Intimacy
The spirit that endows all things with life is love.
(Tschu-li)
Isolation
We live in a culture where people are
drawing away from one another.
E-mail, text messaging and even phone calls represent ways of distancing
people.
Television has encouraged the world to withdraw into locked houses.
Whilst social barriers regarding sex erode by the year, actual intimacy has reduced.
People have grown uncomfortable with
each other.
What is intimacy?
Intimacy is closeness between people.
It can be the unspoken feeling of
love
and affection between friends or between family.
It can be the shared experience of physical joining known by two lovers.
These things are just part of intimacy.
At the root of intimacy lies the trust you have in the other person.
Being able to trust someone means that you can truly be yourself without
fear
of judgement, betrayal or humiliation.
This is why infidelity upsets people; the trust has been violated and the
victim feels exposed.
Intimacy is a joining of two people,
it is the state of trust underpinning the relationship.
Resistance must soften
In order to feel close to somebody your barriers must
soften.
You allow that person to become close.
You relax.
Tai chi encourages people to soften their defences and make
themselves vulnerable.
If you
stiffen and resist, then you create
conflict by offering a barrier.
If you are not comfortable with people being close to you, then you must
relax your emotions and gain
composure.
Seeing
yourself in others
People may all be individual but we are
also quite alike.
We all eat, sleep, love, live and die.
Taoism asks you to see through the facades that people use and
see the real person behind the clothes and the image.
Look softly into another person's eyes and you may learn to see beyond the
personality and the barriers.
You may find somebody familiar.
Sensitivity
Tai chi and
taoism require us to become very sensitive.
We must learn to sense
emotional states within ourselves and other
people.
Our physical awareness must also increase considerably.
Touch is incredibly important.
To perform tai chi well we must feel every move the other person makes and
respond to their force with
softness.
Sensory awareness will change
completely as you learn the skills of tai chi.
We must find out what it means to be soft and
gentle, open and receptive.
Page created 7 May 2000