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.
From the recent practice survey we conducted at Brookline Tai Chi and experiments I’ve been running in online learning, it’s become clearer and clearer to me that most people need some external motivation when they are learning a new skill. That’s not a judgment about willpower and motivation, it actually says more about the way we are wired for survival. In Z Health, we always talk about the way that the nervous system is at once the most plastic system – it can adapt to lots of different changes – and also the most stable.
Every time I circle back to extended periods of posture-holding, I find all kinds of new layers in my practice. Lately, I’ve been holding Single Whip. I was shooting some other videos and I thought, “why not see what happens over those 30 minutes”. I had a mic on, so whenever I changed focus or felt some big internal shift, I made a comment. The end result, condensed down to 3:30, includes minute markers for each of the changes.
What the heck does Donkey Kong have to do with the practice habits of tai chi students? It turns out the ladders and platforms in the video game are a perfect model for understanding the ecosystem of students practice habits. Let me explain the survey design and then I’ll share some really fascinating results about how people engage Brookline Tai Chi to develop their tai chi practice. Survey Design Last week we conducted a small practice survey to try to get a more accurate picture of what students do outside of class.
Most of the practice tips on this blog are about setting good practice habits in motion, but bad habits, like poor breathing, need to be disrupted too. The tools you use to disrupt bad habits are the same ones you use to create good practice habits: Make the “when” and “how” of your practice highly contextual: “On Tuesday, I will practice for 15 minutes between meetings in my office, so that I can feel more energized as I head into the afternoon.
Implementing a breathing practice that has an impact on your energy levels and actually chips away at stress can be tricky. It requires a blend of persistence and relaxation that can seem like a paradox at first. That’s why I recommend the 20-20-20 Rule (which I made up) for better breathing. I explain the 20-20-20 Rule in this clip, pulled from the breathing course in my Foundations of Relaxation series:
I’m running a little experiment right now at Brookline Tai Chi to see if we can help our students develop better home practice habits. Specifically, I’m experimenting with self-reporting and automated reminders to spark daily practice sessions outside of class. Now, when I talk to other people in our international tai chi community, I realize what a powerful practice aid Brookline Tai Chi already is. What I mean is, the bricks-and-mortar experience of coming to the school and being around other people removes so many barriers people have to doing tai chi.
Update: We’ve just released a new video-based course that shows you how to loosen up your hips and become stronger and more flexible! [CSSBUTTON target=“/fix-your-frozen-hips/” color=“66ff33”]Check It Out[/CSSBUTTON] Original Post: I know the weather is getting warmer, but as I look around, all I see are frozen hips. We just aren’t a squatting culture. We sit in chair, couches, cars. Look around the room you are in right now and see how all the furniture is designed.
