A Few More Words ... Ninth Month

Tai Chi, Qigong, and even meditation always talk about letting go of muscular tension. It’s one of those fundamental statements everyone makes. We’re told to relax, release tension, not use strength, and become more internal.

In Taijiquan, we often talk about moving away from forceful muscular effort toward something more intrinsic, but taking that idea too literally can create problems.

We still have to use muscles. If our muscles stopped producing tension, we would fall to the floor. Even standing quietly requires continuous muscular activity. Every movement we make involves muscles producing and regulating force.

So what are we actually trying to do instead?

When we practice Tracing the Wall, for example, the whole body is involved. We are moving slowly and repetitively, sinking and rising, shifting weight, bending and extending the legs, and maintaining the relationship between the spine, pelvis, head, arms, and feet. Throughout the movement, we are continually trying to relax.

But relaxing doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. As we sink, the muscles in our legs and the rest of our body work to control the movement. Some muscles produce force while lengthening, while others help stabilize the joints and maintain our balance.

When sinking, the legs support our weight and the body compresses. There is muscular tension, even as we are trying to relax and release unnecessary effort. But this is different from deliberately tightening the body to lift a weight.

You could call this the Yin side of muscular tension.

When we lift a weight, we actively produce force to overcome resistance. When we slowly lower a weight, however, we are still using our muscles, but in a different way. The muscles control the descent as we yield to the weight rather than trying to lift it.

We aren’t limp, and we aren’t simply relaxing. We are allowing the weight to move us while maintaining enough control to guide what happens.

This is closer to what we are doing in many of the movements of Qigong and Taijiquan. As we sink, we follow gravity in the movement rather than trying to control everything through muscular effort. The legs naturally compress, the muscles respond, and we continually adjust the amount of tension needed to maintain the movement.

This doesn’t mean that Qigong is the opposite of weight training. Both involve different kinds of muscular activity, and good strength training also teaches us to control a movement rather than simply force it. The difference I’m pointing out is in how we approach the movement and how we use the body.

Instead of telling someone not to use their muscles, we should say that we want to use no more muscular force than the movement requires. As we practice, we learn to let the muscles that need to work do their job while releasing the tension that isn’t necessary.

But that isn’t the end of the story.

In traditional Taijiquan, we aren’t simply trying to become more efficient at using our muscles. We are gradually changing how the entire body supports itself and produces movement.

As unnecessary muscular tension is released, we begin to rely less on isolated muscular effort and more on the integrated relationship of the muscles, tendons, and other connective tissues, joints, and bones.

Modern anatomy may give us terms such as fascia and connective tissue to help describe aspects of this, while traditional teachings speak about the sinews, bones, qi, and blood. I don’t think we need to make these two ways of describing the body identical in order for each to help us understand what we are experiencing.

Traditionally, the warmth produced through practice is associated with mobilizing the qi and blood and allowing them to penetrate more deeply into the tissues, sinews, and bones. Over time, the body is cultivated to become increasingly pliable, connected, and responsive.

So when we talk about relaxing the muscles, we aren’t talking about making the body inactive. We are trying to remove the kind of muscular effort that interferes with this deeper integration.

That gives us another way to understand song (鬆), which is often translated as relaxation.

If we understand relaxation to mean the absence of muscular activity, we quickly run into a problem. A person can use very little external force and still have a great deal of unnecessary tension.

Think about someone learning a new movement. They may tighten their shoulders and neck, clench their jaw, grip with their hands, tense their abdomen, and stiffen their legs simply because they don’t yet know how to coordinate the movement. Without realizing it, they try to gain control by creating tension throughout the body.

Someone with more experience, however, may be dealing with considerably more force while being much more relaxed. The difference isn’t necessarily how much force is being produced. It is how that force is being managed and how much unnecessary tension accompanies it.

You can feel this directly in Tracing the Wall, Taijiquan, or any other Qigong practice. When you sink, do your shoulders tighten? Do you grip the floor with your toes? Does your jaw clench, or do you tense your abdomen before you even begin to move? If you pay attention, you can often find places where you are working harder than necessary.

