One thing that’s been on my mind since Bruce was here teaching a Push Hands Intensive is what it means to follow instructions in your training. He basically laid out a year or longer curriculum during a week. What do you come away with? What should you practice? How do you reconcile “downloading” a whole curriculum at once vs. really upacking it and learning to use it over the next year.
One of the most fascinating connections between your mind and your body is the way that the actual physical movements that you make affect your awareness. When your movements are linear and jerky, your mind stops and starts too, essentially gapping out. If you can move in a smooth circular way, your mind tends to stay calmer too. Or at least, you can calm your mind through circular movement. The next level of “
My friend Jess makes a point of studying with as many different teachers as he can. His goal isn’t to dabble in a lot of different styles or systems. He is faithful and dedicated to his main practice, but he knows that each time he gets exposed to a new system, he learns something about his own. See if you can glean one new thing from each of these qigong videos from YouTube to refine and improve your practice today.
When you spend a month training Tai Chi 10-12 hours a day, what happens when you go home? What does it feel like several months later when your life has returned to normal? Is it a let down? Do you need to be inspired again to continue your training? What have you continued to discover about your practice? How has the intensive training infused your teaching? I sat down with several Energy Arts Tai Chi instructors to discuss these issues for Episode 3 of Qigong Radio.
Cloud Hands is one of the best containers for developing better rhythm and flow in your practice, but you’ve got to work on rhythm and flow separately. The reason is that you develop two very different qualities of mind when you work on these two seemingly related skills. Better Rhythm Better rhythm comes from “harmonizing” more and more moving parts over time in your practice. At first, we all face the challenge of not being able to feel into the body well.
In episode 2 of Qigong Radio, I sat down with Energy Arts Senior Instructor Paul Cavel to discuss what it feels like to work with soft tissue – muscle, fascia, and ligaments – in the internal arts. We discussed the different stages of practice and one of my favorite topics: adopting the right mindset so that the progress you make in your body isn’t outpaced by what you think you’re doing in your mind.
We’re hosting Bruce Frantzis for a Push Hands Intensive this week at Brookline Tai Chi. The training is being filmed and it will become the Push Hands module of the Tai Chi Mastery Program, due out later this year. Here are my thoughts so far on how the Push Hands component fits in with what we did this past summer in Brighton:
As Nate and I were discussing specific breathing challenges in qigong and Tai Chi, he started to explain the way he had learned to work with breathing and movement in his yoga training. It’s fascinating to compare strategies for working with the mind-body connection across different systems, and while this is by no means a definitive exploration of similarities and differences, I think you’ll see that there are two distinct approaches.
