Stillness and Movement

 

Stillness and Motion in Movement

or How Standing Meditation Can Help your Practice

    Zhan Zhuang (pronounced Jam Jong) is a standing exercise fundamental to the martial art yiquan (I chuan or Mind Fist). It's part meditation, part physical exercise, but it's just standing still. Seriously, the basic components of yiquan are a series of 5 postures that you hold from 2 - 20 minutes. Unlike Yoga, these standing postures are very simple, typically involving the weight evenly distributed over the feet, only changing the position of the hands and the depth of the squat for each posture. Yiquan masters claim that these postures will give you physical strength, increase cardiovascular health, promote mental clarity, and cure diseases.

    Before I get into a discussion of what I really admire about these exercises and how they can fit into a current training program, I want to look a little more at the foundation of practice and what the postures entail. The basic stance, Wuji (Wu Chi), is simply standing with the feet hip-to-shoulder width apart, the tailbone tucked under slightly in a pelvic tilt, the arms by the sides with space under the armpits so that they make a very loose oval shape, fingers spread slightly, shoulders relaxed down and slightly forward, and the chin tucked under so the crown of the head can extend gently towards the ceiling. Hold for 2 - 10 minutes.

    So this doesn't SOUND like a very challenging exercise... until you try it. When I first started doing Zhan Zhuang, I would try to force myself to hold some of the postures for a long time. I figured because I would do 40+ minutes of seated meditation, would do 60 minutes of yoga or Tai Chi, that the standing exercises SURELY must be easy. I was wrong, I hurt myself. More than once!

    I think the trickiest thing about Zhan Zhuang and other standing meditations is that the longer you stand, the more your body wants to tense to stay in place. The muscles that start out taking the postural strain fatigue, so your body recruits more and more muscles, or the same muscles at higher load, until a lot of the body is involved. Great, right?

WRONG.

Postural Load

     There are two basic types of muscles we're interested in when we're looking at movement and stillness: the postural muscles and the prime movers. The postural muscles are the muscles that give shape to the spine and trunk, the "essential" posture. We're talking about the muscles that support our bodies against gravity, create length through the spine, and keep us balanced in ambulation. These muscles tend to be "deep" or close to the spine- the diaphragm, the pelvic floor, the arches of the feet, the deep spinal stabilizers, the iliopsoas, etc. The prime movers are the muscles that are designed to, well, move the limbs. The quadireceps, the biceps, the pec muscles and so on.

    What isn't necessarily taught, however, is that these two systems need to work in harmony. It seems elementary- the postural muscles hold us up and then the prime movers operate around that framework. And optimally, that's how it should be! But through holding patterns, compensations, muscular imbalance, injury, self-expression, and even emotions, those relationships can change.

    What hopefully starts out as a system in harmony, can rapidly and totally without conscious effort, change and alter in ways that we don't expect. Muscles and fascial lose elasticity, can become adhered to other fascia and muscles, can shorten, lengthen, tense, or lose tone. Prime movers can take over postural roles, postural muscles can give up the fight against gravity, and we can decondition ourselves so that the "core" or deep muscles no longer give us the support that they are capable of.

Load

    Our bodies are constantly in motion. Rather, they are constantly influenced by forces that cause them to adapt. Remember- you are constantly conditioning your body somehow, regardless of how you value that conditioning. Even sitting and watching TV is conditioning because we can never escape the force that gravity exerts on our bodies (external) and we can never escape the forces that the weight of our extremities exerts on ourselves (internal). Sitting with the head slumped forwards puts the weight of the head over the muscles of the neck, shoulders, and back. Standing with the weight on one foot over the other places more strain on the loaded side.

    But more than physical load, we also have to contend with emotional load. Our minds, like our bodies, are constantly in motion (I think they are the same thing, as we'll discuss in a moment). Emotion is energetic motion- E-motion. If you think that sounds a little new-age-y, then emotions are an electro-chemical signal sent by brain to body through the nerves. Emotions effect muscle tension, as in defensive posture, or relaxation. The autonomic nervous system effects heart rate, blood pressure, resting muscle tension, breath rate, blood flow, etc. As above, so below, as within, so without. The one effects the other, always.

