Standing Like a Tree ( Part 1)
Standing Like a Tree or Zhan Zhuang is a type of Tai Chi that opens pathways to what wants your attention. It is a simple yet powerful exercise to enhance energy, mental clarity. It helps you create a connection to your inner self without re-traumatizing oneself. It’s an excellent standing meditation to bring more movement and aliveness to everything you do. This meditation can eventually help to unleash deeply held trauma that can be relieved by our recognition of its pain as part of your Wholebody practice.
Standing Silently Connects Us to Our Bodies
Wholebody Focusing includes a movement-based language with which we can silently communicate with whatever emotions our bodies hold. Standing like a Tree offers many ways we can enter this subconscious world to help balance whatever we are conscious of with all that our body holds and uses to react from a perspective that includes all we have ever experienced. This practice also holds a pathway to clear whatever is no longer needed. In addition, It holds on to the essential lessons that guide our lives.
First and foremost, we communicate with our bodies through Grounded Presence. Grounded Presence is merely putting time aside to recognize our body and its relationship to the Earth, Air, and the Universe. Connecting to these energies opens a communication pathway from our bodies to our consciousness, starting with whatever wants our attention. We must be patient, open, and concentrate on what is happening in and around our bodies. In this state, our consciousness often opens up and shares whatever insight is ready to reveal itself.
Benefits of Standing Like a Tree Meditation
For example, one day, I was holding Grounded Presence quietly standing in my Den, feeling a sense of comfort and lack of anxiety. Suddenly, a wave of anxiety arose and took over. I asked what caused this wave to show up. What came for me was the memory of what it was like to live with my family as a young girl. There was fear, danger, and a lack of care. What That part of me was letting me know that its experience was trapped inside that childhood moment. The trauma of the experience froze and split off from my consciousness.
This part of me did not know that we were no longer five years old and no longer lived with my family of birth. I told this part, “We live in a different state with our loving husband. The danger is no longer present. We were now 59 years old and far away from the anxiety-creating circumstance. While it seemed incredible to the traumatized part that the danger no longer existed, it was happy to have connected with me. That part of me has revisited over time to make sure that the trauma had not returned nor were we still living in the original place of trauma.
Awareness of Trauma+Compassion=Healing
The silent meditation that involved my body was what led me to this experience. Holding still in Grounded Presence gave an opening to a struggling part to share its trauma with my consciousness. My new awareness of this trauma, helped me comfort this deeply held pain, anxiety, and loss of our connection to my Whole Body. I would never have remembered that feeling without Grounded Presence and Standing Like a Tree. However, I knew immediately that that the experience was true.
Learn from Standing Like a Tree
I find I make the biggest leaps in reconnecting with parts of me that hold unknown, trauma, joy, ancient truths when I connect to my body in this manner: Standing, Recognizing my whole body, waiting, for whatever needs my attention to awake my consciousness.
The Link below describes the Standing Like a Tree Tai Chi practice. The next post to the blog will be how to it can be used to strengthen our WBF practice.
Standing like a Tree is a very simple practice that takes 30-40 minutes.Click on the link below to get more information.
- Stand in a comfortable place
- For best results keep your body weight on the front or middle part of the feet.
- Your arms should be at your side imaging that there is a pea under your arms so they are extended a tiny bit with hands faced toward the body.
- Bend your knees slightly.
- Lower your chin towards your throat.
- Draw your upper pelvis inward.
- One of the body’s energy centers is just below the navel. Hold this space in your consciousness.
- Become aware of what your body is experiencing. The longer you hold this position in grounded presence, the higher the likelihood that automatic movements will show up. They can lead to new parts of yourself coming into consciousness. Start with 10 minutes and bring your practice up to 30-40 minutes. Whatever shows up, welcome it, accept what it is and show compassion for its experience. No more is needed.
See the link above to more information about the physical practice of Standing Like a Tree.
Thank you so much I have been doing a system of Chi Gong for a couple of years now and its incredibly helpful. The resources you provided are invaluable specially in relation to how to hold the body positions. Grounded presence is something I need to be reminded of time and time again. Each time feels a fresh revelations. Thank you
From the first time I experienced Standing Like a Tree I knew this was a valuable practice for me. As a girl growing up in the sixties I experienced a lot of limitations on being able to move, exercise, play because it was either unladylike or would expose me to some unknown danger. Having an energetic practice that didn’t include movement was just what I needed. I could connect with my body without any of the ancient prohibitions getting triggered.
I am once more reminded that if only we had known these things at the time how different life would have been. Wish I had been taught, wish I had a role model, wish I had had some one to turn to……