Tai Chi

I recently received this breathing question and I thought it was worth sharing with everyone here as a post. (Don’t forget, you can send me your practice questions!) I’m really confused! I took a Yang Style Tai Chi course and at the end of the class we would do Qigong. He said “We will do diaphragmatic breathing. As you breath in draw the navel into the spine, as you exhale release and let the belly relax but don’t collapse.” What kind of breathing is this and what is the correct breathing for my qigong practice? Is this wrong? ...

The easiest way to work through the Energy Gates Dissolving Series - like having a teacher by your side the whole time! Working through all 21 gates, you will do a complete pass through the major Energy Gates of your body. As you clear each gate, you will find new space inside the body, release bound or stuck chi, and realign the twists, kinks, and compressions that warp the body -- physically and energetically. ...

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. ...

Qigong instructor Dan Kleiman practices Standing Qigong to relax his body and mind and strengthen the flow of chi throughout his energy system. --- Free Practice Resources Available, See Details Below --- Standing Qigong is a gentle, yet powerful way to cultivate your internal energy. From the ancient Chinese point of view, an abundance of internal energy, that circulates cleanly throughout your body, leads to a vibrant life. ...

Basic Standing Qigong Posture Congratulations on starting your standing meditation practice! As you can see from the picture on the right, "standing" is easy. Just begin in a relaxed, arms-by-the-sides posture, with your eyes closed. Pay attention to these 3 important postural points: Unlock the knees and hips. Let the weight fall into the arches of each foot, not back to the heels. Relax the chest and muscles of the face and breath smoothly, without a lot of force or effort. Got it? ...

Here’s a quick update on what we’ve been working on during Immersion Week 2014. I’m very impressed (and I say so in the video about 15 times!) with the way this group has patiently explored many different facets of the Swings and Spine Stretch without rushing ahead to try to fit seemingly contradictory pieces together conceptually. Instead, they’re doing a great job experiencing/exploring each different component on its own. When you practice this way, you naturally come to integration points where the components gel in a way you couldn’t have predicted.

Last night I taught my last two weekly classes at Brookline Tai Chi. Next month, I’ll be diving into a new intensive learning experience, building software applications and learning about the web from a depth I’ve only poked at up until now. (I have some really cool stuff planned for Immersion Week too, so I’m not quite done yet!) It’s going to be a big change for me. I don’t quite know what to make of shedding a professional identity that I’ve held for almost 10 years. ...

When you settle into your practice each day, you should always give yourself a couple of minutes to just feel and see where your body, your energy, and your awareness are. In one sense, each practice session is about bringing the rhythms of each of those into harmony. That’s why Tai Chi and qigong can be so powerfully restorative. So, if you take a couple of minutes to just “settle in,” you’ll discover several possible things: ...

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 getting excited about Immersion Week at BTC next month, where we’ll take another look at the Spine Stretch and the Three Swings. Another look? Like we’ve done it before? Yes! Why is it exciting to go back to the same qigong sets over and over again? So-called creative people understand better than most that there is nothing new under the sun. Working with boulders of granite, with empty stages, with blank paper, they are credited with making something out of nothing, but that isn’t exactly what they do. All art is derived from what is in actuality a remarkably finite human experience. Whatever the medium, the creative person’s task is to interpret an essentially unchanging reality, a dog-eared reality pondered by Homer and Mel Brooks and everyone in between. The artist succeeds if he or she can present something familiar from an unfamiliar angle." ...