Zhan Zhuang

    So back to our standing meditation exercise. Let's go one step at a time and break this down, looking at physical and philosophical ramifications for each step.

Feet

    We start with the feet spread about shoulder width apart with the weight centered toward the front of the foot. The weight should be balanced between both sides of the feet, not so far forward that the toes clench, slightly off of the heel. The toes should point mostly forward, but not so that it's forced.  

    So, why this position? Well, here, the natural position of the foot lends itself to engaging the arch of the foot without excessive torsion. If the foot pronates, drops inward, the arch of the foot collapses, If the weight is in the heel, it's easy to lock the leg and send the postural strain into the skeleton and not into the muscles. If the toes are pointed outward too much, you might end up bow-legged or supinating. The whole posture of Zhan Zhuang is geared toward balanced effort and avoiding compensations, so starting with a firm base is very useful

Knees

    The knees are slightly bent, pointed the same direction as the toes. Here, we're looking at hip-knee-ankle-toe alignment. Not that there's an "ideal" alignment, but compensation at one joint effects another. So a collapse at the ankle (pronation) tends to pull the knee inward, tends to increase the lordotic arch at the lower back. Take some time to play with the hip-knee-ankle-foot alignment so that they're "active" but not excessively rotated in either direction. Starting at the feet, if you activate the arch of the foot, you might need to "squeeze" with the knees or rotate them slightly medially again to keep them in line.

Hips

    The hips should be slightly "tucked under", drawing the tailbone under into a pelvic tilt. This is another "wiggle" play where you have to pelvic tilt and then relax the glutes and lower abs. Tuck, relax, tuck, relax... trying to open the lower back or reduce the curvature and also avoid tensing the abdominals and messing with your breathing pattern.

Shoulders

    Shoulders should be relaxed without being slumped. Drop the sternum slightly, create space under the armpits. Fingers similarly should have some space. The head lifts gently toward the ceiling. The effect that we are trying to create is "extending" the spine or creating less of an "S" shaped spine and more of an "l" (lower-case L) shaped spine. You won't or shouldn't try to get rid of ALL of the curves, just a longer line, more evenly stacked.

Meditation

    After you get all of the postural bits, we get to the hard work. Maybe it took you a few minutes to get all of the steps in order and now you're there, now you're feeling good. Here's where the hard part starts... Now you have to...

get ready...

...

STAY RELAXED. Or relax, and then stay relaxed. Here's where the awareness, the internal focus, the real work starts.

Once you are in position, you have to stay ever-so vigilant, fully tuned in, listening oh-so-softly, oh-so-carefully, to make sure that you are relaxed. The natural tendency is, as the body fatigues, to start to shift the effort to other muscles. It's automatic, it's unconscious. It just happens- your body naturally wants to make any load easier so it transfers effort. So if you feel your neck starting to tense, re-adjust your head and shoulders and rib cage. If your lower back starts feeling effort, re-engage your pelvic tilt.

    And the longer you practice, the more positions you practice, the deeper and deeper the effort goes, feeling more and more sensitively into your body. It never ends, really, this striving for balance. Striving for relaxation.

Conclusion

    This is where we get to the line between meditation and exercise and internal and external. I've already posited that emotions and posture effect each other, that thoughts and muscles both follow a feedback loop. During Zhan Zhuang, the "inner" effort of keeping your muscles relaxed and keeping your mind focused blur, they become the same. That "energy" that normally gets wrapped up in making thoughts gets diverted into paying attention to your posture and strain. The effort of watching gets wrapped up in the effort of the muscles.

    Our internal struggles are mirrored in the physical body and the changes in tension in the physical body are reflected in the internal "tension" that we experience. Movement, even movement in stillness like Zhan Zhuang, is catharsis, and how we approach our bodies and the stresses that effect us I think shows a lot about how we move through life. Do we tread gently, or do we tread harshly? Do we posture ourselves aggressively, or compassionately?

    So as a physical exercise, Zhan Zhuang might help you find where in your body you compensate during movement. It will help you be more mindful of the postural vs the prime mover. It will help you tailor your effort to actual ability.

    But as a meditation it will help you focus on where we put our energy, how to focus that energy where we want it, and how to consciously relax body-and-mind.

