Surprise

   Some of us are shocked when life tosses us a curve. Some of us just don’t like surprises. I know that when my wife comes home from work with a bright idea about maybe going out for dinner, and I have planned to have dinner at home, the disruption in my expectations can lead to a little emotional upset. Instead of allowing that upset to derail my peace and order, I can try to look at her idea as an opportunity to share in her joy; and shift gears inside my brain to embrace her idea.
   How can the practice of Qi Gong and Tai Chi help us to accomplish this sudden shift in direction when met with an unexpected situation in life? How can the exercises we practice like the “Taoist 5 Organ Exercises” make a real and lasting difference in how we experience our time on this planet? I submit that one example of that lies in the Heart Exercises. As we learn the Taoist 5 set, we learn to associate certain colors, movements, emotions and concepts with each exercise. This helps us develop our relationship with our body, and integrate into that relationship our mind in the form of labeling emotions and mental constructs to fit with each organ system.
   When we do this with the heart we associate the emotions of excitement and un-met expectations with the heart so that we can cultivate peace and order to balance those emotions in order to avoid overwhelming disappointment (what traditional Chinese medicine calls a stagnant state of the heart energy). Conversely, the heart also relates to upsets with shock when we are faced with something we do not expect. How do we balance the idea of unmet expectations with shock, seeming opposites in the spectrum of balance for the heart energy?
   What if we learned to maintain a sense of peace and order in our hearts, as a balance point. And what if we go ahead and look forward to see what may be coming at us, but without too much inertia of excitement or dread, just with peace and order. This practice may allow us to meet our expected outcomes with a sense of acceptance and joy, but if things don’t turn out the way we expect, we are not overly disappointed. We meet the moment with acceptance, but maybe a little less joy then we had “expected.”
   In contrast, when a something happens to us out of the blue, so to speak, we can meet it with surprise instead of shock. So, that gives us some joy that may otherwise have been “unexpected.”
   Finding a way of navigating life’s ups and downs without becoming swamped in emotional upsets is one of the goals of Taoist practices. It is the reason for developing all these mental constructs for our emotions and relating them to movements and more steady mental states. Those are the ideas that go along with each organ system like “peace and order” go along with the heart.
   So meeting an unexpected situation with a little surprise, seeing it as an unexpected opportunity—or meeting an expected situation with a little less disappointment if it doesn’t go just like planned, are both examples of using the Taoist 5 constructs as a platform for making life a little more peaceful and hopefully a little more joyful. Both are examples of attitude adjustments instead upsets.