I’ve been practicing Tai Chi for over a decade and I’ve been having a strange problem for the last year or so. I’ve spent a lot of time building awareness in places like my feet and core (the bubbling well and Dan Tien, if you want to be technical).

At some point though, I just lost that connection. I couldn’t bring awareness to those areas like I used to and I couldn’t figure out how to make the awareness come back.

I’m taking a cohort of River Kenna’s Inner Wayfinding course and he introduced an exercise he called the Somatic Gravity Well. Basically, that you think of putting awareness in an area of the body as giving that area a little bit of extra gravity for your awareness. The more attention you give an area, the more attention it can pull.

I started paying attention to my feet using this lens and almost immediately my awareness was able to rest there in a way that it hadn’t for a very long time. If I want to intellectualize a bit, I was trying to push awareness places that I needed to let my awareness be pulled.

Whatever it was though, this new practice was enough to completely revitalize an old practice. I think it’s a common trap, to get stuck on the same set of old practices, and especially to hope that you can get the same result by trying the same time.

Part of it is that these practices become part of your identity. You become the person who does Tai Chi instead of someone who is using Tai Chi practices to build certain kinds of bodily connection.

Letting yourself move beyond identities like this, in this case by introducing new practices, can help you get farther in the old practices than if you just tried to grind it out indefinitely. I don’t think you can get away from all grinding with big blocks like this, but if you never bring in anything new, it’ll take a very long time to get through them.

Don Miller, my Tai Chi teacher, has a similar approach to standing meditation. Traditional standing meditation involves up to an hour and a half a day in certain postures. If you have the time for it, and the strength to do it, and the patience to build up to that level, you can unlock a lot of shit.

You can get some of the same benefits in a much shorter time by standing until you start noticing the blocks, moving briefly, and then returning to the standing position. A little taste of something new, here the movement, can help you unlock things would have taken much longer and required a lot more pain to do otherwise.

I’m certainly excited to see how this Somatic Gravity Well will help me in rediscovering my Tai Chi practice, which has stagnated while I’ve felt disconnected from my legs, and what other new practices the Inner Wayfinding course has to offer.