The question then becomes whether we can do the movements without that extra tension. We aren’t trying to make the body limp or take away the structure it needs. We are learning to distinguish between what is actually required to move and support the body and what we are unnecessarily adding to it.

I think this distinction is important because the traditional goal goes much further than simply becoming a little more relaxed.

Stuart often told a story about one of Master Liang’s teachers who could stand in the Golden Rooster posture on one leg. If you felt the calf of his rooted, weight-bearing leg, it was just as relaxed and pliable as the calf of the leg suspended in the air.

That is incredible when you think about it. Most of us standing on one leg would feel the muscles of the supporting leg become noticeably firm as they work to maintain our balance and support our weight. Yet his rooted leg remained soft and relaxed.

This master’s ability illustrates how much further the cultivation of song can go than our ordinary understanding of relaxation.

We can say that muscles must still be working because the teacher is standing there on one leg. That may be physiologically true, but it doesn’t adequately describe what he had developed through practice. He had trained how to support himself without the kind of muscular hardness most of us would expect.

This is why I don’t want to define song simply as using our muscles more efficiently. That may help us understand what is happening at one level, but the traditional practice points toward just how much muscular tension can be released while still maintaining rootedness, balance, and the ability to move.

This is one of the reasons slow practice is so valuable.

When we move quickly, unnecessary tension can be difficult to notice. We may not realize that our shoulder tightened when our hip moved or that our hand contracted when we shifted our weight.

When we slow down, we have time to sense what is going on and make adjustments. We can pay attention to how one part of the body affects another and begin to recognize patterns we might otherwise overlook.

Modern movement science gives some useful terms for understanding part of what is happening. Co-contraction, for instance, occurs when muscles on opposite sides of a joint contract at the same time. This helps stabilize the joint and is a normal part of movement. But when we aren’t relaxed or Yin in a movement, we may use much more contraction than necessary.

This can make us feel more stable, but it can also make the movement stiff and inefficient. Through slow practice, we can begin to discover how much of that effort we can release without losing stability or control.

At the same time, we are learning to coordinate the body as a whole unit rather than relying too heavily on individual parts.

For example, when reaching out to push something, most people think of the movement as coming primarily from the arms and shoulders. But in Taijiquan, one learns to involve the whole body. The feet connect with the ground, the legs support the movement, the waist coordinates it, and the spine, shoulders, arms, and hands all function together.

The muscles in your arm haven’t disappeared. They still have to work. But they are no longer being asked to do the entire job by themselves.

This gives us another way to understand the traditional Taijiquan teaching that force comes from the feet, is directed by the waist, and is expressed through the hands. The movement is coordinated through the body rather than being generated primarily by one part.

This is a key distinction in developing intrinsic power. We are gradually moving away from isolated muscular effort and toward an increasingly integrated body in which the different parts work together.

Tracing the Wall provides a good opportunity to train this because the movements are slow, compact, and repetitive. You can pay attention to how your feet, legs, waist, spine, and arms relate to one another rather than focusing only on the part of the body that appears to be moving.

The more you practice, the more you can recognize when one part is doing too much work or when unnecessary tension is interfering with the movement of the whole body.

This leads me to think about the feeling of the body compressing when sinking in Tracing the Wall.

As you relax and gravity takes over, your feet may feel like they are pressing into the ground, your joints bend, and your body has to deal with the changing pressure. At the same time, you are supposed to relax and release tension.

At first, these things sound contradictory. How can we relax while supporting all our body weight?

I think the problem is that we tend to see relaxation and tension as opposites, as though one must disappear for the other to work.

We can sink while maintaining support. We can yield while remaining stable. We can allow the body to compress without deliberately tightening everything.

This is where the language of Yin and Yang becomes particularly relevant.

Stuart used to say that when Master Liang was asked what percentage of Yin and Yang we should use while doing the form, his answer was 100% Yin.

At first, this might seem contradictory. We are moving. We are supporting our weight. Sometimes we are rising rather than sinking. So how can the entire form be Yin?

