Make It Pervasive

If what you train in Taiji and Meditation remains in your Taiji and Meditation practices, then much of its potential is wasted, and much of the point of the practices are lost. The purpose of Taiji and Meditation is to transform yourself, and only when these transformations manifest in your daily life have they truly transformed you: before this, they are simply things you do in your practice.

The purpose of developing Mindfulness is manifold: training calmness is one thing; training your attention to follow your directions, and to remain on what you intend it to focus on is another. And there are many more. The same goes for Taiji and other Meditation practices. Here is a semi-random collection of examples to ponder. I'll maybe add to these as I go. What I write about in books on this topic is not something that I've learned or trained: it is something that I learn and train. As I learn and train, I discover more interesting aspects of the training, and those aspects can and do turn into the thoughts I write about. I am no master, merely a student with years of experience. I aim mainly to pass on what I have learned as a student to those who are also students of disciplines such as Taiji or some Meditation discipline. My writings are more of a student-to-student communication than a master-to-pupil affair. I like the saying 'There are no masters, merely students further along the Way.'

1. We need to get up and go to the toilet at some point in the day. This involves getting out of our chair, walking to the bathroom, and walking back. This walking gives us an opportunity to put into practice what we train in either the Taiji form or perhaps Mindful Walking. Taiji obsesses with efficiency, Awareness, Intention, and balance. We can carefully form an Intention for every step, be aware of exactly where our body will move, where our foot will land, and maintain careful balance as we slowly move one foot after another. We can think of where our hands go: before flicking the light switch, before even moving our hand, first become deliberately, consciously aware of where in space that switch is, and what it feels like, and then like one moves an arm in the Form, slowly form the Intention to move the arm and then move it.
2. If we are sitting and typing, which many of us do a lot of, we have an opportunity to practise typing with a similar Meditative way that I described in Of Mind & Movement. Each keypress, each word, is done efficiently, precisely, with deliberate Awareness and focus. I make myself aware of the location of each key. I make precise, deliberate movements for each keypress. I aim to make zero errors, to train out the instinct to rush that creeps in all to easily. I aim to make the movement of my hands and fingers efficiently choreographed, practising early preparation in the sense that I aim to get my hands and fingers positioned for the next keypress they will make as early as possible. For common words, I aim to precisely choreograph how to type that entire word; and for common fragments like 'graph' which ends many words. Then there is sitting posture: when formally practising my typing, and also when practising piano, I sometimes go very slowly, one keystroke at a time, paying attention to my entire sitting posture, being upright, relaxed, aligned, for every keypress. Then when I start pressing more than one key in a single movement, when I move from key-by-key to word-by-word, I aim to maintain this upright, relaxed and aligned posture as I do so. It is all to easy for me to slump into bad posture, and so it is important for me to make the effort to retrain, and so I make the effort.