- Taken from a talk by Ron Timm at the Bagua Retreat, spring 2024 -
When we practise, what do we do here? It is always the same: we centre and connect Heaven, Earth, and Human. Down you connect to the Earth, up you connect to the Heavens. This way you already do the job, you already do Gong.
Now, don't think that people starting their standing practice- and it doesn't get better when they sit and meditate - connect to the Heavens and the Earth. As a human being you are capable of accessing your human potential but this usually doesn't take place. You just try to sit upright, because someone tells you to: 'sit straight and don't move'. But there is not really a connection to Heaven and Earth.
When you sit there, what you experience could be a lot of turmoil. Maybe, maybe not. If not today, maybe tomorrow. Disturbance, chaos, the whole thing can feel pretty banged up. That's why you can't sit still. All this internal noise does not allow you to sit still. Lots of you get pretty tense during the practice- which is good, it means you are doing the work. All kinds of states appear, mostly summed up by: 'get me out of here'.
This is the work to do.
This is how and when you start to establish a middle.
The order in the madness
The sitting or standing posture in Qi Gong- this is the outer form. I have you do these things. The purpose in all this is that you centre. If we are able to establish a connection between the up and the down nicely, that already helps a great deal. As you establish a middle, there is a direction. This is why you have to sit correctly, do the best you can. The energy goes all over the place, it gets scattered, it goes mad, but you continue to bring it from the periphery to the centre. The middle should become stronger by practice and by time: 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 hours, 10 hours, 5 days, 10 days. You will feel you can't sit here. It will tear you apart. But remember, you establish the centre, you establish your own spiral galaxy. You organise yourself towards the centre.
It can be quite a challenge, you will experience that, but this is how it is done. Because there are strong forces working. The forces that tear you apart are strong and the forces that you try to establish to order all this, coming more towards harmony, they have to be strong as well. You might not be able to feel this in the beginning, but the forms of Qi Gong are very strong. The practices enable you to do this work. It is like when you're driving on the highway at 100 miles an hour and then you push the brakes. These are the kind of forces that you can experience here.
Dealing with the forces
The process is not easy and doesn't necessarily get easier with time. In fact, the more you do this, the more you are able to feel the disbalance and dissonance. The more you slow down, the more you are able to notice. When you drive at 40 miles an hour, you don't feel how fast you go. But you hit the brake hard and you know: wow, that was quite something. Just at 40 miles an hour, if you have ever experienced this, even when you drive fairly slow but push the brake fully, you feel: ‘Wow, that's fast, actually, these are some forces’. While if you go at 100 miles an hour without braking, you don't notice the speed at all. Now, we have you sitting there for a long time, still, and that is pushing the brakes hard. Because everything comes crashing, you want to do something, you want to run away, but no, you just sit there.
Then: breathe into your belly, that is what you do. The energy would normally get dispersed, in all kinds of actions we usually do. Here, you don't allow it. You breathe into your belly and that's where the energy goes. It's caught. And ordered. It is a process, and it is quite tough.
Organising, tidying, cleaning
This is how you shape your energy field, by creating a centre in the system. With a lot of decent practice, all the energy will be gathered and organised. That's when we talk about forming a ball. There will still be chaos, random thoughts and feelings and difficult experiences but even though all this is still there - because it probably never really goes away- it doesn't matter so much, because there is something bigger, the centre. While the personal stuff becomes smaller, less significant.
It is like cleaning your flat. You spilled something. You go and clean it. While you are cleaning it you realise there is more- not from today, from yesterday, but you didn't notice. This is how it works. If you go into this process, you just want to clean this one spillage, but then you figure out there is more and more to do, all over the place. Generally, when you want to give your flat a deep clean, you need a lot of time. Nowadays, people rarely live longer in the flat than 10 years. But if we treat it as a metaphor of a home, where we stay, where we collect all our experiences and memories, there will be a lot to clean. Perhaps even from the previous generations. This will need some time. If not to say forever. Which is what they say. Which is not why we shouldn't do it.
The story of perseverance
There's a wonderful story from the Daoist canon, of a guy by the name of Li Bai, very well known. He was aspiring, dedicating his life to spiritual values. He retreated somewhere into the mountains, and he devoted himself to practise. He was practising and practising and practising, and sometimes he thought he was getting somewhere, and sometimes he thought he was getting nowhere.
Just like me and you. We are all just people.
He made a lot of effort, 20 years, 30 years. He achieved a little something, maybe. Sometimes he thought he got something, sometimes he thought he got nothing. And then one day he thought: ok, that's it. He came down from the mountain. The Gods saw that and went: ‘Oh, why does he stop? That's not good, he should continue, he was doing well. He just needs to continue.’
But he was going down from the mountain. So one of the Gods disguised himself and he took on the shape of a very old woman, maybe 400 years old. She-he, the God - sat in the way of the man coming down. And she had a steel rod she was grinding over a stone.
The man comes, sees this old lady, and asks himself: ‘What is this?’ He has never seen such an old lady, she was very beautiful, but really old. So he asks: ‘What are you doing here?’ And she says: ‘I make myself a needle, because I want to sew my wedding dress.’
He replies: ‘But that will take you forever.’
And she says: ‘Yes.’
That moment he realised, and he went back up the mountain.
It just needs to be done.
The neverending practice
It needs to be done, not meaning ‘finished’, but to be done as a continuous process. We always clean our flat so that it is done, but guess what? It is never done. You will have figured that out by yourselves. And what do you do then? Give up? You just continue to do it. It is a part of a bigger story.
Still, you can come up with some tools, develop some techniques. Not to get in total despair in that process. The way you clean a corner might not be a good way to clean under the couch, so you cannot always apply the same posture and the same movement. There can be a method to this process. We build a centre and we work around it. This is a structure the Daoists have provided, they have done their research a long time ago and it still stands. This is a help we can use as the work is not easy. Those people have already treaded a path that we can follow.