Brookline Tai Chi

I’m heading home to Boston tomorrow, but I’ve already begun looking through my notes and thinking about what I will personally practice and what I’ll be able to share with my students in classes this coming year. Here are some of my initial thoughts: How Material is Woven together over a Month: Day to day we’re looking at really small specific pieces but now going back through my notes, I can start to see different threads that run throughout the duration of the month. It’s almost like you don’t even notice some of the nuances as in the moment, but like we’ll look at something about the legs in Tai Chi from the first day and then we came back to it four or five days later and then we look at it again, and when you actually line up the pieces side by side, what you start to see is that…versus looking at it from like sort of looking at a ball, you look at it from one side and then the next time you look at it from this angle, then you look at it from this angle. And by taking this kind of spherical approach to it, looking at different facets of the subject, you start to develop a sense for the whole. And it’s not the progression that he always teaches and it’s not linear. It’s not one, two, three, four, five. It’s look at it this way, look at it that way and it’s sort of up to you to put the pieces together to create the whole. ...

Week 3 wraps up and testing is right around the corner. What was Bruce’s big message as we prepare for testing? Work your ass off and cram all night for the big test? Not quite. You might be surprised. Check it out: A Lesson about Integration: The biggest thing that Bruce is emphasizing in the last couple days of class is that with this stage of the training, a month long training, you need integration time. And we talk about this all the time in regular weekly classes. We talk about in a given practice session, whether it’s an hour or 20 minutes or whatever, you always have this sort of startup time where you just get warmed up. And then from there you go into the work period, where you just kind of crank and crank and crank, and that’s when your system is the most open. You can get a lot done. ...

Here’s my Week 2 update. Some big milestones this week: group 1 finished the form and group 2 has been languishing in the purgatory that is holding static postures. Check it out: Inner Form vs. Outer Form In the two groups, we’re doing very different things. The group one just finished the form this week. So on Thursday after they finished it, we came in Friday, and it was a really interesting dividing line. Bruce made the big distinction between, on the one hand, on Thursday we finished the shape and the form, that’s sort of the container. He said, “Now, everything that we’re going to do has to do with internal content.” So he made this distinction all the time. He talked about the bottle versus the wine you put inside it and we even have an article at Brookline Tai Chi that we put out from, I think, it’s from 1989 Tai Chi Magazine. The title of the article is “The Inner Form is the Key to Health.” And in the article, Bruce talks about all the different internal content things that should be going on that to be Tai Chi form. ...

We’re a week into the Wu Tai Chi short form instructor training in Brighton, UK, with Lineage Holder Bruce Frantzis. So far we’ve been completely rebuilding our forms, working on Tai Chi leg power, and exploring the meditative aspects of the art. Check it out: On Rebuilding Your Form: It’s crazy when you come at these things, you’re completely rebuilding your Tai Chi form. We’re about two-thirds of the way through the form and it feels so different. When you run through the whole thing one time, you get up to what we’ve done so far and it feels brand new, like a completely different moves. And then you get to the last thing we’ve done, you come around to the last move that you finished and you go back to your old form and it has a totally different feeling. ...

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. Everything he teaches seems so obviously and natural when he explains it, but you’ve never thought about it before and never accessed it so effortlessly. ...

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). ...

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. ...

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. It sounds too obvious to mention, but that is exactly why participating at the school is such a powerful way to build a practice. ...

I’m not talking about a polygon with triangular faces or a marketing scam to rope your friends in. I’m talking about The Pyramid Method, laid out by Cal Newport on his blog, Study Hacks. Newport tells the story of a friend of a friend’s journey to becoming a professional hip-hop artist. The key, he claims, was that the friend, Chris, followed the Pyramid Method – named for the hip-hop club, The Pyramid, where he honed his craft. Chris went back to the Pyramid again and again and as he worked his way to becoming the undisputed champ of their weekly rap battles, he polished all the different facets of his hip-hop game. This is the essence of Newport’s method. From the post where he tells Chris’s story: ...