Has your Balloon Got a One-Sided Leak?

James Drewe
Jul 5, 2017
3 min read

Updated: Feb 1

When it feels right

Sometimes when you move in tai chi or qigong you just know you’ve got it right. You don’t need anyone to tell you, you instinctively know that it worked. It felt easy, light, balanced, friction-less, and you were completely ‘in tune’ with yourself. The movement felt free. Typically, you then try to repeat it and can’t quite capture that same sense of ease. Irritating! But you know it’s possible. What you experienced was both you and your body moving as one. Just for a moment you let go; your body was in perfect balance, and mind and body were both connected and perfectly balanced. With experience this feeling can occur more frequently.

How do you encourage it?

To feel balanced, the body constantly needs to behave like a balloon.

A ball (a globe, a balloon, a sphere, the planet we live on) is always in balance; the pressure inside is equal on all parts of the inner surface. A ball can never fall over, but were you to cut it in half (e.g. a melon), the halves would fall over. Your body needs to feel as stable as the undivided ball!

The body has these extraneous limbs that flap about, and which are largely (though not entirely) responsible for unbalancing the situation.

So, for example, for ease of movement in tai chi, when moving an arm forwards, in order to keep things in balance, we also need to do something at the back; this could be the other arm, or a leg, or possibly your spine.

The same is true for left and right as well as up and down.

When you manage to accommodate all the criteria – front back, left right, up down – correctly, you know you have got it right without being told … it just feels right … the melon can’t fall over! But if it’s loaded on one side….

So what’s the 'balloon' title all about?

Simply that, when blowing up a balloon, the rubber expands equally across its surface; i.e. the pressure is equal (assuming that the rubber isn’t weaker in some places). Your body needs to do something similar, but, rather than a physical expansion (although this could also happen), it has a feeling of ‘protection’ without tension. If the balloon is too rigid, it is unable to expand.

So in the case of the body, muscular force (rigidity) cannot be the answer. Your body needs to behave like your lungs; on breathing in, the tissues of the lungs flex and an equal expansion takes place within. This is known as Peng, sometimes described as ‘educated force’, and to feel it you don’t even have to move a millimetre.

If your body were a castle, you would defend all sides of it equally and wouldn’t leave any gaps for the opposition to sneak in. So when moving in tai chi and qigong, no part of you should be ignored; the movement of one part of you (arm, leg, shoulder, back, chest, knee, etc.) should be reflected across the body; a balance needs to be maintained.

James Drewe teaches Tai Chi and Qigong in both London and in Kent and online.

Details of weekly classes both live and online can be found on the website, and there are classes for 2-person Tai Chi on one Saturday a month.