Internal Balance (2)

Sep 1

4 min read

Maintaining Your Equilibrium; Staying 'Balanced'

This blog looks at an exercise which might help to achieve a sense of all-round balance.

Zhong Ding (Central Equilibrium) 中定

Zhong Ding, often translated as 'Central Equilibrium', is a fundamental concept in Tai Chi that focuses on maintaining a balanced vertical alignment of the body. This principle is crucial for effective movement and stability during practice. This isn't only mechanics, it's also both sensory and emotional.

The Mechanical Side

When you are standing upright, with the weight both in the middle of each foot, equally spread between the two feet, and your arms hanging on either side of you, you are in a state of 'balance' physically. Your weight is equally on the ball of the foot as well as the heel, and the weight is 50/50 between the two feet.

Getting Out of Balance

If someone were now to put a hand on the front of your shoulder/upper chest, and were very gently to push your shoulder (e.g.) backwards, you would be gradually pushed 'off' or 'out of' balance.

Your body and your mind would then try to do something about this.

First of all you might push back (resist) with your shoulder, and you might also find that you started to dig your heels into the ground at the back (bracing).

If the pushing were to continue, you might then find that other parts of your body started to tense up in their involvement, for example your neck would start to engage fairly early on in the tightening up process, followed by your lower back, and so on...

You are by now very much OUT of balance; there is no longer an equality of natural tension within the body (tensegrity, or 'integrated tension'), certain parts of you would be far more active than other parts.

So what do you do about it?

The only way to experience this is to allow another person to push you very gently. The 'very gentle' part is extremely important, because you are looking for the precise moment when you start to tense, and you will miss it if the other person 'shoves' you.

When being pushed, you want to avoid the gripping up that naturally takes place if the push is too hard, and you want to reach the point just before the gripping up, (which is why the push should be very soft), before there is any resistance in the shoulder, and before you begin to brace yourself with the heels. [The picture above has gone much too far].

You also don't want to focus on the point of push (the shoulder), or on the heels (that you might use to brace yourself). If you do this, you are no longer thinking/feeling your central equilibrium, and are being distracted by the potential effects (the shoulder and the heels).

The internal practise here is to re-harmonise the body as soon as there is the slightest tension in the body.

The Practise

As you reach the cusp of gripping up, ask the other person to push a fraction harder.

The precise moment that you feel the body starting to resist or brace, ask the person pushing to stay where they are, to stop increasing the push, and/or to ease off very slightly.

In this paused position, you then have to restructure internally so that it no longer feels as though you are being pushed.

Using the Breath

What really helps here is to focus on your breathing, ideally down in the abdominal region, allowing the body to soften and at the same time giving you a different point of focus to the obvious ones on shoulder and heels.

Whilst still being pushed, what might then happen is that you gain in confidence, and you can allow the person to push you gradually harder.

Emotionally

The above exercise involves a lot of subtlety and sensory awareness, but there is a psychological side of it that interests me also, and this is to do both with one's relationships with other people, and the way in which we deal with the knocks and scrapes of day to day living (often the same thing!).

It's easiest to take a slightly extreme example of someone who gets very cross with you.

We might react by either caving in or getting angry in return (I'm aware that there are other options).

Caving in is the tai chi equivalent of being pushed over - you literally become 'a pushover'.

Getting angry (heckles up, putting your back up etc.) is the tai chi equivalent of bracing with your heels and pushing back with your shoulder.

Applying this to Emotional Issues

So is it possible to apply the same thing that we do in the above physical tai chi exercise to emotional issues?

I think that the answer is 'yes, very much so'. Try breathing, focussing on keeping yourself harmonised.

Results

When trying the 'physical' version of this (as above), the very interesting result of this is that the more adept you become at it, the more you will find that the person pushing you, instead of feeling as though they are pushing you, they will feel as though they are actually pushing themselves backwards away from you.

When you are completely comfortable in your own skin, things bounce off you; there is no need for resistance, and like a well-balanced spinning top, or a wheel that is perfectly balanced, it can carry on rotating much longer than something that is not balanced.

This is not about ego; it's not about thinking that you are completely okay and other things are not. This is only about being settled and grounded, and working from that perspective.

Zhong Ding is not only about physical alignment; it embodies a holistic approach to movement and balance in Tai Chi, physical and mental health, and martial effectiveness.

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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.