Opening to Let Go

By Paul Cavel

I began studying the Taoist Water tradition in the late 1980s and quickly dedicated myself to my training because of life-debilitating injuries I needed to address to maintain any decent quality of life. At that time, I felt as though I had looked everywhere for answers, but nothing seemed to suffice or allow me to make headway beyond short-term gains.

I soon learned that the Water Method starts from the position that everything you need to be healthy and whole is already inside of you. Practice is, therefore, about removing all that is false, untrue — not you — rather than looking for what can be superficially or only temporarily gained.

When I had the ah-ha moment – the experiential recognition – that the answers I sought were in fact inside of me, it became easier for me to change my orientation from an external focus to an internal one. Instead of pointing to markers of success, I could finally start to hear and feel the ways in which my body had been trying to communicate with me all along.

Letting Go Is the Purpose of Practice

The price of living a life entails collecting some degree of baggage and those burdens can lead to blockages in the body, energy and mind. If you lugged around your suitcase everywhere you went, your muscles would soon become tense and the amount of energy it takes to go from point A to point B would increase dramatically. Soon your thoughts would change too: "Hmmm, maybe I don't really want to do this or that because it would take too much effort"!

Stress, injury, illness, trauma and ageing have a way of sapping your life-force energy and creating blockages that, at least from a Taoist perspective, must be actively released in order to restore your body-energy-mind to the free and easy state unto which most of us were born. For this reason, letting go becomes the focus of all Taoist practices, whether movement-based (like qigong, tai chi and bagua) or stillness-based (like standing qigong and sitting meditation), with the Dissolving process itself epitomising the Water Method of letting go.

As soon as you go to sit for meditation or begin to move in a focused and specific way, e.g. during a qigong, tai chi or bagua practice, tense and stuck places in your body become amplified and you become acutely aware of the blockages that you’ve been lugging around. These uncomfortable and sometimes painful spaces call out for your attention and impinge on your ability to make headway in your practice, e.g. to sit for prolonged periods or accurately practice your forms, because your body, your energy and even your mind have become restricted in some way.

Opening or Letting Go: How Do You Know?

The prime directive of Taoist arts is to open because a blockage always involves some measure of closing, condensing or binding. First you literally need to create more physical space in your body, so that tension can be released, energy can circulate more freely and sophisticated internal techniques can be learned, practised and embodied that go to the underlying cause of any blockage. You must learn how to open before you can truly let go, which, again, goes to the crux of all Taoist practices. (See my post on creating internal space for some simple qigong exercises you can start training now.)

Over the last 30 years of teaching, one of the most interesting questions that pops up now and again is: What is the difference between opening and letting go? Of course, as with all self-development training, the answer lies in deepening your skill set, self-reflection and, from a Taoist perspective, ongoing meditation practices. That said, there are some fundamental differences between opening and letting go that I hope will steer you in the right direction and help you make good use of your practice time.

To Control or Not to Control, That Is the Question

The biggest difference between opening and letting go is that opening entails exerting some level of control over your body, qi or mind, while letting go does not. Engaging any genuine method of self-discovery will initially require some degree of struggle. Now whether that is to do with learning and developing a new skill, such as a particular practice technique, engaging an under active body part or integrating such knowledge into your mind-body-energy as one whole, it is all applicable. Once some degree of familiarity and faculty is established though, you can reduce your effort.

Once you reach this point, you can focus on relaxation and releasing your nerves to unlock the mechanisms that enable greater self-awareness and, ultimately, self-discipline. In the beginning, a lot of focus and energy is needed to learn a qigong, tai chi or bagua form, but this eases off as you become more familiar and comfortable with the movements, the relevant internal content and specific modus operandi of each form.

In the Water Method, qigong is the central practice for maintaining and caring for the body and its energy, known as "qi" (or "chi") in the East. For example, engaging the body's soft tissues (muscles, fascia, tendons and ligaments) without reciprocal inhibition, that is without strenuous muscular effort, is quite difficult to achieve. You must feel and observe what is happening or not happening, as the case might be. Once you are satisfied that something is happening, then you can put in less effort for the same result ... and relax.

And the primary point of qigong is indeed to relax. Why? Because relaxation is precisely what allows deeper access to and finer control of your body, as well as your ability to cultivate qi. In time and if you can relax progressively more through ongoing qigong practice, it becomes possible to gain deeper and yet deeper access to your body’s systems, where the benefits can go far beyond basic self-care.

Losing All Sense of Effort

The Dissolving process is used by Taoists to let go of blockages in your system by contacting your qi with your mind and releasing them. First this is done through standing practice, which removes the underlying energetic bindings that can release and open the body. Subsequent movement practice requires far less effort and, therefore, the body can naturally drop open.

Later, sitting practice tunes you into the emotional and mental blockages that you carry and which hold or support the physical and energetic bindings within you. Successful release of blockages of the emotional and mental levels has a profound and positive effect on health and well-being.

Eventually, if you so choose, you can take both of these aspects of Dissolving into your movement practices, so that you can deal with the deeper underlying blockages that are hidden in your system. Accurate, relaxed, internal movement uncovers that which your mind avoids. It lifts the veil, making the unseen seen, so that you can deal with it. These practices soften, release and open your body on a profound level, and the internal qi flows begin to wash away the deeper stagnancies and bindings within you. Oscillating between stillness and movement practices leaves no stone unturned and gives you a method for truly letting go of all that impedes you.

Letting Go Is a State of Mind

When you achieve this state of being – where your mind can truly let go – your nerves can fully release and empty, your body and its energy can open and expand; there will not be anything in your system closing you down, drawing you in or causing a contraction of any kind. This is why the prime directive of any pure Taoist discipline is to open: open and expand your body, open and expand your qi, open and expand your mind.

The opening you experience from letting go is more profound than that of using your intention to open. You must enter a space of utter relaxation while practising – not just after you have finished your practice. This is how you move towards The Tai Chi Space: the place where all opposites come into balance and integrate into one, seamless whole. Through this portal, practice becomes effortless and you sink into wu wei – achieving without effort.