I’m sure you’ve spent time looking around YouTube for qigong and tai chi videos. According to their website, people upload 24 hours of video to YouTube every minute! No doubt you’ve seen some crazy stuff. So how do you sift through all of it and more importantly, are there any qigong videos on YouTube worth watching? The good news is, of course there are. And I’ve put together a list of 5 good ones to get you started. ...
Recently, I’ve been talking a lot about two things, improving your breathing to give you a major energy/relaxation boost and developing tools that help you follow-through on your home practice. I’ve even created an online course with all the information you need to cultivate better breathing habits: Better Breathing. The biggest lesson we learned as we talked to BTC students was that the best time to use reminders to trigger your practice was when you were invested in learning a new skill. When you’re going through a period of sustained practice, integrating stuff you’ve learned before, you need external tools less. However, when you shift back into learning mode and set a specific training goal, getting extra, regular motivation from an outside source can push you over the line from wanting to learn something to ingraining it as a habit. ...
We’re running a little experiment at Brookline Tai Chi to see if providing students with practice reminders, ahead of time , will make them more comfortable starting the Gods Playing in the Clouds chi gung class this summer. Read about the course here. The set is made up of six, repetitive spherical movements and I think, if students have a chance to practice the basic shapes before the class starts, they will be much more comfortable and ready to learn the nuances of the internal work that goes into these basic shapes. ...
Paul Cavel is an Energy Arts Senior Instructor based in London. He teaches regular weekly classes there, but he’s also been traveling all over the UK and Europe for years teaching workshops, including annual week-long retreats in Crete. I talked to Paul a little bit about his background in Tai Chi, neigong, and Ba Gua and asked him for some practice advice for a group of students who just completed a series at BTC on the Marriage of Heaven and Earth. ...
I’m pretty excited about this: Eyes and Visual Training It’s my new online course and the first in the Foundations of Relaxation Series I wrote about here. As I’ve been developing the course, I keep saying to myself, “I wish everyone who comes to see me for pain relief or to learn tai chi did this first.” In fact, that’s how I developed the whole series. There are a few simple things that don’t take a lot of oversight or feedback from an instructor that everyone can do to move better (meaning more gracefully and in less pain). ...
As a tai chi teacher and movement coach, I get to meet a lot of people who want to relax, slow down and have more energy for the things they love to do in life. But there’s a very common misconception that I encounter and I think it leads people to spend too much time chasing the wrong things when it comes to a relaxation practice. Hopefully, this series will begin to clarify what the best way to start a relaxation practice is and how to most efficiently get the results you want. ...
Here’s a sneak peek at some online learning support I’m doing with a Tai Chi group in Farmington, Maine. I went up a couple weeks ago to teach an afternoon workshop and this was the practice set we did by the end. The workshop participants also have access to a private Q&A forum, so as they practice between now and the next live training, I can give them feedback. I’ll probably add some new videos as we go to answer any questions that come up. I also think it will be a useful way to pre-load content for the next workshop, i.e., if I can get them to learn some basic choreography before I arrive, we can spend our time focusing on refinements or more subtle internal principles that are best learned by feel. ...
In a recent post, I asked the question “Can you learn qigong (or any movement art) online?” The answer was a big fat qualified “yes.” I think there is a limited role that online resources can play in your movement education — even though movement is something best learned through live human interaction. So the question for you, as a movement coach, is not whether or not you can teach online, the question is “what is the appropriate way to use online resources in my movement education business?” ...
Can you learn qigong, or any movement art, online? This is a burning question for me right now. My immediate reaction is “NO!”. However, I believe there is a significant role for supplemental online material in the overall learning process, even for movement arts. Here’s why it’s a bad idea to learn movement online: Learning movement is a kinesthetic experience, not a visual one – you have to feel where you are in space and you certainly can’t get that from staring at a screen You need feedback – when you are learning something new, you need refinement and guidance, usually hands-on Some things need to be felt on another person – we get into this all the time with more subtle qigong principles and there is no way around feeling what’s going on in the instructor’s body to learn what you are trying to do in your own Those are my big 3 “No way!” reasons you can’t learn qigong online. Or I should say, the reason why online learning shouldn’t be your sole way of learning this stuff. Let’s look at it from a different point of view. ...
I’ve been working with the team at Energy Arts on various projects, but mainly in the capacity as a community coordinator. Currently, my focus is on helping them get a new community discussion forum off the ground, but I also had the chance to participate in the launch of their new Ba Gua Mastery Program. The Ba Gua Mastery Program is a home-study program with information on circle-walking for meditation and martial arts. They’ve drawn from a live instructor training Bruce taught in 2009, and turned out CDs, DVDs, print manuals…the whole works! It’s been a monumental effort and in the future I’ll be discussing how we’re going to blend live teaching with all these materials at BTC. ...