Flowing Freely & With Balance

It’s always a joy when Justin joins us for a Tuesday morning T’ai Chi Chih teacher practice. He’s usually helpful with his suggestions: last time he came he said, “I see softness in the wrists, but I don’t see looseness.” To achieve the latter he suggested we take the attitude of people whom had nothing left to lose – as if we had just lost our best friends, or we had just been fired from our jobs. With everything gone, we could finally let go of everything else – including tightness in our wrists, our backs, or some other of the many places we hide tension.

In the middle of doing our practice with the “Boss” (Justin) watching us, it was understandable that we might have a little tension and not be flowing freely. What he was pointing out was for us to take a different attitude. No matter what was going on, no matter how stressful, no matter how anxiety producing it was … that was the moment to let go and feel ourselves flowing freely.

It’s easy to be relaxed when everything is going the way we’d like it. But that’s not usually the case for most of us. Not only are situations not going our way, but many times, it seems as if the whole universe has decided to gang up on us, making sure we don’t get our way. This is precisely when Justin’s advice is most necessary and helpful, because the alternative is to drive ourselves crazy or into a deadly challenging position. So the practice of looseness that comes while doing our TCC practice could save our lives. It’s a rewarding reason to practice loosely.

But looseness is just the beginning because benefits build exponentially. With looseness comes receptivity, as in from Pulling in the Energy. Where the flow of life had been blocked before, we are now in the middle of it, and it is in the middle of us. Remember how you feel when you enter that same timelessness Justin experienced while doing Passing Clouds in a Japanese garden – that Cosmic Rhythm where he felt that no one was doing anything because TCC was doing itself. How freeing it is to feel that we are in balance with life, loving and sharing the Chi.