Just a few minutes’ walk outside of Harrison Hotsprings, B.C. there is a short trail called “Spirit Trail.” Over the years a local artist has created and installed clay masks up on the tall Cedars that line the kilometer or so path. Cedar and mask watch over hikers wandering through the lush mushroom & fern inhabited forest. They reveal powerful archetypes: the potent crone, the contemplative sage, the terrifying demon, the compassionate angel. The joyous singer, the grieving unspoken, the dead and the reborn. At the center of the loop trail there is a circle of a dozen or so trees with their placed masks. They surround an open space where the locals have placed a bench. I stopped here and gazed at the masks looking out over the forest. They looked into the trees and also somewhere beyond, their gaze beyond time, beyond this space. I breathed in and out. I slowly raised and lowered my arms, gathering in the thick moist air, the spirit of these masks, and allowed the feeling of it all to wash through my body. I turned to the four directions and begun my Tai Chi practice.
I came up to Harrison over the holiday break to take intentional time to process some recent unexpected events in my life. Perhaps what I really mean to say is I needed quiet time to feel these events. During the busy month of December, I had not had time to simply slow down, be present with myself and feel. The environment here, while bustling with holiday makers, gave me the reflective time I was looking for. Each day I soaked, got bodywork, hiked in the surrounding forest and walked around the lake. I practiced my forms in quiet uninhabited spaces surrounded by the magnificent Lillooet Mountain range. I allowed all the mental activity stimulated by this unexpected turn in my life – the confusion, beliefs, narratives, fears and future projections that arise naturally when one is shocked, to soften down into the forest floor, to dissolve in the mineral water. And I practiced.
I thought how grateful I am for the power of my practice to sustain me during this unsteady time. My practices have been with me over 2/3 of my life and have kept me ashore through many of life’s unexpected tidal waves: sudden deaths, relationships ending, moves from familiar places, financial crises, health crashes. During those times it’s not always easy to show up for myself on the floor, but each time I do I come back into my body where I breathe and feel the earth beneath my feet.
Many people mistake the point of learning something like Tai Chi or Qigong as to simply learn a physical form, “Qi exercises” as it were. Whereas there is nothing wrong with this approach, one can gain much sustenance this way, there is more available to us if we allow it. Practice makes us strong. Strong feet and legs, powerful glutes, core and arms. Robust eyes and ears. Vigorous insight and perception. The benefits are obvious. We are compelled to continue. But practice also makes us brave. We encounter what is new with a valiant spirit: new moves, new thoughts, new approaches. We meet the unexpected with fearlessness: awkwardness, trouble remembering, shaky thighs. And even when it is hard and we are unsure, we keep showing up.
By their nature, Taijiquan and Qigong engage us in a fluid process, a process of learning to become resilient, malleable and tenacious. Yet, when we sign up for a class we might not understand this. We may not expect these simple rather innocuous methods served up in a 12-week session to give us a chance to look inside of ourselves, below our masks as it were, and see what deeper essence is there. To test what we are actually make of. When we meet ourselves over and over again in our practice we create physical, mental and emotional muscle. We learn to preserver. If we allow it, we learn to apply lessons learned and discoveries made to our whole life.
As I practiced amidst the masks of Spirit Trail I remembered my pilgrimage last year along the ancient Kumano Kodo. Much in my life had changed that year too. My mother died unexpectedly, I decided to release my school location of 15 years. I remembered hiking along the difficult trails in the driving rain feeling I was very much out of my physical and emotional depth. But there was no where to turn back, only the forging ahead. Buddhist Statues lined the path. They reminded me for a thousand years many pilgrims struggled this path too, surely feeling as I did. Somehow, we all made it, one nimble footfall after the other. One breath after the other.
After I finished my practice along Spirit Trail, I bowed to my forest training hall. I remembered Grandmaster Chen Xiao Wang saying years ago, “the most important thing is to make the heart/mind like a Taiji ball.” We talked into the night about the real point of Taijiquan. It is not to just learn form or technique, but to become pliant and flexible, to gain the ability to be agile when meeting unforeseen circumstances. To not become rigid and hold on but to change with grace. This is the real art. The truth, the only truth really, is that everything changes. How we meet that fact is where the emotional, mental and spiritual rubber meets the road.
Before I left to return to the Springs I turned one more time to look at the masks. The demon and angel, the silent and singer, the crone, the sage, the shrouded and the newly borne looked off into the distance. I followed their gaze and looked out towards the unknown future, confident in my capacities to meet whatever that is with the resilience my practices give me.