Nurture: The Role of Stillness in Taiji Training

Yǎng, 养, which means “nurturing,” is one of the most important principles guiding an efficient and effective path to cultivating robust health and well-being as well as higher-level taiji skills. One of the primary means to nurture the development of taiji is the practice of stillness. One central principle from Chinese philosophy is that “to achieve something, you need to start with its opposite.” Following this principle, it is said in the martial classics that “without mastering stillness, you will never achieve the miracle of motion.” This, along with slowness, are two critically important elements of nurture in taiji. In other words, if you want to learn to move with integrity, speed, and power, you have to practice stillness (and slowness). Consider the fact that training directly for power and speed—as is done in many hard-style martial arts—can lead over time to repetitive injuries and significant joint damage and arthritis. 

There are three stillness practices in traditional training: standing, sitting, and lying-down qigong (or meditation). Each of these is important and, in complement with one another, brings about a transformation of the body and mind. It is said that “silence yields great revelation.” These practices are effectively “silent”; that is, the mind is not engaged in guiding motion and directing energy. The mind is, for the most part, silent. 

Here is a brief summary of the functions of each practice. Standing meditation can lead to optimal body alignment, global relaxation and integration, sound sleep, and power and economy of movement. The initial effects of this can be felt relatively quickly, especially when practicing push hands. Physically speaking, sitting medication can help one develop deeper stillness and heightened body awareness, therefore leading to quick reaction time. In martial art terms, this is called Líng, 灵, meaning relaxed but heightened alertness, intuition, and responsiveness. Importantly, sitting meditation can awaken our innate kindness and, when practiced as a functional meditation, can transform challenges to wisdom and strengthen  our understanding of abiding truths in life. Lying-down meditation can lead to deeper relaxation for sound sleep, pain relief, and injury prevention. And when combined with gentle stretching exercises, lying-down meditation provides an excellent medium for softening and opening the joints and elongating the fascia. This idea is summed up by the phrase Jīn zhǎng yīcùn, lì dà shífēn，筋长一寸，力大十分: “Grow one inch and double your strength.”

Training taiji choreography alone can lead to improved balance and agility, and to a limited degree, improved energy; but without stillness practice, it will remain empty of real energy, power, speed, and sensitivity. This tenet is expressed as Liàn quán bù liàngōng, dào lǎo yīchǎngkōng，练拳不练功，到老一场空: “If you practice form (external movement), but do not practice gong (stillness and other essential training), even if you practice your whole life, your art will be empty.” The mind and body are “use it or lose it” systems—and our system forgets how to completely relax and let go and thus recalibrate. Stillness allows for improvement in the way the system functions (at least partially) by creating the opportunity for the system to reset to a more accurate neutral, a state of relaxed awareness and preparedness—a youthful sensation that we tend to lose amid our daily challenges and the fast pace of modern life.