Internal & external strength

In the Tai Chi Classics – the ancient writings of Tai Chi – is states that all problems of posture and movement can be traced to an incorrect use of the legs. I am now of the conviction that this wisdom applies to all problems: physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, social, external and internal.

Someone told me recently that our first semi-conscious act as human beings is to straighten the legs to thrust ourselves out of the womb, and you can see clearly in the baby that everytime it is held upright and its feet touch a surface it forcefully straightens its legs as if to leap upwards. Our instincts have conditioned us to automatically straighten the legs and lock the knees, hips and ankles. This conditioning leads us down the path of external strength – basically muscular strength – where the body becomes expert at moving itself as an independent object in space. It is this feeling of independent power that becomes ego. With external strength chemical energy is transformed to mechanical energy in the muscles which is then transformed into either kinetic or potential energy as our body moves or becomes still. This is the energy we learn about at school in our science lessons.

The first stage in Tai Chi – a stage that literally takes decades to complete – is to start using the legs differently. Instead of straightening the legs every time we feel a hard surface under our feet, we bend them, not in order to retreat from that hard surface but to melt into it and transform it. This is a special bending that requires a constant releasing in the joints of the legs: sacro-iliacs, hips, knees, ankles, toes, allowing energy to flow across those joints and through the legs. This is the energy of central equilibrium: an energy that flows when we start to relax into things and allow the forces operating upon us into our bodies to find their natural equilibrium (balance) there. This is internal strength – the cleansing and reconditioning that happens when energy flows through flesh, bone, and above all: mind.

Internal strength begins to develop when we learn to relax into things in order to allow them into ourselves. External strength develops when we interact with the world non-communicatively: forcefully and insensitively, neither entering nor being entered – as though we were independent enough of that world to control and manipulate it. We obviously need a degree of external strength, at least until we have developed a significant reservoir of internal strength, otherwise we couldn't function around other people. But we must also strive to distinguish between the two: to become aware of when we use external strength, and then investigate ways of softening that strength to make it more internal. This softening may start in the mind, but we must then take it into the body – into the legs, otherwise we have knowing but no understanding.