (and possibly excessive) activity, allowing for a time of reflection, slowness and rest. Maybe, it’s just what I needed.

An opportunity for new beginnings, only not as I had intended.