• Listening: A Simple Exercise
• The Nervous System Problem
• Tensegrity Requires Perception
  • The Meditation Gap
  • The Form Gap
  • Beyond Taichi
• John Vervaeke’s Opponent Processing:
• Cognitive Foundations of 聽勁
• As Wisdom Practice
  • Applied in the world
  • Get off the cushion
• Footnotes

In prior posts, we uncovered taichi’s rollback (yielding) demonstrates tensegrity in motion—compression and tension creating structure through opposition. But there’s a crucial element I left implicit: you can’t yield appropriately if you don’t know what you’re yielding to.

In the last post, I introduced 聽勁 (tīng jìn, listening energy).

There is a drill practice in taichi called Push Hands that teaches what skills can be honed for combat. Two partners maintain constant contact while each attempts to “uproot” the other. It is dynamic tensegrity in action—your compression becomes my tension, my yielding creates your instability.

But it only works if you can sense the incoming force accurately enough to respond with precision rather than panic. Thinking is your enemy here 😬.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOmqsOTn2_w>

§Listening: A Simple Exercise

In my first real push hands workshop1, I experienced what it’s like to over-react. It’s a moment of truth—you see how wired you are to predict what’s coming. My nervous system was too “wired” and triggered, my head too busy to listen.

You can try this yourself with a friend:

1. Get a partner you have a good relationship with

2. Stand in a push hands stance (see pic below)

3. Relax and sink—in taichi this is Sōng (鬆), pronounced “Sung” or “Soong”

4. This starting position is your balance of tensions

5. Your partner places their hands on your shoulders and gently pushes and withdraws—sinusoidal, wave-like movements, but not fixed speed or depth2

6. Constraints: (a) Neither of you can move your feet. (b) Don’t be silly, its not a competition, its an exercise. (c) bodily rotation, bending forward/back/up/down is allowed. (d) hands should stay in the same place.

7. Their goal: get you off balance

8. Your goal: “stick” to their hands, not be uprooted.

9. The real goal is to feel your nervous system responses to the changes, even if you are not uprooted, you should find the humility to sense when you are just a little off balance because your wern’t listening and “sticking”.

Switch roles—both of you should try being the pusher. It’s immediate feedback on: (a) your ability to listen to your partner rather than letting your head decide what happens next, and (b) your technique of sinking.

Here’s a clue: the sensitivity of your feet on the ground is hugely important.

§The Nervous System Problem

Here’s what happens when you can’t listen: someone pushes, your nervous system fires, you jerk backward or brace forward. If they were feinting—testing your response—they withdraw the force and you’re suddenly over-extended (gone beyond 70%), locked in a compression pattern with nothing to push against. You’ve collapsed your own structure.

Axiom: No matter how cool your think you are, your nervous system does not lie.

聽勁 requires a calm enough nervous system and a still enough mind to distinguish between:

• A committed push (yang) that you can redirect

• A probe (shifting toward yin) that you should absorb without reacting

• The moment a push transitions—when their yang becomes yin and your structure can flow into the opening

Fairly quickly, I also experienced tastes of this skill. All the built up experience of Sōng (鬆), yielding and sinking that you repeat over and over again in your form practice and Zhan Zhuang (站桩 standing post exercise). You may realize your arm is locking, in the next moment you can soften or strengthen through the back leg, or you can direct your partner’s force through your body into the ground.

Calibration comes from (paradoxically) holding something and its opposite: hot/cold, sweet/bitter, compression/tension, yang/yin.

§Tensegrity Requires Perception

In this exercise you are not just in a tensegrity structure—you’re actively sensing it through touch (listening). The moment you lose perceptual clarity, the structure degrades. You either:

1. Match force with force (double compression—both structures fail)

2. Collapse entirely (tension without compression—no structure)

3. Over-anticipate and move before the force arrives (your nervous system’s guess replaces actual information)

The practice isn’t just physical conditioning. It’s training your nervous system to stay receptive under pressure, to process opponent information without triggering fight-or-flight reactions that destroy your ability to listen.