   

So please, friends, explore body and mind through movement, and consider trying Zhan Zhuang for a while, too. 🙏 

Quality Vs Quantity

 

Let's Look at Exercise

    I have had a few conversations with a friend of mine recently about the topic of exercise. He does a martial art, helps instruct the class on occasion, and keeps his own personal routine very consistent. I would say he has a "body builder" mentality. Not because he necessarily lifts weights, but one of his definite goals is to build or sculpt his body into a certain shape and image. There is nothing wrong with this goal, certainly, as long as it is kept, I believe, within the context that there are many goals for pursuing exercise and movement. All goals are valid, and being "in-shape" is largely relative to each individual.

    Let's digress here: I am not at all claiming that the ACSM exercise guidelines don't provide a great framework for general health and wellness, nor that training for high performance is negative. I am also not claiming that being a "couch potato" is necessarily a viable movement goal or fitness program. But coming from a background working at a 55+ senior center, and working for the YMCA, I have come to espouse the idea of meeting people where they are, with what their own goals are. There are plenty of seniors, and I'd bet plenty of younger people, whose goal is to be active enough to be healthy. My argument is that the fitness industry as a whole as of the time of this writing tends to put down reasonable goals or to engender the idea that high performance goals are more "worthy."

Quantity

    I want to state from the beginning that these are my own conclusions on what I perceive to be the trend in pop culture, in social media, and in the fitness industry as a whole. There seems to me to be a huge push for movement quantity. By movement quantity I mean that it's output based. How many reps at what weight, how long can you hold the plank, how intense is your spin class or step class, how many calories did you burn on the elliptical? The output, the intensity, the duration, distance, or weight shifted tends to be the focus. There are many reasons for this- weight loss, for instance, happens more rapidly, in general, at higher MET levels (overall increase in metabolism due to demand on the system).

    The issue that I see with this quantitative approach to exercise is that the output becomes the metric. IE had a 'better' workout because I moved more weight on my bench press today. This can be a very dangerous way to think, and one that is so ubiquitous that it has become very hard to even notice! Even in yoga classes, like Vinyasa, or even Hatha yoga, the perceived quality of the practice is in the "heat" generated or trying to match certain angles and depth for stretches.

Quality

    So what, then, is a qualitative practice? Well, I always have to come back to Tai Chi where I was really first introduced to the qualitive aspect of movement. In certain Tai Chi and Qigong forms the instruction is to "move without effort" and to "integrate the external and the internal". Other instruction is "coordinate upper body and lower body". You're playing a game trying to figure out how to set the feet at the end of one movement so that the next movement can be more efficiently approached, you're trying to coordinate the breathing with the movement.

    Now, this is not solely limited to Tai Chi practice, nor is it limited to "mind-body" exercise as a whole. Martial arts, dance, hell even weight lifting all have this aspect of looking inward or proper form... when approached from that angle. There are many sources I've read from weight lifting, yoga, and other movement theory that all say how important this mindfulness is in your training. The issue that I see is the general trend in the industry to direct the consumer, the "uninitiated" into the high intensity, the high output, training and eschewing or denigrating or downplaying the more mindful practice.

Possible Solutions

    Now I'm not trying to rush to the end of a very complex debate, but I want to look at some ways to solve or marry the two sides of the equation. The industry will not change until the people who train teachers change or the instructors change what trainings they want, that much should hopefully be fairly obvious. Or, what the consumer seeks out, what they value and choose to pursue, shifts.

    With that aside, I tend to like the idea of an approach of "First A, Then B." First, master movement mechanics. Then add volume and output. "First move well, then move often" as physical therapist Gray Cook likes to say.

    So as a movement enthusiast, I'd tell you the same thing. Learn to watch your body from the head to your feet, learn how when you move one part, another part of the body compensates. Learn to engage and gradually progress to higher output and volume movements when an easier progression becomes more manageable. You don't HAVE to go straight to push-ups and squats! Watch to see if your ankles collapse (pronate) when you try to do a squat and then do strengthening exercises to mitigate that, for an example.

