Coming to the conclusion that we all need to learn to relax is a sobering thought and I encourage everyone reading this blog entry to think about it.

Shouldn’t we all normally function in a relaxed state and use the symptom of tension as a warning that something has entered our consciousness resulting in some form of unbalance?

Of course we should. The natural human state is contentment, but it is clear that’s not the way of the world right now. There are many fundamental reasons why we as a society have lost our inner peace, not the least of which was our indoctrination into a competitive society rather than a cooperative one, but if you realize that there is a better way, then you are that much closer to seeing and living the truth.

Tension is so accepted as normal today that getting a student to learn to relax has become one of the fundamental lessons required in teaching Taiji. One of the lessons I learned from Master Cheung was that in order to teach one thing, it is often helpful to show the opposite. So in order to teach relaxation I get the student to first become very tense. This is easily accomplished if you just put some creative thought into it! For example, I get the students to push on both sides of a doorframe as hard as they can for one minute and then tell them to RELAX. Immediately I get them to become aware of what they FEEL. That’s relaxation! Relaxation is hard to articulate but easy to feel. There are dozens of ways to incorporate the feeling of relaxation into your practice and I suggest that one should make it a point to become intimate with that feeling in order to use at as a continuous point of reference.

This way, whether you’re late for an appointment or have just opened an unexpected tax bill you’ll sense that you have shifted off balance resulting in tension and can relax your way back to contentment, because after all, life is not about what happens to you… it’s all about how you react to life.