movement:
How to engage with movement? One could think of movement as falling into these categories:
- subtle (including postural readjustment; sitting or standing, etc.)
- one-off overt movements (including postural readjustment; sitting or standing, etc.)
- structured (informal or "formal") repetitive movement (e.g. tai chi, qigong, slow-walking meditation, dish washing)
- unstructured (and structured) relatively still (standing around, shifting weight, looking around, Zhan Zhuang, whatever)
- unstructured in motion (walking, jogging, swimming, etc.)
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All of the ways of engaging above can be helpful at different times, with varying degrees of "stringency."
Subtle movement, aliveness, poise (sometimes!) facilitates meditative progress!
Allowing only subtle movement (so suppressing one-off overt movements) can make very subtle things more salient.
Allowing one-off, overt movements can help the system get (move backwards) over (incorrect) "humps."
Structured repetitive movement is sometimes good for getting the benefits of movement as well as keeping the mind just a little bit occupied, in a good way.
Unstructured repetitive movement (e.g. a long walks) tends to draw people into reverie, daydreaming, etc., in a good way.
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In general, urges and impulses to move can be deferred, but there’s usually something there that needs to be expressed, eventually, at least liminally. So it can be good to think of suppressed urges or impulses as debt that eventually needs to be paid off. Sometimes it can be good to hold movement in abeyance, to allow important subtlety to become salient. But, sometimes, it’s better just to "move now" because you’ll eventually need to "move later," anyway.
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Structured repetitive movement can be thought of as an optional investment that doesn’t always net pay off. It takes time for such movements to become relatively automatic, such that they can be interleaved with meditation in a way that doesn’t clash and jar with meditation (or thought). For some people, it’s worth the investment, as a sort of delimiting container for meditation, where the movement helps to move things along and there’s just enough room for variation to get over state-space humps. For other people (perhaps most people?), such a container isn’t necessary and can add significant complexity, over the long-run, that isn’t worth it.
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Unstructured repetitive movement (e.g. long walks) tends to draw people into reverie, daydreaming, etc., and sometimes people find this initially unattractive if they’re "trying to meditate," but sometimes reverie and daydreaming are the most important thing to be doing. People need almost as much unstructured reverie time as they do "meditation time," at least long-run, in order to "go all the way." Meditation masters take long, aimless walks, with no particular relation to their (body)mind, as long and as often as they have time for, and it’s unwasted time; it’s time well spent, in terms of their values and goals and hopes and dreams, as it were. If you do take long walks, a key piece is "nonvigilance," and so just make sure you’re in a safe environment, where you can naturally "space out." People are generally ok, if they’re undistracting strangers at a distance or just passing you on the trail. Cars can be more loud and disruptive, depending, even if you’re safely on the sidewalk.
If it’s hard to "sit down to meditate" or meditation has lately been "immediately going wrong" (in some very loose sense!), then often the right thing to do is to just take aimless walks, for hours and hours. One can also leave open blocks of time to do random chores at home and kind of slowly "back onto the cushion" and hop right back off again if things become problematic.