The eyes are the gateway to your nervous system. This is a theme that my teacher Bruce Frantzis weaves into many different Tai Chi and qigong teachings that he gives. Relaxing the nervous system is one of the central goals of Tai Chi practice. With a relaxed nervous system you are more aware of your reactions, thoughts, emotions, and really, your entire internal environment. One of the best ways to begin to tune into the state of your nervous system is by learning to feel your eyes.
Taoist Master Bruce Frantzis is my main Tai Chi and qigong teacher. Bruce was one of the first Westerns to live and study intensively in China, then come back to the U.S. and popularize Wu Style Tai Chi, qigong, and Taoist meditation in a way that was accessible to a Western audience. He teaches all over the U.S. and Europe, including regular workshops at Brookline Tai Chi. His books on qigong and meditation offer clear and direct practical instruction.
The Spiraling Energy Body Qigong set is one of the toughest in the Energy Arts system, so I asked Energy Arts Instructor Isaac Kamins to tell us about his experiences with this practice. In this episode of Qigong Radio, Isaac explains how as a teenager he came to appreciate the counter-intuitive approach that the internal martial arts take to fighting and how the energetic sensitivity he has developed doing Spiraling Energy Body qigong has influenced how he interacts with other people and the world around him, far beyond the martial arts.
If you’ve learned many different meditation, qigong, breathing, and movement practices over the years, you may be faced with the problem of trying to decide what to practice each day. In this episode of Qigong Radio, I’ll show you a framework for thinking about your different modes of practice and show you the single most important goal of an energy arts practice, regardless of the mode or specific techniques. Specifically, we’ll look at:
When you relax into the turning of the waist and feel how it connects to the legs, you begin a process of rooting while moving that creates a dynamic and springy stability. Kind of a paradox, right? You feel like a giant spring, anchored to the floor even though you’re moving around, that is constantly being wound up and then released. The key to cultivating this connection is how you relax through your turning, so let’s start off by getting clear on what we mean when we say relaxation.
The most popular discussion topic in the Inner Form coaching section for April was the question of how to integrate qigong and meditation. The original poster asked, “What are the benefits of doing qigong prior to meditation? I would think that doing qigong before meditation would help to have a deeper meditation practice and vice versa? Is this true ? Does it depend on the set or practice you are doing?
When learning qigong or Tai Chi, people are often either more tuned into to energy or to their physical bodies. In this episode of Qigong Radio, I asked my first qigong and Tai Chi teacher, Energy Arts Senior Instructor and founder of Brookline Tai Chi, Bill Ryan to explain why this is. More importantly, Bill teaches you how to navigate the experiences of developing your internal energy, regardless of how you first become aware of them.
We talk a lot about the health benefits of Tai Chi and qigong, or the way they create mental and emotional relaxation, but if you really had to distill all these benefits down to one common thread, you could say that the smoother your mind, body, and energy get, the more you are truly making progress in your practice. In this hour-long webinar, we’ve used the transition between two qigong courses at Brookline Tai Chi as an excuse to look at the issue of smoothness.
