QiGong, and the art of standing in the garden

Ok, this one’s a bit bonkers. Not so many plants and flowers. More muscle twitches, and garden feelings. Here goes.

I’ve been standing all wrong.

I’ve been standing wrong, and I’ve yet to work out quite how the realisation is going to play out in my garden. That it will, I have no doubt, since how I garden is more than glancingly related to how I take up space in the world and, specifically, how grounded I am upon the soil from which my garden grows.

Let me explain...

It’s all come as a bit of a shock. Standing, after all, is something most of us, if we’re in the fortunate position of having our lower limbs in working mechanical order, don’t really have to think about that much. We find ourselves doing it if we’re not sleeping, sitting, or dashing about1. Once we’re out of toddlerhood and more or less reliably ambulant, standing kind of comes naturally.

I’m not very good at sitting on chairs, and especially not sofas. It’s not that I just slip off them – I’m not a fool, or a football – my body simply seems to find these items of furniture decidedly confusing, as though my limbs and torso can’t quite work out why they’re being prevented from falling, and so close to the ground. Perhaps this explains why I can manage to be reasonably still when perched on the floor – there’s a whole planet underneath me, preventing me from zooming out into space on the other side – but I get monumentally fidgety in a chair. And if the seat should tip backwards – what’s going on here? How are my internal organs supposed to orient themselves when my knees are higher than my hips? It’s all wrong. I can lounge comfortably on a lowish wall for quite some time, but sitting’s not really for me. Standing, though, that’s where my body finds its serenity.

And so I do it. A lot. You may not have noticed since, at a smidge under five eight, I’m not what anyone would call tall, to the extent that encountering an O’Brien in meditative stance is more like bumping into a particularly stubborn bollard than it is being loomed over by a lighthouse, or a pylon. But it ticks all the boxes for me. The standing.

And a lot of it’s to do with the breath (here we are again) – when I stand, my arms can fall to my sides, my shoulders drop away from my ears and the muscles across my chest relax, allowing my ribcage to extend up and out. Similarly, when I’m not hunched up with all my organs folded into the stuff sack of my torso, a whole space opens up for my diaphragm to drop into. So much more room for my lungs to do their expansive thing. So much more space for the diaphragm to stimulate the wandering vagus nerve that travels right through it, each deep breath sending calming signals back upwards into the brain.

More than all this, the standing thing has to do with presence – not just the fact of being present, and still, but the sensation of being within and a part of the world around me, which might be a busy London street, or a supermarket carpark in Kent, but is just as likely to be the garden. It’s slightly counterintuitive – you would think that the body would be most at rest, and therefore, least distracted and able to take notice, when it’s lying or sitting, and it kind of is, since the muscles and bones are being aided in the work of keeping you supported in space by whatever your lying or sitting on. So, relaxed, but not necessarily alert, for the very reason that your body needs to be more alert when standing up to stop you from falling over. The whole business of proprioception – of being aware of your body in space – happens largely subconsciously, but your brain is continually taking readings from your surroundings, and firing signals to your muscles to make exactly the microadjustments necessary to stop you from losing your balance. (If you want to test this out, try standing on one leg. You’ll probably be fine, and able to keep it up indefinately. Now, try standing on one leg, but with your eyes closed, and see how quickly you start to wobble without the whole array of sensory information on which your own body has become reliant.)

So, I might think I’m standing still, and ostensibly, I am. But my senses are continually taking readings of everything around me – not in a high alert, there’s-a-tiger-in-the-shrubbery kind of way, but in the kind of way that fully justifies my contention that standing is the most appropriate position to put your body in if you’re looking to get a read on your garden.

My lungs are free to breath in the air the plants and the birds have just breathed out (the garden is in you, and you are in the garden), and my whole nervous system is an early-warning radio antenna highly tuned to pick up the gentlest snail fart that might, had it arrived unannounced, tickle a patch of skin on the back of my left calf and induce me to tumble to the ground.

You bet your life I’m going to make a point of standing about, noticing things.

But I’ve been doing it wrong. And it’s to do with the knees.