The Here & Now Of Completing Your Weight Shift

Being present to the present is an essential part of our T’ai Chi Chih practice and spiritual journeys. Yet, having the presence of mind to live your life with awareness takes practice. For some reason early in my TCC practice I adopted a bad habit of keeping much of my weight still in the yang leg and never quite flowing freely and completely into the yin. I was on to the next movement before I was fully into and out of the last.

That is what it is like to never fully be present to the present. We find ourselves tied to the past with our weight still settled into what was. And our focus can be pulled into the anticipation of “what might be,” finding much of our life’s weight thrown off balance as we lean into worrying about what may come. To live either way is to live off balance. Like always mentally being somewhere else when reading a good book, you reach the bottom of the page and find you are wondering what you just read. Rather than our core leading our movements, we find our unfocused extremities leading the way or holding us back.

We live in a culture that is continually off balance and out of breath. There is this dreadful busyness that drives us to feel a kind of worthlessness if we aren’t always doing something. Multi-tasking (doing more than two things at a time) is the new rage. This can nurture a frantic awareness-disconnect with our living moments. To live this way day-to-day is a kind of Homerian tragedy, allowing the sirens of distraction to blissfully lure us onto the rocks of inattentiveness.

Conversely, listening to and doing faithfully what this moment requires is the heart of awareness. Breathe. Step. Connect. Listen. Notice. Repeat.

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1) Each step, every breath, each heartbeat has its “now” time. The present is the only commodity we can purchase with any certainty using the one true currency we all possess: life. The purchased past is already wrapped and delivered, painted and defined. The possible future is not up for sale yet. All that is truly ours to touch, hold and shape is happening in this very moment.

Listening to your body, staying attentive to your movements through the weight shifts, can keep you connected to where you are – to your living “address.” In our TCC practice we faithfully complete the weight shift in a gently soft rhythm, attentive to the flow of our energy from yang to yin. The joy of movement we speak of comes to us in the awareness of, and living into, the rhythm of our life’s present moments.