Three years of standing.
What emptiness finally meant.

The first time my teacher made me stand still, I lasted four minutes. My knees shook, my shoulders locked, and I was convinced he had forgotten I was there. When I finally broke posture and looked up, he was twenty feet away, watering his orchids. He glanced over and said only: "Again tomorrow."

This was, as I learned later, a gift. He could have given me a lecture about alignment, or a lesson on the philosophy of zhan zhuang — "standing like a tree" — the foundational practice of every Wudang internal martial artist for the past eight hundred years. He did not. He gave me the chance to meet the posture myself, without the scaffolding of explanation.

I am writing this nearly twenty years after that first attempt. What I want to do in this essay is trace, as honestly as I can, what happened between then and now. Not because my experience is representative — every serious practitioner arrives somewhere slightly different — but because the vocabulary around standing practice has become so loaded with mysticism in the West that I think a plain account might be useful.

The first months

For the first six months, standing was primarily physical — in the crudest sense. My calves burned. My lower back complained. My shoulders, which I had not realized were carrying most of my inner tension, quietly screamed. I began to understand that my body had been holding itself in a chronic emergency posture for most of my adult life, and that simply being asked to stop doing so was, at first, unbearable.

My teacher's single instruction during this period never varied: set it down. When I asked him, once, to explain — was he referring to the arms? the thoughts? the effort? — he looked at me for a long moment and said: "Yes." Then he went back to his orchids.

The second year

Somewhere around month fourteen, the physical protests started to quiet. Not because my body had become stronger — though it had — but because I had gradually stopped fighting gravity. This is the beginning of what classical Daoist texts call song (鬆), usually translated as "relaxation" but closer in meaning to "loosening" or "release." Song is not limpness. It is the precise cessation of the muscular over-effort that I had been expending, unnecessarily, to maintain a posture my skeletal structure could hold on its own.

This was the first thing that genuinely surprised me: the discovery that my everyday standing — walking around, waiting in line, having a conversation — involved an enormous amount of chronic muscular holding that I had simply never noticed. Zhan zhuang did not add something. It revealed the subtraction.

What changed outside of practice

At this point I began to notice small shifts in my life that I could not attribute to anything else. I slept differently. I argued less. I could carry a conversation without planning my next sentence. My students — I had been teaching for about eight years at that point — started asking what had changed, because something had, and apparently it showed in how I moved across the training hall.

What emptiness actually means

By the third year, I had started to understand what my teacher meant by "emptiness" (虛). The word in English carries connotations of absence, void, even nihilism. In the Daoist internal-arts tradition, it means something very different — closer to "uncommitted." An empty muscle is one that is not yet doing anything, but is instantly available. An empty mind is not a blank mind; it is a mind that has not already decided what it's going to do.

This is the quiet but revolutionary discovery of zhan zhuang: that the nervous system can be trained to return, continuously, to a state of full availability. Not idle, not prepared, not tense — available. Present without commitment. This is what the classical texts call "being with the root" (守中).

And — this is the part I want Western readers in particular to hear — it has almost nothing to do with mysticism. It is, as far as I can tell, a precise physiological skill. It involves the autonomic nervous system, fascial chains, proprioceptive mapping, and a kind of quiet attention that we do not usually practice. It is demanding. It is also learnable, by anyone, with patience and a chair nearby for the early weeks.

What I teach my own students now

When students ask me where to begin, I tell them: five minutes a day, against a wall. Heels two inches out, back of the head lightly touching, knees very slightly bent. Not for posture correction. For listening. The wall becomes a reference surface. Your body starts telling you what it has been holding, and — critically — you do nothing about it. You simply listen, and eventually it lets go on its own.

After two weeks of this, most students are ready to step away from the wall and begin the open-standing posture. By month two, they are standing for ten minutes. By the end of the first year, twenty. That is the curriculum, and it has not changed since the Ming dynasty. It does not need to.

What I hope to offer students — more than any form or technique — is this single understanding: that the richest training is the one that looks like nothing is happening. That true internal work is almost always quiet, undramatic, and boring to observe. And that the body, when you stop micromanaging it, knows extraordinary things. Your job is mostly to get out of the way.

My teacher is eighty-three now. He still stands every morning. When I ask him what he is working on these days, he smiles and says the same thing he has said for forty years: I am setting it down.