Tai Chi, Standing Meditation, Letting Go, and Awareness

In training Tai Chi one will often be told to hold a standing meditation or Zhan Zhuang posture. The purpose of these postures is to make you stronger and more physically relaxed. There is an additional benefit here. To accomplish the task of relaxing you have to bring awareness into play. You work your way through your body feeling your insides. Your muscles, bones, organs, connective tissue. You work on letting go of tight places and easing more and more into relaxation. This is a kind of attention that most of us never pay to ourselves.

In terms of qigong wherever the awareness goes energy follows. This means that by moving your awareness to a certain part of your body you will direct energy there. Notice I'm not saying to visualize or imagine. Imagining is not enough. You need to simply observe and be aware of the area of tightness or pain. A helpful exercise that comes from the martial arts is to breathe deeply as you keep your awareness on the problem area. We will cover deep breathing in another blog but for now just do your best.

So you stand and breathe deeply, relaxing the body more and more. This practice should be done everyday. Start with 5 minutes and slowly increase the time to a maximum of 20 minutes. It will make you stronger, more resilient, and more relaxed. You can add this exercise to any workout routine and reap great benefits.

The Wuji Posture, the safest and simplest posture for standing meditation.

If you want to know more about Zhan Zhuang Standing Meditation please check out The Way of Energy by Master Lam Kam Chuen. This is one of the best books available about standing meditation for health and fitness.