Is anyone working with stillness or emptiness on a regular basis?

I’ve been working on Module 4 – level 12 since October. The work has given me some interesting insights into stillness and emptiness. I’ve been working with the physical and etheric bodies for the last few months trying to slowly open the etheric sphere. While working through the material I started to get a much deeper understanding of stillness and more and more glimpses of what I think emptiness is. I’ve progressed to working with both in my daily practice. Both are difficult to describe.

I found stillness by balancing two forces. In the Taoist arts this is done in many many ways. When I stated practicing Bagua module 4 – level 11, I began by trying to manifest this in the bone-marrow. Later, I worked directly with the centerlines of the torso, arms, and legs. And now I’m trying to work directly with the central channel. At first it is done in the particular, a hand, a forearm, whatever. But you can find it using any neigung element or using peng, ji, liu, and an in Tai Chi. I found it in the Tai Chi form by balancing physical forces in the arms and legs, neigung elements like bend and stretch, as well as balancing the energy of peng and an. There are thousands of ways to create stillness and I imagine the design of a Tai Chi form is just a complex formula for balancing all of the neigung elements from move to move as well as in aggregate. The whole purpose is to find and sustain stillness from movement to movement.

Bagua’s approach is a little different. It finds the balance in a single dimension then another and another until in the 7th palm where you are multi-dimensional and balancing all of the directions at once (up/down, front/back, left/right, in/out, what you are doing/what is being done to you). As you add more and more directions, your understanding of stillness deepens. When you finally start to “get it”, you experience the sense of balance at every single point in the field of consciousness simultaneously.

Stillness starts with a single element balanced in two directions. In the toaist arts we use the body and the spine in particular to understand this balance. No matter what you do, or how you approach this – stillness is local. The single palm change can be about moving everything in a single direction (even if that direction is omni-directional). The double-palm change starts the process of binding two things or balancing them. At first it is local (stillness). Eventually it becomes non-local (emptiness).

It is in the double-palm change that I started to understand the progression. At first it was just balancing the forces in a hand, then the hands balancing through their connection to the spine, then noticing that that was really done in the central channel, and then noticing that the central channel wasn’t in the spine or the bone marrow – it is non-local, the balancing occurs in every point throughout the etheric and physical bodies. The completeness of your connectedness determines your level of mastery.

Stillness comes before emptiness. I helps relax the mind. Without this deep relaxation of the mind, it is extraordinarily difficult to experience any level of emptiness. It is the quiet produced by finding stillness that eventually allows you to recognize emptiness. I think the many levels of stillness that Bruce mentions is the progression from a single element to balancing a a bunch of single elements, to balancing elements of elements, to balancing them in the spine, to balancing them in the central channel. Each stage deepens the minds ability to be quiet, clear, and still.

Stillness creates the state of mind that enables you to experience emptiness. It is only from this place that you can begin to understand and manifest the energies of the trigrams.

Matthew,

Thanks for sharing your experience of emptiness and stillness. I’d be interested in hearing more. We’ll have to get coffee some time and shoot the bull. Once in a while I get really frustrated not being able to relate this stuff with anyone especially when I’m not sure which direction to take.

Good luck with your Tai Chi practice.

Jim