Energy Arts

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. ...

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. ...

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the social nature of wanting to belong to something bigger than yourself as one possible drive for learning tai chi. The social drive is a major aid teachers can rely on to build their base of students. Another one, that we’ll discuss here is our habitual drive, i.e. we are creatures of habit. That can be a good thing when it comes to maintaining a student base, but it is also the first major hurdle you have to clear as a teacher when it comes to getting new students. ...

Over the weekend, Energy Arts Instructor Jess O’Brien was in town, teaching at BTC. We got to spend some time together and talk about teaching, studying with different teachers, and trying to run a teaching business. One thing that we came back to again and again was how difficult it is to build up a student base. I think I know why. People are Lazy, Social, and Creatures of Habit Now, I know it sounds like a mean thing to say, but in the words of Stanford psychologist BJ Fogg, people are “lazy, social, and creatures of habit.” Rather than looking at this as a moral judgment, take it as a reality of the way we are wired to operate in the world. In fact, if you look at studies about willpower and motivation or start to research how our nervous system functions, you begin to see that these qualities are survival responses that drive efficient behavior. ...

I just started working with Bruce’s new meditation program. I’m very excited to hear him framing this home-study series in terms of rhythms, pacing, and long term development. Every couple of weeks he’s putting out new guided practice recordings, which I think will be easy to follow-through on and fresh enough to keep people tuned into their practice. I’ll let you know how it goes! Taoist Meditation Circle “Get out of your head and into your body.”

This one is for the Energy Arts Certified Instructors. The new EA website allows you to change the details of your instructor profile when you have a registered account. I think having accurate and updated information is helpful, especially if you decide to become an active contributor on the forum.