4👑☸ Cattāri Ariya-saccaṃ 四聖諦

1. 👣 Buddha takes a stand

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There’s a saying that “you don’t want to be a one legged man in an ass kicking contest.” But if that one legged man is a man of taiji, then it’s a completely different story.

A. Standing static postures

Only externally static, internally depending on which the 4 jhanas you abide in, it can be a raging volcano, an ocean rumbling in your dan tien, a still pond, or just empty luminosity.

What meditation to do while standing statically?

Prior to jhana, work on pacifying body and thinking. A great way to do this is completely immersing your awareness in the breath as it suffuses the entire physical body, aka 16 APS (anapana). Basically, any meditation you can do in the sitting posture you can do in the standing posture. A taoist spin on 16 APS Visualize a white hot gooey magnetic ball of energy the size of a basketball in your dan tien (near belly). With your eyes closed, visualize and keep your mind immersed in that white ball. Eventually, with a good 4th jhana, it won’t just be a visualization, there will actual luminosity that pervades the entire body, and you can make a gooey magnetic ball of qi roll around anywhere on your body, and compress and stretch that gooey mass. how do you know if you’re really relaxed? The biggest problem for most people is they’re not relaxed in the kaya-passaddhi and taiji sense of relax, and they don’t even know it. If you’re fully physically relaxed, you should feel forces permeating every part of your body, sometimes heat, hot liquid, electricity, other strange sensations running in loops and channels. As chanels are getting cleared, euphoria and blissful sensations in parts and eventaully every cell of the body. At a higher stage when the forces smoothe out, maybe you feel just like a water balloon, at higher stage, maybe like an air balloon that expands and contracts. At a higher stage, body feels empty and luminous. If you’re physically relaxed but not mentally relaxed, you won’t experience those symptoms of physical relaxation above. Mentally relaxed means citta passaddhi, a-vitakka-a-vicara samadhi. In other words, you’ve stopped coarse thinking, only subtle perceptions and intentions relating to your meditation object remain. MN 19, MN 20, 16 APS are especially helpful in developing this. why stand when you can sit? * If your qi channels aren’t opened up very well, not limited to leg channels, after long sits (of many hours continuously) you’ll start to get drowsy. * doing daily sessions of standing, say, 20min, 30min, 60min, develops some leg strength and if done well can help open up the leg channels. Whereas sitting longer than the flexibility of your body allows (say 2 to 3 hours of advanced sitting meditators), the qi channels in your legs start choking off your extremities (especially feet, toes, lower leg). If you see young meditators in a monastery frequently stumble, lose their balance, fall while walking, this is a strong hint they may be pushing themselves too hard and sitting too long. What they should do instead is shorten some of the sits, add some short yoga stretching sessions, do some standing and walking meditation until they’ve loosened up and are able to comfortably sit for the desired length without any part of their body in pain, discomfort, or going numb.

1. 🌌Wuji posture

legs shoulder width apart, arms completely relaxed at side. Weighting is about 50/50 between left and right side. Prior to opening up all the energy channels in the body very well, if you’re relaxed enough, you might experience some vibrations and shaking in the body. This is normal, you shouldn’t feel ashamed or self conscious. Shaking can take years to gradually fade. Many people don’t experience bodily shaking because they’re standing (or sitting) too tense.

2. Wuji with hands covering dan tien

one hand over the other, covering your dan tien. Energetically, how does this differ from plain wuji #1? Similar to how cross leg posture connects and energy channels between right side and left side of your body, you might feel a stronger, more consolidated energy from doing this.

3. Tree hugger

See the video 8x-meridian.webm It has nice 3d video animation with camera angles all around the body.

4. Leaning tower of wuji

Starting from posture 1 (standard wuji). 1. close your eyes, don’t worry about details of what the posture looks like externally. Kaya passaddhi, true relaxation is an internal art. Learn to feel where tension and relaxation is. 2. Shift your weight completely to the right leg (you were 50/50 split weight prior). 2a. While shifting weight, try to keep spine + torso relatively straight, but don’t worry if it curves slightly. Main thing is stay completely relaxed. 2b. While shifting, don’t introduce any tension by lifting either shoulder, or adjusting neck orientation, or subtly pushing off the left leg with any upward direction. 2c. your right leg, as you shift, let it compress and sink into the ground from the additional body weight being added to it, rather than keep the right leg stiff and resisting the weight shift. If your two legs were an hour glass, imagine all the sand was in the left leg, and gradually shifting and sinking into the lower right leg. Internally, after you finish shifting weight, you should feel a few inches shorter, most of that from the right leg and hip compresing. 3. your ending position, you kind of look like “leaning tower of pisa”. Your right leg feels a few inches shorter than before you started from the compression, your right hip feels like a shock absorber that got compressed as well, hips folded in as you shifted weight. 4. check your shoulders for relaxation, with subtle “medusa principle” movement. 4a. your right arm should be dangling freely, and if you quietly relax and observe your right arm, gravity and the weight of your free arm dangling should cause your shoulder area tissue to expand and lengthen by several centimeters at least. With eyes closed, it feels like my arm lengths by several inches. 4b. your left arm, try to relax the same way as much as possible, but it won’t lengthen because of your “leaning tower”, the weight of your arm is supported by your body (hand and wrist area will be resting on body from the lean). But your left arm will get it’s chance to shine and lengthen when you repeat this exercise for the left side. 5. similar with shoulders, look for and dissolve tension in the neck by using the medusa principle (soft like octopus, no bones, just liquid or magnetic energy sloshing around). If you don’t understand medusa yet, try just making very small motions with your neck, side to side, or circular, and observe which part of the neck is tense and which parts are relaxed as you move slowly. And then appy sati, remember what tension and relaxation feels like, and using that memory as a reference point, coupled with medusa movement, you know what you’re shooting for when the taiji master tells you to “relax deeply”. 6. your left leg is completely relaxed. You are now a one legged man of taiji, with 3 arms. The left leg is the 3rd arm. Your weight is completely supported by the right leg. Test this by lifting the hand of the left leg just slightly off the ground to see how it affects your balance. 7. empty out your 3 arms, imagine for a moment having all 3 amputated, no arms, just emptiness there. You’re just a leaning tower of spine and right leg. Feel how relaxed those 3 arms are, and try to make your leaning tower feel just as empty and relaxed, using subtle, almost invisible medusa movements to adjust yourself. do the same for the other side repeat these steps for the other side of the body. sample practice sequence alternate between 3 postures: left side, right side, and 50/50 standard #1 wuji stance with arms hanging freely. Maybe start with about one minute on each. Or try left side, 50/50 wuji, then right side, wuji 50/50. Try different combinations, even up tp 5 minutes for each. original source The original move was a taiji quan relaxation qigong designed to loosen the shoulders, but without much explanation other than “relax”. The explicit details of that I figured out on my own over many years, but basically any taiji master who has relaxed shoudler and body are intuitively doing most of what I’m saying in explicit detail, but they might be doing it subconsciously and the internal adjustment is too subtle to see externally, and they don’t know how to explain it in detail other than “relax”.

5. relaxed fit playing guitar

(coming soon)

B. Static standing with some arm action

c. cloud hands / feet walking d. ocean in the palm of your hand e. wing chun palm changes f. 3 palm change g. skiing: on one leg, arms and other leg are “skiing”

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