Softness is our all-important quality. It simultaneously gives and takes – offers and accepts. It doesn't essentially have much to do with relaxation – it is more a quality of and in the heart – a perpetual willingness to engage and communicate at an essential level. This is why some people who are so obviously as tense as hell can be warm and soft when you put your hands on them – when you enter into communication with them. Relaxation enables your inherent softness to permeate your body and mind, giving it a far better chance of being noticed and put to use. Softness is the opposite of forceful – it enables you to make your point without force, without a clash, by seduction and transformation. The same soft open heart that allows others energy into you somehow gets your energy into them without having to go against in any way. There is a lot of energy on frictional surfaces and they can be useful but as a general policy softness is far more effective.
The most powerful presence in your life is the Earth – the Mother of All – and it is the one thing most of us have no idea how to get on with. If you watch people moving around from a distance they look like scurrying insects – using the ground as a firm purchase for their locution and no more. They regard the earth only as a large mass. In Tai Chi we sink in our movements in order to develop a root. This is a beautiful concept but so often it just means a lowered centre of gravity and the ability to use the legs – the largest muscles in the body – to issue energy – like pumps. If this is all that rooting does then it is still forceful. If you sink softly then as well as dropping your energy into the ground you allow the earth's energy up into you. And if you're really soft and alive then it'll flood all the way up to the crown of the head (and maybe beyond). There is a feeling then that rather than the soles being where the ground stops and you begin, it is the crown of the head – your root is in your crown, not in your feet.
The Earth is always there – always ready to provide you with a lift – a gift of energy – so in a sense there is no excuse not to be working with energy all the time. And the beautiful thing is that the quality of softness in your heart that you must allow in order to let the earth's energy up into you is exactly the same quality you need to let any energy in, including that from the teaching. The heart must open in softness in order for energy from outside to enter its domain. Without such openness any energy that comes in will be resisted and thereby distorted. This is where the thinking mind comes in – our magnificent last line of defence. It is only necessary when we haven't had the heart to connect properly in the first place. If you let the heart open and swell then the mind stops because there is now no part of you that is observer – with an open advancing heart you are all participant and the mind doesn't have time to withdraw into its cosy place and think. I've always loved that poem of Robert Creeley's about the sunset which starts “Oh who is so cosy with despair and all they will not come to the last great spectacle of the day?” And the thinking mind is a place of despair and desperation. It can discover solutions but I'm never sure that putting those solutions into practice without those qualities of openness and softness that would not have required its use in the first place is ever going to be ultimately correct. The alternative approach, for those of us not naturally open and soft (enough – never enough), is a lifetime of persistent endeavour. No time to lose.
The most powerful presence in your life is the Earth – the Mother of All – and it is the one thing most of us have no idea how to get on with. If you watch people moving around from a distance they look like scurrying insects – using the ground as a firm purchase for their locution and no more. They regard the earth only as a large mass. In Tai Chi we sink in our movements in order to develop a root. This is a beautiful concept but so often it just means a lowered centre of gravity and the ability to use the legs – the largest muscles in the body – to issue energy – like pumps. If this is all that rooting does then it is still forceful. If you sink softly then as well as dropping your energy into the ground you allow the earth's energy up into you. And if you're really soft and alive then it'll flood all the way up to the crown of the head (and maybe beyond). There is a feeling then that rather than the soles being where the ground stops and you begin, it is the crown of the head – your root is in your crown, not in your feet.
The Earth is always there – always ready to provide you with a lift – a gift of energy – so in a sense there is no excuse not to be working with energy all the time. And the beautiful thing is that the quality of softness in your heart that you must allow in order to let the earth's energy up into you is exactly the same quality you need to let any energy in, including that from the teaching. The heart must open in softness in order for energy from outside to enter its domain. Without such openness any energy that comes in will be resisted and thereby distorted. This is where the thinking mind comes in – our magnificent last line of defence. It is only necessary when we haven't had the heart to connect properly in the first place. If you let the heart open and swell then the mind stops because there is now no part of you that is observer – with an open advancing heart you are all participant and the mind doesn't have time to withdraw into its cosy place and think. I've always loved that poem of Robert Creeley's about the sunset which starts “Oh who is so cosy with despair and all they will not come to the last great spectacle of the day?” And the thinking mind is a place of despair and desperation. It can discover solutions but I'm never sure that putting those solutions into practice without those qualities of openness and softness that would not have required its use in the first place is ever going to be ultimately correct. The alternative approach, for those of us not naturally open and soft (enough – never enough), is a lifetime of persistent endeavour. No time to lose.
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'And if you're really soft and alive then it'll flood all the way up to the crown of the head (and maybe beyond). There is a feeling then that rather than the soles being where the ground stops and you begin, it is the crown of the head – your root is in your crown, not in your feet'
There is a similar concept in Tantra of connecting to the Earth and drawing energy up through the feet to the crown chakra and beyond, but also of pulling it down from the sky.
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