Tai Chi Chuan and Comfort

Tai Chi Chuan and Comfort

I ran across an intriguing statement from a blog that I follow and deeply admire.  The blog is called Leadership Freak.  The author is very tai chi in his approach to Leadership and a recent post began with:

“You can’t grow if you can’t be uncomfortable.”

We all can relate to this statement.  Of course leaning into our emotional discomfort means you have to learn to accommodate something unpleasant and therefore change. 

But my teacher, Maggie Newman, constantly encourages us to feel the comfort of tai chi and not the strain.  “Make it comfortable,” she tells us frequently.  Does this create change?

In tai chi, the context is sort of flipped.  In life, often we are NOT comfortable, so leaning into a comfort zone is a new experience, a new skill.  In fact, we rarely even think in those terms.  Even worse, what is comfortable is often tense, or held, or out of alignment.  We don’t even know what that experience might feel like or what it would mean.  We simply bulldoze our way through life with our discomfort and keep moving.  Creativity is blocked.  Action takes twice the effort required.  Minds bend themselves out of shape to accommodate the discomfort that remains unaddressed and unseen.  Poor thinking takes over.  Our vision of our Self gets contorted.  Energy is trapped.  We live like a pretzel.

Change in tai chi is about creating more comfort and more relaxation.  This comfort is not a dopey or sluggish sense of comfort.  It lives on the edge of activity.  Here comfort helps create a better relationship to activity.  Think how often activities – the ones that are required – make you tense or worried or tired or bored. 

Change through greater comfort would mean more access to integrated action.  It would be pure activity without the strain or discomfort of physical or emotional blocks.  In this regard, the sense of action gets lost in the act of the action itself.

In the tai chi way, we untie the knots so that ease becomes the way we function.  We can relate to ourselves and the world in an open way and more readily take in what the world has to offer.

My tai chi blog has to add an alternative suggestion regarding growth:

“You can’t grow if you can’t be comfortable.”

Try that on for size!