Where Do Long-Term Practices Lead?

20 Years of Meditation, 10 Years of Taichi, and the Study of Aesthetics (1): My Winter Edition of the Body

I’ve been in a team with my body for quite some time now. It took an enormous cost to finally become a team, and maintaining that team is not cheap either. In return, I gained a nervous system in which my body trusts me.

Recently, as winter arrived, despite no significant change in my eating habits, my body began to swell, its overall volume becoming rounder. It feels as if my body has put on its own insulated padding and entered an energy-saving mode.

I no longer make this body my enemy. When animals puff themselves up in winter, we find it endearing. We joke about them getting chubby, after all.

Yet when it comes to my own body, I used to judge it through a social lens. The moment its volume changed even slightly, I would immediately look for ways to “reduce” it. That was the old version of me.

But when you form a team with your body, you begin to hear what it has to say.

Body: “I’m in survival optimization mode right now. If you start measuring me with numbers and trying to control me unnecessarily, I’m going to sulk.”

I am choosing to respect my body, which has already reached an agreement with nature. When it’s cold, gathering inward, slowing down, turning inside — this is rhythmically honest.

From a cognitive science perspective, this is not a matter of willpower. It is the result of the nervous system responding to environmental signals — temperature, energy availability — and shifting states accordingly.

Swelling and changes in bodily volume do not always indicate failure or poor management. At times, they are strategies chosen by the autonomic nervous system, prioritizing energy conservation and safety.

From a dynamical systems perspective, this state is not collapse, but something closer to a metastable state, preparing for the next transition.

A metastable state may appear static or like a temporary retreat on the surface, but in reality, it is a phase in which external output is suspended while internal variables are being finely adjusted.

The interior of a metastable state is, in fact, quite busy.

Energy redistribution

Recalibration of nervous system sensitivity

Reordering of priorities

Noise reduction

Elimination of unnecessary pathways

It is work that protects my body more effectively than my will ever could.

Yet my will is easily contaminated by linear, externally imposed values.

Continuous forward motion = normal Stopping = a problem Slowing down = failure

To remain in a team with my body, I have to continually notice the moments when my will betrays my body.

And today, I called my winter body state a “winter edition,” and once again, I kept the team intact.