I think Master Liang and Stuart were describing the quality or state we are trying to maintain throughout the form. And this relates to how Stuart would tell us to think about song energy.

He’d say to think about how a cat can be deeply relaxed while remaining completely attentive and alert. It doesn’t need to tense itself in preparation for movement. Its body remains soft and responsive, yet it can move instantly when necessary.

That is very different from being limp or passive.

This catlike quality is closer to the state of song we are trying to cultivate. The body remains relaxed and receptive while retaining stability (root), awareness, balance, and the ability to respond.

So even though we can analyze a movement mechanically and identify muscles contracting and lengthening, forces changing, and the body alternating between compression and expansion, that doesn’t mean we have to describe the practitioner’s internal state as alternating back and forth between being Yin and Yang.

Master Liang’s teaching sets a much higher goal: to remain in that relaxed, receptive, Yin state throughout your practice.

This is important to me because I don’t want a physiological explanation of muscular activity to lower the traditional goal of the practice. Knowing that muscles must be active doesn’t mean that we should settle for being tense. The Golden Rooster story gives us a physical example of just how far this development might go.

It also changes how I think about the idea of the Yin side of muscular tension. I don’t mean that there is a special kind of muscle contraction that belongs exclusively to Yin. I’m using the phrase to explain a different way of working with the tension that movement requires.

We can yield without collapsing. We can support ourselves without feeling stiff. We can sink and compress without resisting, and we can remain ready to move without first tensing in preparation.

This is also why I find it useful to pay attention to what happens during the movement rather than relying too heavily on descriptions of what the movement should feel like. We can talk about sinking, releasing, compressing, expanding, and becoming more internal, but the real work is learning to recognize these changes in our own practice.

We run into a similar problem when we talk about stillness.

In Taijiquan, Qigong, and meditation, we often emphasize becoming still. But the body is never completely motionless, even when we are sitting quietly or standing in a fixed posture. The muscles continually make subtle adjustments to maintain balance. The breath moves the body, and our weight shifts in ways we may barely notice.

So what do we mean when we talk about stillness?

I don’t think it requires the complete absence of movement. We can become quieter in how we move and reduce the unnecessary activity that accompanies our movements. This gives us another way to understand stillness within movement and movement within stillness. We can be physically active while developing a greater degree of internal quiet, just as we can sit quietly while a great deal of activity continues within the body.

The practice isn’t about eliminating all that activity. It is about changing our relationship to it.

This brings me back to Tracing the Wall. The movements are repetitive enough that we can begin to notice things we might otherwise overlook. We can feel when our shoulders rise, when our hands become tense, when the abdomen tightens, or when our breathing changes because we are working too hard.

We can also notice when a very small adjustment makes the movement easier. Perhaps we no longer need to hold so much tension in the shoulders, or we discover that we can sink without contracting the abdomen. We may find that the legs can support us without becoming as tense as we thought they needed to be.

These are small discoveries, but over time they begin to change how we use the entire body.

Modern movement science can help explain some of what we are experiencing, but I don’t think we need to reduce everything in Qigong or Taijiquan to biomechanics. The traditional language of Yin and Yang, song, sinking, releasing, qi and blood, and internal development gives us another way of understanding what we are cultivating.

I think both approaches can be useful without having to make them identical.

And this brings me back to the idea of the Yin side of muscular tension.

At first, this may simply mean noticing that we are using more effort than necessary and letting some of it go. But the traditional goal goes much further.

Master Liang’s idea of being all Yin, the image of the relaxed but completely attentive cat, and Stuart’s story of the teacher standing in Golden Rooster with a soft and pliable supporting leg all point to a degree of relaxation available to us that may be much greater than we can imagine.

The more I practice, the more I think song isn’t simply about removing tension. It is about discovering how deeply we can let go while remaining rooted, connected, attentive, and capable of movement.

Ultimately, we are trying to cultivate a state in which relaxation itself becomes the foundation of our strength. That is something we can practice every time we do Tracing the Wall, Taijiquan, any of our other Qigong exercises, or when sitting in meditation.