You Need a Yin to Match Your Yang
It was one of those things that came out of my mouth while I was teaching and a part of me said – “Hey you’ve got to meditate on this more!” (And then blog about it…)
T’ai Chi Ch’uan is about the balancing of opposites. In the T’ai Chi Classics it says, “Wherever there is a left there is also a right; wherever there is a forward there is first a back; and wherever there is an up there is first a down.”
Another way of saying this is that wherever there is a yang there is also a yin. So many times I watch people perform T’ai Chi and I notice that what is missing is that there is no real yin. (Of course, sometimes I see the opposite – no real yang. These are the T’ai Chi people who have misinterpreted the meaning of softness and just become limp… all yin.) Now in most T’ai Chi forms we can find the “yin” moments in the transitions – the motions that link the actual martial techniques and their final positions. In Yang Style, for example, we see the yin in the “shift back then step up T-Step” transitions.
But it’s not enough just to go through the motions of shifting back. this is a moment of release, withdrawal and sinking down. In fact, there are many moments where you actually want to sink really deep into the kwa (watch this week’s T’ai Chi Minute on Rooster Stands on One Leg) before rising up into the next move… then next yang. Too often, I see students perform a shift back motion without changing their energy or intention. They’re really just doing a yang in reverse!
OK – by now most of you know me well enough to know that I teach the principle of The Body is a Metaphor: everything you see manifesting on the physical level is almost certainly happening on every other level at the same time – mental, emotional, energetic and Spiritual. We’re faking our yin. Our lives get so caught up in doing that we ignore the non-doing. It’s not enough to take a day off — if that day off is filled with errands and visits to friends and household projects. We need real yin – quiet time to reflect, meditate and inhabit a quiet inner space.
That inner space – the yin – is the real womb of all action and results. It is the place of replenishment. Without real yin we wind up running on empty for a long time, using up our qi instead of conserving it. This week was another long one for me. I’m carrying a larger load of clients than I typically do, and I am working on two websites. I did a guest appearance T’ai Chi class, and I’ve been preparing for a workshop I’m teaching all day tomorrow. My Tuesday, for example, started at 4 am and didn’t end until after midnight. It’s been a go go go week. I may have sat down a couple of times – in fact I even tried to take a quick nap in my office once. But I was just going through the motions. It wasn’t until last night, when I put my daughter to bed, that she and I just sat and did nothing. Rocking in the rocking chair, she reached up her little hand and touched my face, and I just listened to her breathe. I finally found a yin to match my yang.
