Meditation: The 4 Primary Skills (4/4)

By Paul Cavel

Part 1: Making Your Body Conscious

Part 2: Expanding Your Awareness

Part 3: Creating a Stream of Consciousness

Part 4: Entering Into Wu Wei

In Part 3, we established how presence, awareness and focus come together to create a stream of consciousness.

Posture and Breathing

The quality and degree to which you integrate essential neigong —namely, bio-mechanical postural alignments and breathing techniques — either diminishes or enhances your ability to concentrate. Both aspects are introduced at the very beginning of qi-based exercise and Taoist Meditation for this reason.

Proper postural alignments enable a practitioner to keep their body relaxed and upright with little effort, increases circulation of blood and qi, and provides a stable seat for the mind. Smooth, measured and easy breathing also increases blood and fluid circulation, generates qi-energy, releases the nervous system and encourages relaxation. Both aspects become particularly critical in meditation since you have the potential to penetrate your body, qi and mind much deeper than in neigong practice alone.

Very subtle and tiny adjustments to your posture in meditation can slowly and incrementally open up the core structure of your body, while breathing can help you maintain softness and a sense of relaxation. If you make large adjustments or strong corrections to your posture, you will engage tension and produce the opposite result. Your breathing will also close down in response to overzealous and ambitious postural changes. On the other hand, if you do not make adjustments, circulation of blood and qi diminishes, which has a negative, knock-on effect to your breathing, presence, awareness, focus and concentration. You can then drift off to sleep or slip into spacing out much too easily. Finding the correct size, depth and strength of corrections to your posture during meditation is like balancing a coin on a razor's edge. It takes time and practice to hone and refine your technique and the balance point is always moving in response to how you internalise the events of your life, including your state of being when you come to your practice.

When you find the balance point, the results are sublime: breathing opens up and unwanted pressures in the body can be released; blood and qi can circulate more smoothly and strongly, which nourishes the whole body; and the mind wakes up, contributing to the power of your presence, awareness, focus and concentration. Your mind and body can let go and sink progressively deeper into a state of relaxation. The space that opens up is very different from the forced or hard focus generated by a strong intent to achieve some external goal. Instead, you are simply present, aware and able to focus and concentrate on the subject of your choice in meditation while being content to stay in that space without any sense of effort.

The Experience of Wu Wei

Once you get the initial glimpses of this sublime state of being, practice of all other internal energy arts is changed for eternity. The experience of effortless practice is the very early stages of wu wei, often described as ‘doing without doing’, but is more accurately understood as ‘achieving without effort’. Through soft and subtle postural adjustments, you can enhance every other aspect of your meditation, which will begin to seep into your neigong. It might begin with standing or breathing practice, or turn up in your medical qigong, Five Element neigong or tai chi form. It could surprise you and suddenly manifest in Circle Walking or bagua. Wherever you might discover a sense of effortless practice, just go with the flow. Once you have the experience, it will be easier to replicate and eventually become the driving force towards vibrant health, freedom of spirit and a relaxed reality, without the necessity of applying your force of will.

The energy of this state of effortless practice is driving yourself towards goals, whether that is gaining more energy, healing old injuries or developing higher states of consciousness — any external marker of success. From a Taoist perspective, it is the effort necessary to achieve and the expectation of achieving that generates a yang force in the body, qi and mind. When you let go of the need to achieve in the here and now, you release the bite point in the mind and nervous system, and settle into your practice. This is somewhat of a paradox, as we are conditioned to push, force and drive towards that which we wish to achieve. The Eastern and particularly the Taoist Water Method philosophy is very different.

Consistency Without Desire

The Tao Te Ching advises, ‘Consistency with our desire’, because the desire is the drive and pushing generates tension, which builds up internal resistance and breaks consistency. On the other hand, consistent practice on a daily basis generates results. Consistency of practice without the strain of desire allows you to deeply relax into practice and remain within your natural two-thirds limit. Over time, you can generate a deep, effortless state of being from deep inside yourself. With this, your capacity naturally grows.

As you begin to get a handle on this depth of practice — that is, engaging effortless practice in meditation and other internal energy arts — this easiness will more frequently reveal itself to you, at first in small ways. In time, the positive effects begin to permeate every aspect of your life and can support the well-being of not only yourself, but also those around you, from your closest family and friends to your fellow human beings whom you meet along The Way.

If you've enjoyed this series and found it useful to your neigong and meditation practice, please share it on social media to help grow awareness of the Water Method, ancient Taoist teachings passed down by lineage masters for 4,000 years to help people let go of all that holds them back from realising their true, human potential.

Wishing you good practice!
Paul