Tara Weaver Fitness

Wu wei means the “act of non-doing” and it's one of my favorite parts of Tai Chi, an ancient practice that has no shortage of ironies. Wu Wei is an “act” but it's actionless. It is achieved by not doing and once you've done it you have to start all over by undoing it. Ancient traditional Chinese texts about Tai Chi are brimming with simple yet tricky instructions about Wu Wei, but they aren't meant to make things impossible. The instructions are helpful because humans aren't necessarily adept at standing or sitting quietly in stillness – at least not without a phone in our hands. Modern life encourages constant consumption and productivity. Even scrolling is a form of consumption and productivity. Have you ever mustered the courage to review your browser history? If you dare, you might even experience a silly pride in finding out that in less than one day you visited over a hundred websites. But this “mindless” scrolling is not Wu Wei.

So how does one deliberately transition out of productivity/consumption mode and into Wu Wei? We still have to do something to be doing nothing. The body and mind are resistant to stillness, but can be soothed to a stop with the right input. My students and I use a movement called “pouring” where we slowly rock our body weight from one foot to the other. If you rocked a baby on your hip, swaying from side to side, it would look pretty normal. Without the baby, it looks and is a self-soothing, rhythmic movement side to side of the whole body. If I start practice by attepting Wu Wei right off the bat, I will most likely fail. If I go into pouring and come back around to Wu Wei, I'm more successful at accomplishing nothing! I find this indirect approach to be highly successful, in fact. Too bad there aren't any competitive Wu Wei leagues, I think I'd like that game.

There is one Tai Chi game where practictioners compete at Push Hands against an opponent but no one gets points for demonstrating Wu Wei. Anyway, Tai Chi is very much about practice, on your own and in a class. You don't need to compete or earn recognition, what matters is the time spent practicing. Cheng Man Ch'ing who is credited with starting an ever broadening Tai Chi movement in New York City in the 1960's said, “Go without water and food but do not go without Tai Chi”. And so, after several minutes of pouring we are ready to spend as much time as possible standing still. Our minds and bodies become calm and willing to let go of that urge to check our phones and be productive. This could be any length of time from two minutes to an hour.
Pouring, coined by Peter Wayne of Tree of Life Tai Chi, can be helpful almost anytime you need to calm your mind. The other day one of my students told me she'd found an interesting use for it while watching the nightly news. She was finding the news disappointing and stressful, but she told me she was determined “to not tune out” and to stay “aware and informed.” And so while nervously watching the news she began to pour. She found she was better able to process her emotions, hearing the facts and letting go of much of the stress and negativity. Pouring helped her internal environment deal with the external chaos.

We all have patterns of tightness that come from accumulated stress of some kind, whether internal or external. When we are injured, for example a ruptured disc in our low back, the muscles and nerves step in to keep things from getting worse. The paraspinal muscles in the back and the deep abdominal muscles might contract and seize, to keep an injured disc from being further and painfully compressed. Through good posture and regular movement some ruptured discs will actually heal themselves and the protective tension may dissipate, returning freedom of movement and functionality. However, sometimes the body holds on to protective patterns of tension, shortened breath and range of motion for longer than necessary. This is where Tai Chi movements can help. With gentle, mindful movement, the practitioner can “listen” for disfunction in the body and breath. Cues like jerkiness, loss of balance or isolated tension and “hot zones” around the body will become apparent. These cues tell the mover that something is overworking or perhaps, not working enough. Simply noticing the patterns of tension and discomfort can be enough to start cleaning things up. Over time, the practioner becomes an expert on listening to their body and responding with focused exertion or relaxation.
“Woo woo” is a term you may have heard referring to spiritual or healing practices without a scientific basis. Something described as “woo woo” iplies that the resulting experience is due to placebo effect, suggestion, social reinforcement, or other factors not scientifically testable. Ideas like “vital life force”, called “chi” in Chinese traditional medicine, form the basis of the traditional Chinese understanding of living things, including the human body. It cannot be measured or quantified, in the same manner as say, blood oxygen level, or platelet counts, so some people might dismiss this as “woo-woo”. Likewise the more well-known principles of “yin” and “yang” seem to belong more to philosophy and poetry than to a method for recovering from knee surgery. Nevertheless, these natural, universal concepts are invaluable when we need to use our minds to focus on our bodies. Where the mindless automation of CPM therapy may treat an isolated ACL injury, traditional Tai Chi concepts are tools for mindful whole-being enhancement. The results of our practice affect all of our body systems, simultaneously, as well as the mind. Using our imagination and connecting with the interior signaling of our body, we can do real work to stimulate healing and improvement. How can science describe the feeling after Tai Chi practice? You could measure levels of stress hormones, perhaps, but the experience of beauty, agency, and shared effort is truly transcendent.

As Peter Wayne wrote in The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi, “Cutting-edge research now lends support to long-standing claims that Tai Chi favorably impacts the health of the heart, bones, nerves and muscles, immune system, and the mind.”

Our external environment is full of unrelenting stressors for many people, from work and social interaction, to constant attention demands from our phones, the stress of driving in traffic, intense weather conditions and so on. Meanwhile, our internal state may be further challenged by persistent anxiety, depression, low quality sleep and poor nutrition. Together these consipire to weaken the immune system and open the door to illness. What can Tai Chi do to help? The habit of regular, positive effort that Tai Chi offers, helps people deal with the difficulties of life by strengthening the mind and body at the same time.
My student found herself more deeply disturbed than usual during her nightly news program, but she wanted to keep listening to stay in touch with the changing events. Her nervous system was transmitting signals of alarm and fear which were trying to take root in her body and mind, but she didn't turn off the television. Instead, she realized that by slowly pouring side to side she could use her muscles to transmit calm to her nervous system, bathing her whole being with a sense of balance and readiness. Rather than give in to the emotional onslaught of disturbing information, she allowed the information to move through her body and felt her body process the emotions and allow them to settle down below away from her head, heart and lungs. Think about what stress looks like – shoulders raised, breath shallow, heart racing. Do you really want to be stuck in a physical state of stress everytime you hear something upsetting? My student told me she would keep up the pouring when she watched the news. Rather than relying on a woo woo approach, I believe that meant she was ready to bring tools like pouring and the search for Wu Wei to the forefront of her decision to deal with reality head on.