How I used to hate the Standing Meditation! For years. Ever since I started practising Taijiquan in 1999, I just couldn’t get to grips with this exercise, which is, after all, the foundation of the whole practice. My mind would literally go into overdrive whenever I did try to stand up and do the exercise.
At first in group lessons and later on my own in the park – I just couldn’t shake that aversion. Even though I knew, in theory, that this was the foundation. As Jan always said: you can’t learn to walk without being able to stand first. And that’s exactly how it was. For many years, I more or less rushed through the Laojia Yilu form because my mind wasn’t really on it. ‘Just get the form over and done with quickly,’ I always thought. It was fine for the body as a form of exercise, but I made very slow progress that way.
Until I started to really embrace the system. After another major panic attack – the last one to date – four years ago, I decided to shift my focus away from constant negativity and towards a consciously cultivated positive attitude.
I’d spent long enough analysing and questioning where all these problems, fears and depression were coming from, and I was now desperate to try something different. In fact, I saw it as my last resort to escape this never-ending crisis.
So I moved away from ‘traditional’ psychotherapy, which focused almost exclusively on problems, towards psychotherapeutic NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) therapy, which focused on solutions.
Just a few sessions were enough to steer me in a completely different direction. I hadn’t dared to try this form of therapy before. People always talked about hypnosis and trance states and so on. That was all completely foreign to me back then.
These days, however, that’s no longer seen as mysterious, because the Standing Pillar and Taijiquan in general put us into a sort of trance-like state almost all the time. And that’s neither bad, nor mystical, nor in any way burdensome, nor controlled by external forces, nor whatever else I had in mind. Think stage hypnosis!
It’s exactly the opposite. Simply focus on your own body. And stay in the moment! Don’t let your mind wander all the time. And if it does, don’t worry about it, don’t judge yourself – just come back to the present and carry on focusing.
So one of the most important prerequisites for me to commit to NLP therapy was probably my change in attitude. The willingness to let go of all those negative thought loops! A bit like: “You have to empty the cup before you can fill it again” (a concept mainly known from the Buddhist Zen tradition, Chan Buddhism). I wanted with all my might to focus solely on the positive. And that is precisely the crux of the matter that leads to healing!
I’d noticed for some time that whenever, for example, anxiety took hold of my body, my entire upper body would tense up. My breathing becomes shallower, and I find myself breathing almost exclusively into the upper chest. My shoulders hunch up, and I feel completely on edge. That really fuels the anxiety. Everything feels constricted.
To counteract this, I quickly realised that exercises starting from the preparatory position can release tension in the targeted areas. And in this way, you physically take the wind out of the sails of your fears. They no longer have as much power over you. Alongside a few other exercises and techniques, you are no longer helpless or powerless in the face of these situations!
A distinction is made between two circumstances that influence one another.
Psychosomatic:
The mind affects the body. In other words, stress and trauma, for example, can cause physical problems and manifest themselves in the body.
Somatopsychic:
The body influences the mind. Conversely, by using specific techniques and exercises, it is possible to release these traumas and tensions in the mind by deliberately loosening and relaxing the body.
And so, after the NLP therapy, I began to practise the Standing Pillar more seriously and properly. At first on my own, without any guidance. It was very ‘bumpy’ at the start, and I couldn’t really calm my mind yet. Even a few minutes felt very tiring. But then I grabbed Jan’s instructional CD and played it behind me (important, because your hearing is supposed to be directed backwards). It gave my brain, my mind, something to do – something meaningful – and I had a structure to follow during the exercise. Brilliant!
In the end, I tweaked these instructions a bit to suit my needs. I no longer needed to go through the beginner’s instructions every time, and I wanted the rest period in the middle to be a bit longer. So now I can stand for 27 minutes. That’s a huge step forward for me.
This quiet phase used to be awful, because my train of thought would run completely wild and, as I said, practically explode. At the moment, I fill this quiet phase with positive self-suggestions. It’s a brilliant trick that also helps to boost the body’s natural healing powers.
So I try to direct a positive—or, if you like, healing—energy to the parts of the body that need it most at that moment. Just as, at the end of the Standing Pillar pose, the energy is directed into the arms and legs and then throughout the whole body, I focus directly on individual areas. And I believe that this works very well.
Because if, for years or even decades, you constantly dwell on the negative, the neural pathways (think ‘information superhighway’) in the brain become so well-established that it automatically always uses these ‘pathways’.
Replacing these negative pathways with positive ones is difficult at first and requires constant practice. Vera Birkenbihl has often discussed this very vividly in her lectures.
The negative side has also taken a very long time to develop. So, at the start, the positive aspect is more like a narrow path, then a track, and finally a road, which in turn becomes the information superhighway, along which the brain then travels faster over time.
But first I needed a method to break through the flood of negative thoughts, to stop them. And in the end, I succeeded with a ‘thought-stopping’ exercise. As it is best to associate such inner commands with a gesture, thereby making them physically tangible, I associated the ‘stop’ with the gesture from the Buddha’s Guardian. So now, when I say ‘stop’, I clench my fist. After that, the fist opens and the hand brushes the ‘negative thoughts’ away, forming a kind of mudra gesture which, for me personally, expresses gratitude.
So I always accompany the gesture with a specific expression of gratitude. For whatever reason. I always decide on the spot.
So, if you assume that constant negative thoughts lead to a negative mindset and that the brain’s neural pathways – ‘synaptic connections’ – consequently come to focus solely on the negative, then surely it must also be possible, I thought to myself, to achieve exactly the opposite with positive thoughts (whether forced or not, the brain doesn’t seem to mind). And that is exactly how it should be. I believe this is what is known as cognitive restructuring. I have watched many lectures on the subject, for example by Vera Birkenbihl or Shi Heng Yi, and they confirm this in one way or another.
Our thoughts shape the world we live in.
But the most important realisation for me is that we are by no means at the mercy of our thoughts; rather, we can consciously control them. And – it works!
And the Standing Meditation is the perfect exercise to support that. It’s about taking that positive path time and time again. And it also creates a structure within the body that ensures you’re much better grounded. You’re better able to ‘weather’ situations – or perhaps even people. I think Jan put it that way once, when he was talking about Tuishou and the structure of the stance.
So now, for me, the silence during the Standing Column is no longer a time when my mind is spinning out of control, doing whatever it wants, feeling stressed and constantly spouting all sorts of negative rubbish, but a time when I just about manage to fit in my autosuggestions and sometimes have to smile when the gong sounds, but I’m not ‘finished’ yet and the exercise is drawing to a close.
And the best thing is that, as well as these tools, you always have Taijiquan with you. That’s very relaxing.
With that in mind, all you need to do is make time to practise. I still need to work on that myself.
Good luck...
Raimund Burke