adaptability and the common good versus the rule of individual (group) interests, unshakable dogma, and rigidity: general 618

The longer you have been involved in practicing a Taoist philosophy oriented bodymind method and the deeper your experiences with it are, the more the attention shifts away from the formal aspects of the movements.

The movement routines and techniques are important in the beginning to guide you into a new space, allowing for new experiences. The external forms are all you see in the beginning. The philosophy associated with a Taoist bodymind practice possibly attracted you to one of these methods in the first place like in my case, but the philosophical and spiritual depth is difficult to grasp and to get hold of while working with the forms in the beginning. As fascinating as they and the whole framework they are a part of might be to you, the philosophical concepts are somehow only dimly visible and experienceable in your beginning physical practice.

Then, you might increasingly start to feel the depth of the forms when you have worked with them for some time. The movements offer a framework to experience philosophical and spiritual concepts. The concepts you feel attracted to are now not only intellectually convincing anymore. They are step by step translated into and turned into a personal physical experience. By now, the movements have become less and less important by themselves. It is the concepts that you work with and experience physically in these movements that become your focus. The movements could also be and can be different movements. There is such a large variety of traditional Taoist bodymind practices, and it is fascinating to be able to approach topics and issues from different angles.

When you have physically worked with concepts of Taoist philosophy for a longer period of time, you are very much aware of the limitations of a solely intellectual approach to these concepts, though you might nevertheless very much enjoy their intellectual analysis. By now it is a physical experience that makes you see that, though these concepts also travel through the world of verbal language, they are not bound to that sphere alone, and that it is so much more thought-provoking, and above all, more meaningful to deal with concepts of Taoist philosophy in a multidimensional way.

I want to illustrate this with a simple example. I have talked about the coordination of hands and feet in the overall process of physically improving coordination. There are complex exercises to make hands and feet become more alive in Taoist bodymind practices and to open the pathways between them. The process also contains a lot of technical and medical knowledge.

When you lift the arms, you do not do an isolated arm movement. The whole body gets involved in this movement. You at first consciously involve, for instance, the feet, the leg muscles, the hip joints, the abdomen and pelvis, the diaphragmatic muscles, the muscles around the shoulder blades, the shoulders. And with increasing practice, you take much more into account than this. You widen the network of cooperating partners step by step: muscle groups, joints, inner organs, acupuncture centers, etc… Like this, it is easier to approach non-responsive areas, areas with too much or too little tension, etc… More and more parts of your bodymind get involved in this process (of evolving coordination spirals).

The movement experience, however, does not only stay within your own bodymind. The knowledge of the old Taoists was deep. Early on, you learn that the coordination of hands and feet is not just about hands and feet, and the act of coordinating hands and feet is not just something happening within a separated individual body. When working with the feet, you extensively work with the ground below you (天地人的地), while simultaneously having an upwards orientation (天地人的天). The clearer these „external“ relationships are, the better the hands feet coordination. „Ideal“ „internal“ coordination relies on „ideal“ coordination with the „external“ environment. The idea is to have movement impulses freely move within your complete body (氣通不通), into your body, and out of your body. You know that you need to first sense clearly and then to open up the periphery of your body for a free exchange of these movement impulses with the environment around your body. The movement practice, therefore, is also about sensing and communicating with the close and with the wider environment of your existence. This is not about expansion in the sense of conquering and occupying. It is about extending for a fuller integration, about sensing oneself as the environment. A bodymind practice like this is so much more than a narrow fitness experience.

You can restrict a Taoist philosophy oriented bodymind practice to the fitness level, and it still feels wonderful. And I can teach it like that of course. But what a pity is this if you consider its real potential!

A Taoist bodymind practice is also not just about dissolving movement blockades in your body and improving the functioning of your inner organs. It is also about yourself experiencing yourself energetically as something within a wider energetic context to become a more meaningful part within larger meaningful contexts—social and, particularly for the Taoists, environmental contexts.

In other posts I mention the back and forth between emotions and physical manifestations and its coordination integration in Taoist and Buddhist bodymind methods (面帶微笑 心澄貌亦恭 welcoming, polite, and respectful communication and interaction), socialization processes impacting individual bodyminds impacting socialization processes, and so forth. There is nothing banal about coordination in Taoist philosophy oriented bodymind practices. They can not bloom in mechanistic environments like fitness centers or authoritarian (political) systems. Their practice, on the other hand, fits very well into environments, trying to restore a more meaningful interaction between human beings and their wider contexts. The healing process naturally spans individual, social, and wider contexts.

You experience the complexities, and you experience the impossibility to meaningfully „controlling“ these endless complexities (willfully, intellectually, individually). At this stage in your bodymind practice working with the concepts of self-organization (自然、自化) and non-action (無為) from the Tao Te Ching make much more sense than heavy will-control or any other authoritarian patterns that disturb complex ecosystems with their „narrow-mindedness“, even when only simply lifting your arms as in our current example. In this context, softness, flexibility, adaptability, and all the water examples in the Tao Te Ching become the guiding principles for the unfolding of movements and movement coordination.

You are using your will. You are using your intellectual abilities. You are also initiating processes. But to an increasing share, you also retreat, listen, and observe within a bodymind practice. You take care that your ignorant voice is not too loud in this gigantic orchestra.

With an authoritarian teacher student relationship or a wider social environment that is authoritarian, the concepts of Taoist philosophy in a bodymind practice get distorted, and their possible positive and widely constructive impact gets modified and limited. This is another reason why I am so opposed to a Chinese party defined and controlled practice of Qigong and the party’s spin on it.

Qigong has been successfully marketed by the Chinese communist party for its health benefits because this is what the Chinese movement traditions have unfortunately deliberately been reduced to by the party. This is an important reason why nowadays most people in the West interested in the Chinese movement traditions, mistakenly taking Qigong for the representation of tradition, now approach them exclusively from this narrow health perspective. But the original scope of Chinese movement traditions, especially if they come out of Taoist and Buddhist traditions, is so much broader, and they can have far-reaching implications for sociopolitical developments, if they are integrated into educational frameworks in a wide variety of different settings. This is why I am practicing, exploring, and writing about them in the first place.

It does not really matter what the professional field you are operating in is. If you are operating within a progressive environment, it will be helpful to apply a systems approach to the way you operate yourself. How could an „external“ so-called systems approach really work if the ways you deal with your bodymind are not systemic, individually, or community-wise? How can a systems approach not include yourself?