Stand

Standing is something we do so automatically that we rarely think about it.

You stand when you wake, wait, queue, speak, work, or cook. It is often a starting position from which you go onto something else. You focus your attention to the next task while the body makes the adjustments needed to maintain its position relative to gravity and the ground.

For the next two minutes, let standing become the activity itself.

This is not to test posture or alignment, discipline or rooting. It is for you to feel and understand how you organise yourself physically. There is no need to adopt a correct-looking position, which can hide the very thing this practice is intended to reveal.

You might find more weight rests on one foot. More pressure in a particular hip, knee, or lower back. Perhaps your toes grip the floor. Check if your knees lock, your chest lifts, or if tension builds in the shoulders. These help build the picture of your starting point.

Teaching sometimes suggests feeling yourself being attached to the ground, or sinking into it. Rooting here starts by becoming aware of the real relationship already taking place between your body, gravity and the supporting surface.

Stand with your feet at a comfortable width. Let the arms hang naturally.

Keep your eyes open and look forward without staring.

For the first thirty seconds, make no correction. Notice:

• where your weight rests;
• how much effort you are using;
• whether one side feels different from the other;
• where the floor meets your feet.

Then scan from the soles of your feet upward, slowly.

Notice the ankles, knees, hips, abdomen, chest, shoulders, hands, jaw and face.

Where you clearly find effort that is not needed to remain upright, allow a little of it to release. Do not try to relax the whole body. Some muscular activity is necessary. The key is to match the amount to the task at hand.

Continue breathing normally.

After two minutes, take one ordinary step and continue with your day.

• Where did your weight settle before you adjusted anything?
• What tightened when nothing was being asked of you?
• Did releasing one area change another?
• Were you able to release any tension and remain similarly upright?

Standing still is not physiologically still. The nervous system continuously self-regulates, combining information from the feet, joints, muscles, eyes and your sense of balance, to keep the body's centre of mass within a workable base of support.

Most of this regulation happens subconsciously. Drawing attention to areas of pressure and tension can make you aware of those sensations and processes, without necessarily resulting in control.

The purpose in this exercise is to improve your ability to notice when habits affect how you manage and organize your structure, rather than immediately consciously managing it.

Proprioception and postural control can be trained, although this takes longer than two minutes. This initial exercise in attentive standing will help you reflect on your starting point from today. It introduces the first developmental task: recognising how you currently organise support in relation to gravity and the ground.

Traditional Chinese martial arts use stance practice to develop a base, rooting, that is a relaxed structural integrity with internal awareness.

A beginning posture is open and uncommitted, joints are neither locked nor collapsed but hold potential. Weight settles through the legs and feet while the spine remains upright and the breath remains available.

The posture, however, is only the container, through attention it becomes practice. The practitioner continually revisits the posture to detect and release any unnecessary tension without sacrificing structure. A base is cultivated not by becoming unmovable, but by becoming increasingly organised through one’s structure in relation to the ground.