Recently, I’ve been talking a lot about two things, improving your breathing to give you a major energy/relaxation boost and developing tools that help you follow-through on your home practice. I’ve even created an online course with all the information you need to cultivate better breathing habits: Better Breathing. The biggest lesson we learned as we talked to BTC students was that the best time to use reminders to trigger your practice was when you were invested in learning a new skill.
In June, between sessions at Brookline Tai Chi and during master classes with Bruce Frantzis, a small group of students got a special treat. Energy Arts Senior Instructor Lee Burkins was in town to train with Bruce, and on one of the nights off, he offered a special evening course on a topic he calls “Investing in Loss”. What I love about studying with someone like Lee is that he’s a practitioner whose art has soaked so deeply into his bones, that it practically oozes out of his DNA.
By training the principles of body-alignment and movement as described in the Tai Chi Classics, you can move with much more grace, fluidity, and power. Instead of wasting energy holding excess tension, relaxation can lead the way to more powerful movement. Here’s what Yang Cheng-fu said about it a hundred years ago (the following is adapted from YANG’S TEN IMPORTANT POINTS by Yang Cheng-fu (1883 — 1936) as researched by Lee N.
Well, ok, let me explain. I’m moving all of the business-related posts over to the Trainerfly blog. It seems appropriate to separate writing about the benefits of daily practice from the running of a movement education business at this point. If you are subscribed to the email newsletter here on DanKleiman.com, your weekly updates will still be about chi gung practice, relaxation, and reducing the impact of stress on your life.
We’re running a little experiment at Brookline Tai Chi to see if providing students with practice reminders, ahead of time, will make them more comfortable starting the Gods Playing in the Clouds chi gung class this summer. Read about the course here.
The set is made up of six, repetitive spherical movements and I think, if students have a chance to practice the basic shapes before the class starts, they will be much more comfortable and ready to learn the nuances of the internal work that goes into these basic shapes.
When we started asking our students at Brookline Tai Chi about their home practice, we got a really interesting range of habits and preferences. Since then, we’ve been trying out different tools to help spark more home practice. Stepping back for a minute, I’d really like to know more about why you practice. Take a minute drop me a line (filing out the form below is private and goes right to me, no one else).
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.
