Tai Chi and Repulsing the Monkey

When I was a child, we lived in Africa for a while, and my mother would to send me to bed in the evening with the instructions that “now the monkeys have gone to bed, it’s time for you to go to bed”. This is because what you could hear as background noise, from dawn to dusk, was the chattering of the monkeys in the trees. It was as pervasive as the noise of traffic in a busy city - always there, rarely commented on. That’s the origin I think of the description of our background thoughts as the “monkey mind”: it’s not that our mind is like a monkey, it’s just that the constant chattering of thoughts is like the noise that the old teachers of meditation, in India or China or Sri Lanka, would have had as a background all day.

This occurred to me because I’ve been teaching Tai Chi recently, and one of the movemements in the common 24-move form is called “repulsing the monkey”. When I teach this, I talk about all those monkeys that seem to be chattering in our brain - all those background thoughts. Often, they seem to be the mood music for our life - if we’re happy, they are more cheerful, but if we’re not happy, neither are they. I’m talking about them as if they were “not us”, but of course they are us - it’s all in our heads, quite literally! But we seem to have very little control over them!

Often, people find that classical, sitting, meditation is a way of quieting the monkey brain - of turning down the volume on those thoughts. But Tai Chi shows us that it’s not the sitting that’s important, it’s something else: in classical Tai Chi, after all, when you’re doing this particular move, you are moving your arms about while stepping backwards! But it’s about the same thing, I think: about tapping in to something that feels bigger than ourselves, more expansive, more open. The background thoughts are quieter because they are, somehow, further away. We’ve got more space to move in.

And we don’t need to be doing Tai Chi to achieve this effect: we can get there with other forms of movement. Walking in nature is one way, and that’s great, as you’re getting some exercise as well. But it can just be something like doing the washing up: so long as we let ourselves be immersed in the movement, really connecting with each step or wipe or rolling of the hands, that’s what’s important. That’s what puts your mind somehow into a bigger space, allowing you to connect with the larger - inner! - space that’s always there. Breathing, too, that’s important - slow in, and maybe extra-slow out!

So maybe try this next time you find yourself with a bit too much chatter for comfort. Don’t sit, but get up and walk, sway, or clean the dishes - and really focus on feeling the actions of your limbs as you do so.