Yielding

Yielding means giving way, not resisting. In a martial sense this is reasonably clear to see: energy comes towards you and rather than try to knock it off course or retreat from it, you turn the waist, allow the energy through, turn it and return it. The person who excelled at this was Dr Chi: he could yield in any situation from any stance: he embodied yielding. This was because his Tai Chi studies had gradually taken him deeper and deeper into yielding and had led him to realize that yielding was in essence just connecting. Connecting, connexion, connectedness are the basis of life and existence. It is the one thing that happens and is happening all the time, and, as John would say, out of time. So yielding, if you become consumed by it and are correctly motivated (you have a driving need to be better connected rather than a desire to overcome others), will lead you to the source of it all and to the one thing worth studying: connectedness. When this becomes your consuming passion and interest then you begin to develop a yielding attitude to everything: you softly enter all things equally. It doesn’t take long to realize that to connect to other entities you must remove all of your own hardnesses from the situation, and preferably from yourself: eradicate. These hardnesses include your opinions, your ego, your conditioning, your thoughts, your desires, your fears, your education, in fact pretty much every aspect of you, leaving just energy, essence, spirit and soul; even the body is eventually rejected, which, if you like is the beauty and meaning of death. Your hardness encloses and constricts these more fundamental parts of you. Once you begin to let that hardness go then energy and essence will come more to the fore in your being and in your life, and you will begin to operate (cooperate) on their level. In a sense this means leaving for good the world of the average person and entering a new world which the average person touches every now and then, but really has little interest in or regard for. The purpose of this blog is to elucidate this process.

This is a response to Ray's comment below.