    The qualitative exercises are equally demanding, in my book, as the qualitative ones. The output might not be as high in the form of sets, reps, METs, or heart rate, but the input or internal focus required from looking at form, technique, points of failure in a movement pattern, and working on refining that requires just as much or more effort. Go ahead and run marathons, but first learn that you need a good internal core and structure and posture for running and build that, too. Build that FIRST.

Conclusion

    I fully expect, and hope, that the quantitative people talk to me about this topic. It's not really a popular opinion, from what I have seen. Getting right into the fray in the New Year and hitting the pavement happens all the time. The same with Beach Body training, weight loss challenges, Biggest Loser workplace events, and other programs that happen on and off through the years. But I'd love to see more about ergonomics, exercise progressions, learning your limits, mindful movement, and movement building blocks and basics start to emerge and gain popularity. Physical therapists and people who watch YouTube are already familiar with those who engage in parkour and slacklining without the proper foundation, but any output-based movement has the same risk for "fails."

    Take your time, feel your body, start easier than you think you need to, and then go from there.

Embodying Joy in Movement

Embodying Joy in Movement

    I wanted to call this post "Embodying Movement" but the fact of the matter is that ALL of our movement is embodied. Our emotions, and more importantly our restrictions, are embodied in all of our movements, in how we carry ourselves, in how we sit and stand and walk. You are a physical expression of your inner world all the time, whether you are around other people or not. My job in this article is to try to get you to feel what that means and then try to release some of those restrictions to move more freely, more lightly, and more expressively!

How You Think is How You Move

    Do you remember that experiment, maybe you did it in high school or college or a training at work? It goes something like this: Make the biggest, happiest, goofiest smile that you can muster. Go ahead, do it now! Ok, now try to think of something that makes you furiously angry, something that absolutely drives you crazy! Can you do it? If yes, did your face change?

    Now, admittedly, this is not the best measure of how the internal effects the external, but I think that a basic principle can still be drawn here. I hope to explore this principle a bit more before we talk about my feelings about the mental/ emotional and the physical. But the fact of the matter is that our emotions correspond to physical behavioral patterns, changes in heart rate, chemical changes, and these have been observed and documented for years. Body language has been described over and over again, and regardless of how accurate it might be, the same conclusion keeps getting drawn over and over again: How we feel internally is expressed by our demeanor and posture.

    It's easy to get a mental image of a person who might be experiencing sadness or loss: They drag their feet, they slump in the chair, the shoulders are stooped, face slack, arms and hands moving languidly and without force. On the flip side of that, the motivational speaker: Bright eyed, shoulders back, feet spread wide apart, ready to take on the world. His arms and hands make decisive movements, he leans slightly forward as he walks, pulled along by his own energy.

    Most of us, however, fall somewhere in the middle. It's sort of a muddle of ideas, tasks, fears, hopes, and smaller goals. We want to lose weight, we want to have a better job, we're just waiting until we get home to play video games, we're frustrated with our co-worker... lots and lots of low-level stuff that fades into the background. It's kind of like going to the dentist's office. When we first go in, there's that wacky smell, but after like 15 minutes, even inhaling deeply, you can't smell it anymore because it's just accepted as part of the surroundings by your brain.

Embodying Your Brain

    So here we are, embodying all of these tensions and hopes and thoughts. Even thinking about it, you might feel resistance, and that might make your body start to tense even more! So what can we do? Well, the first thing is to realize that, right now, you are embodying (expressing in your body) what the brain is doing. 'Well, duh,' you say, 'you just told me that.' Yes, I did just tell you. But now, instead of just mentally recognizing the words, getting an intellectual picture of the concept, let's take it inside and feel what that feels like. And if you 'Well, duh' me again, thinking that you are feeling what that feels like, I would invite you to take it a little deeper.

    So let's do this simply, one step at a time. I think sometimes with practices like this, authors spell out the whole process at once and you have to memorize it, or do one part and then open your eyes to review the list and that sometimes makes it a little less meaningful. Here, we'll try to go one step at a time.

    The first step is to take a snapshot of where you are right now. So try this: Sitting in a chair, put your feet flat (legs not crossed), and take stock of how you feel RIGHT NOW. So, after reading this, close your eyes, and for a few moments, just observe how you feel. You can go quick: face, shoulders, stomach, hands, legs, feet. That's it.

