Yielding to Weight

For forty years I have watched living bodies move — animals, children, the old, masters of their art — and there is one movement I recognize before all others, though almost no one notices it in their own body. It happens in the brief instant when weight passes from one support to the other. Not in muscular effort, not in any visible gesture, but in the small pause between them, when the body for a moment stops doing and simply rests on its support. For a long time I passed this pause by, as everyone does. And then I understood that it is here, and not in effort, that what I call natural movement begins.

Try it on yourself — it takes less than a minute. Stand and shift your weight onto one leg, calmly, the way you do a thousand times a day. In that instant, if you do not interfere, the body settles a little onto its support: gravity draws it down, and you let it go. You do not catch it with your muscles, you do not hold it — you release it, and the support receives you. This yielding under load — brief, quiet, almost imperceptible until you learn to catch it — is the doorway to everything this chapter is about.

I call this state Maximum Dynamic Relaxation. The name asks for precision, because relaxation here is easily misunderstood. It is not limpness, not going slack: the muscles go on working, and working precisely. But everything superfluous in their work — the counter-tension, the habitual clench, the surplus effort with which we needlessly safeguard every movement — falls away. The muscles relax to the greatest degree possible, and only the necessary remains. This is what “maximum” means here: not rest in place of work, but work cleared of all that is superfluous. And that instant of settling onto the support is the very window in which everything superfluous disappears of its own accord.

This window does not open out of nothing. For the muscles of the trunk to relax, they need the answer of the earth — the force with which the support pushes back against our weight. But this answer does not reach the trunk by itself: the muscles of the legs carry it upward. The leg, taking the weight, passes the ground’s counter-force up through the body — and only then do the muscles of the trunk relax. What forms is a ring, not a ladder: the legs carry up the earth’s answer — the muscles of the trunk relax — out of that relaxation movement is born — it spreads to the limbs — the next step loads the legs again. Contraction and relaxation follow one another around the circle, along the whole body. The relaxation of the trunk opens each new turn of this circle — but only after the legs have made it possible.

What happens in this window? The lead is taken not by the muscles but by what I call the inner pistons of the trunk. There are two, and both are set in action by one and the same thing — the bending of the trunk under its own weight, the very bending that appears in the moment of settling onto the support, when the muscles are relaxed. The first piston is spinal. As the trunk bends to the side, the intervertebral discs change their shape, and this change of shape turns the vertebrae — in the trunk and in the neck alike. The second piston is diaphragmatic. As the trunk bends forward or to the side, pressure rises in the abdominal cavity between the thoracic and the urogenital diaphragms. So, with no effort of its own, movement is born in the depth of the trunk and then spreads outward — to the neck, the head, the arms and the legs. This movement I call Self-Generated Inertial Motion — SGIM. The word “self-generated” must be taken precisely: it arises of itself not in the sense that it depends on nothing, but in the sense that, once arisen, it flows and dies away on its own, without any continuous muscular effort. It can arise only in that moment of settling — but once arisen, it lives on by its own inertia. This, as I understand it, is the manifestation of Internal Energy.

This force was spoken of long before me. The Daoist masters of ancient China named its action Wu Wei — non-doing. The word is most often understood wrongly, as idleness or easy leisure. But Wu Wei is neither idleness nor going slack. It is action from which the superfluous has been removed — the very thing I call relaxation. Wei Wu Wei, doing-within-non-doing: the body works, yet ceases to hinder itself; the weight settles, the pistons come into action, the movement arises as if by itself. What the master feels from within as Wu Wei is, seen from without, Self-Generated Inertial Motion. And the force whose action gives this non-doing, the tradition called qi. I do not set out to reduce all of qi to the mechanics of inertia — it is wider than movement. But in movement its trace, force without surplus effort, I can at last tie to a precise address: weight, support, discs, diaphragms, inertia. The Daoists knew this from their own experience and passed the knowledge down through the generations, clothing it in images and parables. To that knowledge I add what it did not hold: a scientific account of the mechanism of effortless movement, and a method of teaching built upon it — one far faster and more effective than the traditional path.

And so that no one takes this for mysticism, there is a simple test. Remove the support and the weight — a jump, free fall, the weightlessness of orbit — and there is nowhere to settle, no answer of the earth to be had, and the window does not open. In weightlessness, relaxation gives birth to no movement at all: there everything must be done by the muscles, from the first instant to the last. So the “self” in Self-Generated Inertial Motion never meant “cut off from the earth.” The self is the inner pistons as the source; but that source is mute without the earth underfoot. Gravity, the support, and the legs that carry the earth’s answer upward — this is the condition without which relaxation stays merely relaxation and gives birth to nothing.

Here I cannot help recalling Serge Gracovetsky. He made a film I have watched many times since: a young man born without legs crosses a room on his own, on the two sitting bones of his pelvis, rocking and turning his trunk — and he moves, unmistakably, like a walker. From this Gracovetsky drew a conclusion that took courage to say aloud: our movement is born not in the legs but in the trunk. In this he is right, and I go further. I only finish the sentence his picture leaves unspoken: where, exactly, the trunk becomes the source — in the moment when the body settles onto its support and the muscles relax.

And why does this matter to us? Because now it is clear what there is to learn — and that it is not what is usually taught. We are used to wringing movement out of effort: adding more of it, forcing it, trying harder. Natural movement asks the opposite: in that moment, not to add but to take away — to release the superfluous, to trust the support, to let the pistons come into action. We learn to relax — and then movement arises of itself, out of inertia rather than out of our effort. This is one of the cornerstones of ISAI.