It’s 10 pm and mid summer.  The park has an eerie glow of the night sky is turning purple and people are walking home.  I’ve been standing beneath a tree with my hands in front of me for half an hour, supposedly “Wu chi stance”, yet what I sense is just a feeling of complete meaninglessness.  Actually I feel silly, standing here waving my hands around in the darkness with people pointing at me as they pass, all but a few thinking “there stands a basket case”. In addition there is a sense of “why do this?”. With no satisfying answer in mind I return home in the dark.

There are a few taboos in qigong or yoga circles. The most common is being up front about why you do it in the first place, followed by the real reason you quit.

A strange fact is that often when confronted with the reason for starting some form of inner work, people often go out of their way to tell their story of some form of suffering, being some form of physical, mental or emotional reaction to life’s challenges. Either present or in their past. What most people who do meditation, yoga or qigong realize is that the very reason they stop is more often than not a sign that they are starting to really address the reason they started.  I am excluding conventional yoga practice in this, as it now has been diluted as “toning” and “energizing”, and primarily are practiced to look and feel better. Basically to maintain our conceptions of ourselves, as young energetic and vibrant individual egos with a bright future. Which is totally ok, yet has nothing to do with “yoga” in its original meaning; “join, unite, make one”

What took me a long time (probably a decade) to realize is that there is an art to being a practitioner of an inner art, just as life itself. Paradoxically this entails not “mastering” anything particular, but instead honing my ability to trust something that is not my own individual intention, or agenda. For the better half of my adult years this individual agenda was about finding tools to avoid pain and feel better. But this neglected the almost existential thrust that drove me into inner work in the first place.

This urge was an irrational one. It contained the aftermath of several experiences of being thrown out into an experience og “being” or reality that had no previous reference points. At one particular point I was sitting on top of a mountain in France after a long ascent, and seeing the mountains in the distance and feeling them not separate from “me”. Instead them being there and me sitting where I was sitting was the same. That what I essentially was and what I was looking at was totally identical.  At that point, a sense of something deep inside, almost like a resonance, or a yearning, took over, and I broke down in tears. After that, things, and life really was a bit off skelter. Things didn’t add up.

Years later, after qigong healed my broken back, I started to realize that all my wanting to get somewhere with my practice; improve, rejuvenate, empower, transform, and transcend, was not the continuous ascent to a better place. It being the idea of reality being somewhere I needed to go, and the thought of doing something to get there that was actually a part of the same age-old problem.

So back to the night beneath the tree.

I felt the question coming up; ” Why am I doing this?”. At this point, most people stop doing whatever they do, and start shopping for happiness somewhere else.

Then it started to dawn on me. What if there isn’t anyplace to go? Only after posing that question into the void did my practice transform. There really isn’t anywhere to be but here. What starts to happen then is the strange shift into noticing and experiencing what happens within immediate experience. This ever-changing present has no agenda, no fixed objective and is completely ignorant to my wants, fears and desires. The universe doesn’t care.

 The “me” that wants to get anything out of this is extremely insignificant. The cosmos just goes on. But it’s not separate from me either. This lack of separateness is reality. Then suddenly the stars, the trees and the kiosk on the corner becomes intensely significant. So does the all pain, pleasure and loss, fear and joy. It derives meaning due to being my own consciousness.

This sobering fact totally dispels the notion of their being any additional meaning to any spiritual or energetic endeavour. The “meaning of life” is not found through adding anything; not what you do, what you have, what you know, who you know, or what you realize. It’s about removing all artifice. It’s about perceiving the fundamental meaningfulness of what is.

Then real practice may start.