Finding Our Footing in a Time of Turmoil

A pandemic has altered our ability to act and interact, and we have witnessed civil unrest, which will hopefully lead to cultural awareness and societal change and growth. Add whatever troubling news may hit your day, and we are left unsettled, uncertain and off-balance. During times like this it is essential to find our emotional footing.

There is no better way than through T’ai Chi Chih. From the opening, gentle rhythms of Rocking Motion, our focused attentiveness to the movement of the Chi at the soles of the feet, the “Bubbling Spring,” grounds us into the firm bedrock of all life: the essence. As practitioners, we experience the extension of our rhythm echoed in the practitioners around us – even using correct social distancing – and experience a kind of release into a larger shared movement and grounding, a balancing of the universal energy. Our self-focus melts away as we surrender into a larger, gentle rhythm. It is here we experience that one no longer is doing TCC, but TCC is doing TCC.

Justin wrote that you can chase your shadow all day long and never catch it. But if you stand still under the noon day sun your shadow will merge with the body with no effort. This is the effort of no effort, and it strikes me that much of our practice of TCC is to find that place of effortless stillness that essentially engages all things. To find a firm footing is to stand effortlessly in that place of the “noonday sun” in movement and stillness.

Finding our footing is not about chasing after pat answers, much like grasping for dollar bills in a carnival cage. These quick fix answers are so often this world’s moving shadows. Rather, it is about finding that place of authentic stillness; that place that moves without moving with a consistent permanence.

“Properly seen, every incident in life points to the unseen Essence.” Justin wrote in Spiritual Odyssey. This is what it is like to look above the churned-up dust of the moment toward the solid horizon. The mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg wrote in the 13th Century about growth in her spiritual life: “The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things...” It was for her a window-lens through which she gazed upon a troubled and difficult world, and stood her ground with a firm and balanced stance, held in the stillness of an unshakable confidence.