working on hun yuan while walking

[sillybearhappyhoneyeater]

Hi friends,

 

This is just a quick post to talk about achieving the hun yuan, pre birth state while walking.

At least since the time of Wang Chongyang, there have been writings advising that "moving, standing, sitting and lying down" you should practice all the time.   Jiang Weiqiao said in his 1952 book Shi Yinzi's seated meditation health cultivation discussion,  that seated posture is the easiest one to achieve proper meditation, because while lying down it is easy to sleep, and while standing and walking it is hard to fix the mind on one location, which is required in order to meditate properly.

This doesn't mean it is impossible though,and i want to share some personal thoughts about achieving the Hun Yuan state while moving.

 

firstly:  achieving oneness in the pre heaven state means that there is only one mind present, no thought, not intention, only one mind, not separated by anything.   This means that technically it is not possible to completely achieve the pre heaven state while moving, but it is possible to work on reducing the intention to the absolute minimum required to carry out what you are doing.

In seated meditation, usually this chaotic holding as one is brought about by focusing on the lower dantian and breathing to that area without concentrating on anything else.   After a certain amount of time, the mind just naturally congeals into the area and the body seems to become one undefined thing which is not separated into parts or separate from the outside world.

 

Secondly:  if you want to achieve this state while you are moving, you need also to be mindful that you don't get run over by a car.  This means that it isn't good to close the eyes or otherwise dumb down your senses.

 

thirdly:  I have found that the two best ways to get the mind to congeal into one while walking is to first focus on not giving mind to the five major senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste, voice).  This doesn't mean that you turn yourself off, but just that you dont give any mind to sensory input that isn't important right now.   The second way I've found is that it helps to put the mind generally in the whole body.  Some people might say to focus on the lower dantian, which is also good, but when moving it tends to be much harder to focus purely on the LDT than it is in meditation, so if you put your mind on the whole body as one and just breathe naturally as you would in meditation, I think you can get a better result.  If you are really experienced, than you should be able to have a sense of your LDT and whole body at the same time.

 

Remember that the pre heaven state is mixed and turbid and is just one piece, with jing, qi, and shen collecting by themselves and without your assistance, so it is important not to value any specific mechinism of the body outside of the ones you need to keep moving in the direction you want, no falling over, and not getting creamed by a bus.

 

 

What is the value of this:

you will likely find that after a long time of doing it, your body starts to relax and you feel very loose and comfortable.  the mind will naturally quit chattering so much, and you will feel much more at one with the world.

 

hope this is of value to you  :) :)

[Daeluin]

Thank you for this. I believe that one of the main potentials of internal martial arts schools is for the training of deep meditative states while in movement. The idea of true stillness within movement may seem hard to fathom, yet in the yijing we see these two are closely connected.

 

It is difficult to nurture stillness if the body is bouncing up and down, so training one's movements to maintain an overall levelness, with fluid and gentle shifts as required by the terrain, can really help. Sinking into the hips and bending the knees can help. In walking, there is usually one leg that is supporting most of the weight and one that is positioning without weight on it. The supporting leg should be rooted to the earth, and the positioning leg should be weightless. In time, as one develops skill at gracefully and fully shifting weight from one to the other, one may come to find that it always seems like there is a stable, unchanging pillar beneath one, rooting one to the ground much like in sitting. Even though one is moving, it is more like one is still, yet the world is moving around you.

[sillybearhappyhoneyeater]

Wang Chongyang said that you should find the correct balance between stillness and movement and then move within that space. 

[beingnature]

I think its helpfull to focus on your reactions you have on sense phenomena and let them go step by step...