THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT USING STRENGTH – PART I
These series of post are mainly my own LIMITED thoughts and experience from practicing Yiquan and should be taken with a HUGE DOSE OF SALT.
One of the most basic
principles in Yiquan is to use the mind or ‘intention’ and not use strength in
our movements. However, what does this really mean? Not only is this a
difficult concept to grasp intellectually, it is even more challenging when
trying to do it physically? Why?
In order to explain this
simply, let’s look at an example of a room, before and after. Can you see the
difference?
Simply put, the difference in
the AFTER picture is what’s NOT in the room? The room has been de-cluttered.
What’s been added to the room is NOTHINGNESS, or SPACE. In fact, essentially,
the more space there is available to move about, the more comfortable the place
becomes.
The same concept applies to
daily life. We spent way too much EFFORT, ENERGY and STRENGTH in our daily
movements. The fact is, our bodies have been conditioned by our MIND to being
TENSE all the time. There is rarely a moment where our muscles are in a deep
state of relaxation. Most people are about 25-50% tense all of the time. When
you ask them, are you using strength (i.e. tense), they’ll tell you they are
perfectly relaxed, not realizing there’s still a lot of tension in their body
and muscles. When you ask them to tense up, they go all the way to 100% or more…
Try this simple exercise. Lift
up your hand as if holding an imaginary umbrella. Then at the count of ONE,
simply relax all tension in the body, shoulder, elbow, arm, wrists and fingers.
See whether the arm can drop down naturally. You’ll find after several tries, several
scenarios might occur:
1. Arms START to drop down several
seconds after the count of ONE
2. Arms drop down at the count of
ONE, but is extremely slow as if you’re refusing to allow it to drop;
3. Arms drop downs all the way at
the count of ONE but you’re using muscular strength to fling it down. The
strength can originate from the wrists, forearms, elbows, biceps or shoulders.
Or from all of them. You’ll know, because the arms drop down somewhat violently
rather than naturally from gravity.
The correct way to this exercise,
is to release all tension in the body at once and let the limbs (in this case),
the arm drop naturally. If you sync this with exhaling your breathe outwards,
it gets easier. This act of ‘letting go’ is harder than you think.
Intellectually, nothing could be easier, but physically, it’s difficult. Why?
Paradoxically, it’s difficult because we’re not trying to do anything, but
rather it’s exact opposite, do NOTHING. This runs contrary to everything in
modern society.
At more advanced stages, we’re
not only trying to release all tension from the arm, but rather the whole body,
externally and then down to internal organs. This is all for now.