Returning is not repeating

By Simone Claridge · True Better You

There is a practice I return to every morning: one hundred wall squats.

For a long time it felt like a task. I would drag myself toward it, find something else to do first, circle around it before I finally began. Something to get through. Something that needed a check mark at the end.

Since I was in China, something in how I meet it has changed. It's hard to name it as anything other than loving yourself. Not pushing through one hundred wall squats — going down halfway, reaching the bottom, coming halfway up, then fully up, and being completely present in each of those four small moments, with no clock running underneath them. There is an openness in doing the next one that way. How long it will take is still there somewhere, but it no longer runs the practice.

Nothing about the form changed. One hundred wall squats is still one hundred wall squats. I did.

I used to think of that as going in circles. Same place, no progress.

But a circle closes on itself. It arrives back exactly where it started, unchanged by the trip. What I am describing is not that.

The Tao Te Ching, Chapter 40, says it in seven words: Returning is the motion of the Tao. Not advancing. Not achieving. Returning. The Tao does not move forward and leave the beginning behind. It moves by coming back — and something is different each time it does.

That is a spiral, not a circle. Same coordinates. Different depth.

Here is what I notice, every single morning, somewhere around the same place in the practice.

My shoulders come forward to balance the weight, and then they lift. I know I should be sending my Baihui upward instead — the crown of the head lifting, the back of the neck opening, pressing gently back and up. That part is harder, and I catch myself thinking I should already have it by now.

The thinking arrives at particular numbers, almost on schedule. Seventy more to go. I always fall back around seventy-one. The story tells itself in the same place, at the same count, as if nothing has moved since the last time I stood here.

Except it isn't true anymore. It hasn't been true since the second month. My core is stronger now. I can feel myself standing upright — not only in the posture, but in what I intend — with more ease than the story remembers. The mind is still narrating last year's practice. The body is already somewhere else.

Grandmaster Pang Ming writes about the reference framework — the layer of ideas, fears, and expectations we build up over the True Self, shaped by what we survived and what we were told to want. Practice does not remove that layer in one pass. It loosens it, a little, each time we return. The story about wall squat seventy-one is exactly that layer, still running on old information, still convinced nothing has changed.

Teacher Wei has said something similar in a different key: once we stop being so serious and fixated — once the reference frame loosens its grip — we don't lose ground. We become lighter. More playful. And that playfulness is not a step down from seriousness. It is the sign that something has actually landed.

You cannot get to lighter by trying harder the first time. You get there by returning enough times that the grip has somewhere to loosen from.

Some mornings, in the middle of the hundred, it suddenly goes very easy. In those moments I can feel my spine — each vertebra — in a way I hadn't noticed I couldn't feel before. And underneath that, something in my lower Dantian, the energy center below the navel, has been quietly charging. I hadn't realized how low it had been running until I felt it rise. I hear it now in my own voice. Something in the tone is stronger, more determined than it was. The frequency changed. It was not there with the first wall squat I ever did.

Enjoy the song

→ Explore: Spiral Not Circle 

There is a way of counting a year that says: twelve months, one loop, back to where you started. Same season, same date on the calendar.

There is another way of counting the same year that asks a different question: not where did I end up, but how far did the turn go this time.

A spiral looks like repetition from a distance. Up close, standing inside it — even at wall squat seventy-one, even when the old story starts to speak — you can feel that you are not standing in the same place at all.

A question, if you want to sit with it:

Think of something you return to often — a practice, a person, a room, a way you've handled something before. Don't ask whether you're making progress. Ask instead: what would it feel like to meet this the way I actually am today, rather than the way I was the last time I stood here?

You may find you already have. You just hadn't looked yet.

With Mingjue love and warmth,

Simone

Sources: Tao Te Ching — Laozi, Chapter 40. Hunyuan Entirety Theory — Dr. Pang Ming. Mingjue Awakening — Teacher Wei Qifeng, 2026.