§The Meditation Gap

Many people assume their meditation practice prepares them for this. It doesn’t. Sitting quietly with no adversarial pressure is fundamentally different from maintaining calm while someone actively tries to destabilize you. The nervous system skills don’t transfer automatically.

§The Form Gap

Similarly, I don’t believe (in my limited experience) that just doing the forms—the sequences of taichi—is sufficient. You may be the “agent”, but you are faking the “arena” (see below). Shadowboxing and subject to delusion.

Regardless, taichi form practice is the critical underpinning and preparation for this exercise mentioned here.

§Beyond Taichi

This gap matters beyond taichi. How many conflicts escalate because someone reacts to a perceived threat that was actually a probe? How many structures collapse because we can’t distinguish between committed pressure and testing behaviour?

Tensegrity requires opposition. But opposition requires listening. And listening requires a nervous system calm enough to process information instead of just reacting to stimulation.

§John Vervaeke’s Opponent Processing:

Now for some theory! Ahem….I’m a fan John’s “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” series and his work since. If 50 hours of video is not your thang, then these short summaries are good. My micro-take is:* “The axial age gave humanity a bunch of religions that embedded meaning, Nietzsche declared God dead, the post-modernists destroyed all the other sacred cows, capitalism is obsessed with making us slaves to their fiat products culminating with an AGI/ASI God, we are all going to die.”*

I’m sure your friendly AI chatbot can do better - but anyway, check John’s work out!

§Cognitive Foundations of 聽勁

Vervaeke’s emphasis of relevance realization provides a cognitive science framework for understanding why 聽勁 works. Living organisms face an impossible computational problem: they can’t process all available information, so they must constantly zero in on what’s relevant while ignoring the vast noise of the world.

<https://youtu.be/H-opRmx6C9c>

Vervaeke argues organisms solve this through opponent processing—dynamically trading off complementary or antagonistic strategies against each other. The autonomic nervous system provides the clearest example: sympathetic arousal (yang) versus parasympathetic calming (yin) constantly recalibrate against each other to keep you optimally responsive to your environment.

In push hands exercise[^3](#user-content-fn-3), you’re performing opponent processing in real-time through touch:

• Exploiting current information vs. exploring for new information

• Committing to a technique vs. remaining adaptable

• Matching their force vs. yielding to redirect it

This isn’t just about physical technique—it’s about achieving what Vervaeke calls an “optimal grip” on the situation. The agent (you) must continuously recalibrate your relationship to the arena (your partner’s force structure) by playing different strategies against each other.

§As Wisdom Practice

聽勁 is the embodied practice of relevance realization under adversarial pressure. Your nervous system must stay calm enough to distinguish signal from noise, to sense which aspect of the incoming force is relevant to your response, and to avoid the combinatorial explosion of overthinking while someone is actively trying to uproot you.

§Applied in the world

In case it’s not obvious, the “wisdom” we seek is how we engage with others in life—we can listen, yield, and push when appropriate. “Uprooted” is when you are triggered, flustered, reactive to the degree that the engagement fails. It’s everywhere. Any visit to X shows, in a few minutes, tribes beating on each other in a force-meets-force manner. The question is: do I want to be more skilled than that?

§Get off the cushion

The meditation gap becomes clearer here: seated practice doesn’t train you to perform opponent processing while being an agent in the arena. It doesn’t teach your nervous system to “calm-down” (maintain perceptual clarity) while someone exploits your reactions.

§Footnotes

1. I have only introductory push hands experience but the simple exercise is the shizz for an honest introduction to your nervous system. WRT push hands, as my experience grows I might retract some of what I wrote here 🙏. ↩

2. The partner could try to keep pushing on you, but they will eventually overextend if you can yield enough or rotate (it’s a longer conversation…) ↩

3. I’m not qualified to say, but I suspect Push Hands (being from an “internal martial art) uses sensitivity and awareness moreso than something like BJJ which seems to be more applied strategies. Of course I agree you can find these principles of “not freaking out” in any martial arts, but the goal for me is to describe wisdom practices rather than advocate martial arts training. You can also, draw a picture, go surfing or drink a cup of tea to practice relevance realization.↩