    I'm assuming your eyes are open again.

    The first step is to get an assessment of how you are without trying to modify.

    Secondly, trying to consciously relax. So, using the same general areas, see if you can consciously relax the muscles. This can be tense and release, shaking the area, visualization, or whatever combination is meaningful for you. I like the shaking and swinging from Qigong that you can try out here.

    Ok, do you feel a little different now? Make sure you take a little time with it. If you don't feel different, do it again, but go a little slower.

    Third, try some deep breaths. Nothing fancy, just deeper, slower, and more expressively than you do normally. I'll talk more about breathing mechanics in other posts, they're not important now. Just seeing how you feel after assessing, after consciously relaxing, and after breathing.

    So, do you feel a little more loose, a little more relaxed, a little less restricted?

    No right or wrong answers, here, but we're going to move on!

Embodying Mindfulness

    As kids we took chances, climbed trees, walked railroad tracks, rolled down hills, biked, sledded, danced, played sports, or whatever we did. But we didn't have the same ideas of decorum or presentation that we have today. As adults, we take for granted that we are supposed to wear certain clothes at certain times, that there are appropriate times for running, for stretching, certain behaviors that we have in the grocery store versus what happens in the gym. To a certain extent, we need that in society. Wearing underwear only at WalMart is probably a bad idea! At the same time, we have allowed ourselves to be heavily restricted in expressing ourselves through movement. Say you're at work and you just NAIL that special project. Some people might give themselves a 1/4 fist pump, but who does a pirouette, or rocks out hard on an air guitar? We're often afraid to express ourselves, forgetting that restriction is a form of expression.

    Your connective tissues is under constant strain from without and within. From without, gravity constantly presses on you, no matter what your position or lack thereof. From within, there is the constant strain of holding, of bracing, of trying to be perceived a certain way. It can be highly therapeutic to get out of those patterns and use the three techniques above (singly or in combination), to rid yourself of some of that internal tension and restriction.

    So, as a practice, get up and stretch out! And not stingy static stretches: stretch like a dog, like a crane flapping it's wings, or like a bear rubbing it's back on a tree. Think like a good morning stretch, where you tense and extend through your joints, bracing a little bit through the core. This is called "pandiculation" - actively stretching through long chains of connective tissue in the body. Forget about static stretching for a while, really get into it, get into the limbs and fingers and spine and tailbone. (Again I'll get into more specifics in other posts).

    Another practice is expressive breathing. As you stretch and move into big, expansive positions, take deep breaths, trying to fill the trunk (expand the trunk might be a better phrasing). The muscles of the upper body go around the rib cage so breathing while you stretch creates an additional stretch.

    

Embodying Joy

    But this was supposed to be about "embodying joy", wasn't it? Well, starting to recognize how we restrain ourselves and how we are restricted is the first step. The second step is starting to move in ways that can promote freedom and release. The last step is to embody that, to move in a way that is self-expressive, to move in a way that is embodied consciously instead of unconsciously. To be able to choose the way you move and not have the body be an unwitting vessel of the mind, to go towards teamwork between body and mind.

    The steps involve mindfulness and conscious effort might not seem like a lot of fun, but when we realize and let go of how we were restricted, we can return to a more free movement, to more unbridled movement, to uninhibited movement. We might start with a little bit of meditation or self-exploration, but the end result is to express yourself through movement. Express your joy, create catharsis, experiment with posture and locomotion. Play with movement again, play through movement again, take joy in movement again.

    Art, music, even gaming, are all expressions of movement. You can't do any of them without involving the body in some way, and how you hold yourself and express yourself in any of these medium necessitates movement, posture, breath, and that is directly linked to how you feel. Being aware of how you feel affects how you hold yourself and move is the beginning to changing the restricted patterns and being able to shift that paradigm to finding patterns that are freer.

    Joy is a tough concept to pin down. In this article, I mean "free from restriction" or "free expression of the inner self". Even if you just start by observing how you walk on a daily basis and try to put a little more "spring" into your step, you're beginning to embody joy because you're challenging stuck patterns. Starting to think of movement as less of a routine chore and more of a way to express your inner world can be a hugely rewarding and transformative process.