Jing– The physical body ..or more precisely, the Essence. The sum of the gooey stuff that makes you a physical being. The blood, bile and bones that houses your consciousness and allows you to move about. The first and most crucial exercise is to simply pay attention. Everything else comes from this skill. So start paying attention to your feet. As you walk around, start paying attention to the feeling of walking. How are your feet connecting to the ground? Are you slapping them down, rolling the foot, or hesitantly placing them in front of you? Can you place the foot in front of you instead of falling on it? Where is the movement coming from? The foot or the hip? Simply pay attention and notice how you walk. Slow down as much as you need in order to receive the information your body is sending you.
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Qi– the energy body. The flow of emotions, information and energy that travels across the body and mind. As you walk, slowly, paying attention to your feet, start to pay attention to your upper body. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the assumption is that emotions are stored in the organs. Even in Western medicine we agree that emotions, habits, and traumas are recorded within the body as clusters of tight muscles that can cause deformations of our posture. So how’s your posture? And I don’t just mean how are you holding yourself up. How does it FEEL in there? Is your chest tight? Are your shoulders tense? Is your back rounded? What emotions are stored in the various nooks and cranny of your body? Bring your attention back to your walking. In order to walk properly, the upper body needs to be balanced over your feet. Sometimes, our posture pulls us in this or that direction. The feet have to compensate. So where do you need to put the upper body in order to walk in a relaxed and balanced way? Is your head forward? your shoulders hunched? Don’t just force your body upright. Spend some time exploring the changes in feeling, in your emotional state as you move your body. If you drop your shoulders, what emotion does that trigger? What emotion was tied to your former posture? The goal at this point is to simply start noticing the ways your body stores emotions, and how that process changes your body. |
Shen– the Spirit body. The mind, the consciousness and the soul. All are nourished by the body. We’ve been talking about walking , and the feeling that generates. But you can also release that attention and bring the same awareness to your surroundings. As you walk, notice your place in the space that you are traversing. You are, from moment to moment, changing your relationship to the world around you. The ground is no longer the same. The trees around you are closer, or more distant. The clouds have moved. The sky, though is still. Each step takes you through an ephemeral space, and an eternal one, simultaneously. Your consciousness is ephemeral, and eternal. The space around you reflects that dual nature. Don’t think about it. Experience it. Know ( from the word Gnosis..Greek for the kind of knowledge that stems from a direct encounter) what it feels like to be a consciousness traveling thought time and space. |
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Do not take walking lightly. We will go into more complex exercises later. But always remember that we are first and foremost walking apes. Before tools, before language and fire and big brains, our ancestors stood up. Walking is at the core of who we are as a species, and has always been tied to spiritual states of being. The Australian Aborigines go on Walkabouts, walking the land and trails of their ancestors and the spirits that dreamed their country into being. In medieval Europe ( and to some extent still today), people went on pilgrimages. They did not ride horses, or carriages to do so. They walked. That was the point. The act of walking was a form of spiritual cleansing. Start by walking, purposefully. with attention and awareness of your body, your mind, and the vast world you are traveling through.
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