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,”
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.
Why is it that sometimes you feel confident, connected, and at ease and other times you get flustered, disoriented and nothing seems to come together? According to Greek poet Archilocus, “we don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” Now does that mean that every possible situation you go through needs to be practiced, rehearsed, and trained? That seems a little overwhelming!
“I just want to get a feel for what I can change/do…” Or “I just wanted to see what I could do…” In the middle of launching this blog, I wanted to change some of the core settings and I wasn’t sure what could safely be changed without breaking the whole thing. When I asked someone for help, I explained that I wanted to “get a feel” for what I could do without messing other things up.
Just running through a test post again to go over the process and remind myself how this works!
So, I just launched this new blog using Octopress. Here are the steps I followed: Basics How to Blog Deploying on Github I need to dig into the configuration stuff a little more. Writing This Post in Markdown I’m learning how to write this in Markdown which is also pretty new to me. Right now it feels like a lazy version of html, so we’ll see what’s it like as I get used to it.
That’s right, don’t dissolve blocked energy, tension, or contraction in your body….let it dissolve. Now, that might seem like a fine semantic distinction, but it captures an attitude towards practice that is essential for energetic resolution and finding deeper layers of the mind. Let your body relax. Let your chi sink through the structure of your joints and bones. Let your mind land on the body. Let the blockages dissolve.
