Still, Keeping at Bay

神寧氣靜

A mind at ease and calm vapours

神非其所宜而行之，則昧*

If one's spirit does not operate properly, it looses its clarity

Following the feminine and masculine principles theory**, the body (the external), and the mind (the internal), should compensate each other, meaning if one is fast, the other should be slow. If this seems quite easy, it gets complex if the concept of vitality and its materialisation (vapours) and the issue of the organs are added.
Indeed, while vitality is mainly about being fast, the organs, the source of one's vitality, have to remain as still as possible, motionless. In order to simplify the various issues internal speed can raise, let us just consider four skills, the capacity to endure, to relax, to be wide awake and to become frenzied and their more or less respective training speeds, stillness, normal, slowness and fastness. Indeed, while remaining still, one trains his/her mind to patiently endure, normal speed is the best choice to have one's spirit relax, slow is more interesting when one is trying to be at the same time as wide awake as possible and, finally, the faster the more frenzy. 

In order to avoid too long a post, each issue will be dealt separately, the absence of motion being the first one.

Two trainings seem to stand out in internal practices when it comes to being motionless, "Sitting in the Lotus Posture" and "Standing on the Pillars". The first one is sitting legs crossed and intertwined, the sole of the feet facing the sky while the second one is basically holding still a standing posture, but it was also practiced on real pillars to improve, amongst other things, body alignment. Those exercises were seen as a way to keep one's mind focused and imperturbable. The first one could be seen as purely internal while the second mixed both internal and external (like alignments) considerations.

Sitting Still and the Heart

Some school would indeed have beginners sit in the lotus posture for hours while trying to keep their mind active but thoughtless. They had to resist against boredom and keep their mind from wandering. To ease the harshness of such practice, reciting aloud, even singing, or doing gestures with the hands, using sometimes a rosary, may have been allowed in the beginning, a form of transition by keeping a tiny motion at the start. Students were often under supervision, in order to keep them from falling asleep and to teach them how a proper breathing would enable them to control through their heartbeat their emotive thoughts. One had to reach the state where his/her eyes would naturally shine, full of vitality and be totally awake, while the rest of their body would be totally still, having no facial expression whatsoever, almost looking like dead, if not for the eyes.

The absence of facial expression had to come from the total absence of emotions. Still, such practice had nothing to do with a meditative state, half asleep, one had on the contrary to be wide awake. Two practices externally alike but very different because their goals, presence or meditation, were very different. Hence the confusion nowadays that leisurely martial practices brought between meditation and similar in their form martial arts practices. Indeed, the aim of such practices for internal martial arts was certainly not to enter a meditative state but to reach the same state of presence and awareness of one's surroundings some animals have while they stand totally still, nothing moving, no facial or body expression except for theirs eyes, opened and in motion if necessary.

Finally thoughtless and emotionless, one would of course spend less vitality, another very important sought effect (while real meditation depletes vitality, another effect long forgotten).

If while sitting the body and the organs had to be totally still and one's vitality would flow faster just because nothing else, being motionless, was interfering, another training would use the "a still body for active organs" method. 

Holding the Pillars to Fix

Another training would be, of course, to hold a preferably low standing posture while trying to resist the urge to unbend the legs when they start to ache, this until a heatwave would come from the legs muscles. Externally, it was a training customised to learn proper balance through proper alignments and rooting by holding the posture relatively low. The idea, as previously mentioned in Shake Your Body, was be to be able to instantly take a posture with the proper stance, i.e. all the proper alignments. This was called "fixing the form".

It was a quite similar process internally. First of all, it was about having the proper alignments to maintain the organs at their rightful place, like the flat stomach, where external meets internal. Then, one had to keep them as still as possible, especially when the effort and the pain would make the heart race. This was to be done until the "fixing the heart" skill could be attained, a capacity to be as impervious as possible to outside pressure. Indeed, able to control the racing of the heart under an heavy stress created by having to resist to the pain of holding a low posture, one could apply the control of the heartbeats through a proper breathing technique to other "making the heart race" stressful situations.

Holding low postures were also one of the preferred ways to create more vitality by warming the organs through the legs heatwave, creating vapours, hence improving one's vitality. The body being motionless, the mind clear of any emotions, the ratio creation/depletion for vitality was then quite high, higher than motion trainings, which indirectly make the organs move and create emotions until one reaches exhaustion.

Able to control one's heartbeat through breathing in stressful situations, one could start, then, to contemplate motion trainings. Still, in order to stay as relaxed as possible, one of the mottos of internal practices, one would start with normal speed, the most unstressed one.

*The Body is Life's Residence, Vapours are Life's Roots 形為命之舍，氣為命之根. Though 昧, the last character, means obscure, dark, "loosing clarity" seems a more to the point translation in the context. It seems also interesting to notice that 昧 is also used to describe poor vision, like colourblindness "目不别五色之章为昧", the eyes being a very important way to judge the state of one's spirit in internal practices. Hence the difference in the eyes in the two lotus postures describing some essential internals skills.

**Ying-Yang Theory, 陰陽之理