It’s easy to get caught in a linear, progress-oriented way of thinking about your practice. What’s new? What can I learn next? Am I improving…all the time. You get so caught up in doing it right and refining every little detail that you can lose sight of the what’s really great about practice in the first place…the restoration, integration, and feeling of wholeness you can walk away with each time. ...
Last week I had the pleasure of recording a conversation with my friend and Tai Chi colleague Dorothy Fitzer. Drawing on her background in movement, energy arts, and psychotherapy, Dorothy has put together a very interesting group of practitioners from several different modalities to address the question of how embodiment practices can lead to nourishing, healing, and even transformative experiences. Of course, I was thrilled to make the case that this is at the core of so much of what we do in Tai Chi. ...
I’m very excited to share some news about two big projects with you today: Brookline Tai Chi’s annual Immersion Week and the publication of the Tai Chi Way to Better Balance as a physical book. Join me from Tuesday, April 22 - Friday, April 25 at Brookline Tai Chi in Boston for Energy Gates Moving Qigong Exercises. Times, cost, and registration details in the link. The Tai Chi Way to Better Balance is now available for purchase on Amazon, but you can also get your copy of the physical book directly from the publisher.
“At some point, don’t we have to ask ourselves, “Aren’t I healthy enough?” Don’t I need to work on “waking up”, on manifesting kindness and patience, and being other oriented?” That’s from a conversation we’ve been having in the Inner Form discussion group and it got me thinking. You might be learning to cultivate your chi to heal old injuries or for the inner experience of meditative exploration, but at some point, shouldn’t your practice extend into the world around you, to the people in your life, and your work? ...
It looks like Energy Arts is releasing another set of The Tai Chi Mastery Program. This is a short message to those of you who have the program sitting on your bookshelf, collecting dust, or still pristinely packaged: Let’s open it up and get to work! Now, if you’re not familiar with this program, take a look at this: That’s a lot of DVDs! What’s Inside The Tai Chi Mastery Program? It all started back in 2011 when we spent a month in England training the Wu Style Short Form with Bruce. Everyday for 8 hours or more, we worked on: ...
Recently, the question of “should I rotate my spine in Tai Chi” has come up frequently and led to a lot of confusion with some of our students. We are told to maintain the “Four Points” - a sort of internal frame that runs between the shoulders and the hips, forming a box that keeps the spine from rotating or side bending while you practice Tai Chi. Some people hear this rule and think, “but the spine has joints that rotate and bend in more than one plane” or “show me any athletic movement that doesn’t make use of the rotational movement of the spine to generate power.” ...
Checking in with one of my favorite sculptures at the Art Institute I was thrilled to be able to share a weekend of Tai Chi in Chicago earlier this month, thanks to Energy Arts Instructor Chris Cinnamon and his students at Enso Tai Chi. Chris just posted an incredibly detailed report summarizing the workshop here. If you read between the lines a little bit, you can come up with some great ways to structure your own practice. Think of the whole day as a single practice session. Can you: ...
Inspiration for Rooting and Lengthening in Chicago On November 9, I’ll be teaching a seminar for my friend Chris Cinnamon at Enso Tai Chi (registration details here). This year we’ll continue the “Put More Chi in Your Tai Chi” theme that we started last year by focusing on Tai Chi Rooting, Sinking Chi, Dissolving, and more. The goal is to give everyone a clear sense of how nourishing it can be to find your root and feed it through solo exercises and interactive partner practice. Basically, you learn to continuously release and dissolve tension, stress, and pain, but more than just shedding uncomfortable feelings, you actually tap into a restorative wellspring of energy that keeps bubbling up the more you go down into it. ...
When you read the Tai Chi Classics and look at photos of the old masters, everything looks graceful, flowing, and full of life. The problem is, your daily practice can be full of aches, pains, kinks, binds and the feeling that you’re never really going to get it. There is a lot of territory between, “oh man, it hurts, I’ll never get past it” and “be still like a mountain, flowing like a great river” that isn’t discussed in the Tai Chi Classics or most books on Tai Chi. They tend to just give you the gold standard for where you want to go, with not a lot of detail about what it’s like to travel that road. ...
Feng Zhiqiang was a famous Tai Chi Master from Beijing who was a major influence on my teacher Bruce Frantzis. Master Feng did some teaching in the West as well and we are fortunate to have access to a transcript of a 2001 workshop he taught in the Bay Area (thanks to the folks at SilkReeler.com for making this transcript available and thanks to Igor for sending it my way!). Here he is in 1986 performing a Chen Style Form: ...