Letting Go — Like Autumn Leaves

Dan Pienciak, Ocean Grove, NJ

This past July I had the pleasure to audit (for a day) the teacher accreditation in the mountains of northern New Jersey at Carmel Retreat. As I walked in for the morning session, I was struck by two very meaningful words which Ed Altman had written on the board. They were two words which I had not seen in this room when I attended this event for my own accreditation as a TCC teacher the summer before. These are two words which I often find myself repeating to my own students: “Let Go!”

When packing the night before, I had dropped my unopened mail into my travel bag. Arriving hours later at Carmel Retreat, I discovered among the contents a mail order catalogue featuring a theme of leaves. In my walk the next morning, I was touched by the tender rustle of the leaves moving freely in the breeze on the hillside. Then, when I walked into the conference room, Ed Altman was wearing a handsomely printed shirt of . . . yes, leaves!

We worked with Ed and Sister Antonia all day on moving from the waist with loose waist and loose wrists, letting the Chi circulate outward from the T’an T’ien, and not focusing on the hands. “Let the hands be like the leaves on a tree, which is rooted in the earth,” Ed reminded us all. I remembered how a Polish nun once told me the translation of my last name “pien,” means the part of a tree where the trunk joins the roots. I again learned to “let go” in the shoulders and upper arms, and bring my awareness to the soles of my feet. and I heard myself in my own classes urging my students over and over to “let go.”

As I drove down the mountain after supper to begin my trip home I happily recalled the words of John Muir (which I had quoted in my accreditation presentation the year before):

Climb the mountains and get their glad tidings.
Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
The winds will blow their own freshness into you
and the storms their energy,
while cares drop off like autumn leaves.”

I know that this Fall as I contemplate the softness of the colored leaves floating down, I will be reminded in my T’ai Chi Chih practice, as well as in my life, to surrender, release, and “let go.”