The Art of Moving Meditation

To register for Bruce Frantzis' June 19-23 Moving Meditation event, click here

Moving can be an easier way to access meditation than sitting or standing, says Energy Arts senior instructor Craig Barnes. “The mind has something to connect with—keeping movement going physically—so it can relax and go deeper instead of getting distracted.”

How to use your tai chi or ba gua practice to increase awareness of your inner world is the subject of lineage master Bruce Frantzis’ intensive workshop June 19-23. The topic itself—including ‘resolving inner mental, emotional, psychic, and spiritual blockages’—is a leap from BTC’s usual class focus on physical and energy mechanics, says director Dan Kleiman. But it is on the same continuum as Energy Gates inner dissolving methods of letting go stuck energy.

Among the challenges of meditating while moving is staying present to your inner experience while open-eyed. In the beginning, says Craig, most people find that the outside world diverts their focus. The workshop may touch on methods of using your gaze to maintain continuity. A great benefit of practicing that is the ability to relax your eyes so they can accept anything coming in and going out.

Focusing the mind on something that allows it to go into a still, stable space is not essentially different from how sitting meditation practices use a vocal mantra or object such as a candle flame, Craig says. Moving just adds “something else.” Taoism teaches that ‘in movement there is stillness, in stillness there is movement.’ “Part of the idea of moving meditation is that you want to integrate your meditation practice into every part of your life.” Frantzis has called this being able to “ride any of the waves life hands to you.” Sometimes the benefits of sitting meditation are difficult to translate into daily activity.

You don’t have to agree with any philosophic approach to work with the meditation tradition of Taoism. It offers a self-development method to free up the insides and connect with the core of yourself—”relaxing into your being,” Frantzis calls it.

The one-week intensive will offer tools “to take you a long way,” Craig says, “and then the meditation practice of releasing and resolving is a very individual, personal one.”