I’m sure you’ve spent time looking around YouTube for qigong and tai chi videos. According to their website, people upload 24 hours of video to YouTube every minute! No doubt you’ve seen some crazy stuff. So how do you sift through all of it and more importantly, are there any qigong videos on YouTube worth watching? The good news is, of course there are. And I’ve put together a list of 5 good ones to get you started.
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.
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.
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.
Check out this post from the Trainerfly blog. I talk to teachers and trainers all the time who want move beyond their live events, but the number of steps it takes, and the technology required to make it work seem overwhelming. Hopefully, I’ve made a little dent in that perception!
I’m pretty excited about this: Eyes and Visual Training It’s my new online course and the first in the Foundations of Relaxation Series I wrote about here. As I’ve been developing the course, I keep saying to myself, “I wish everyone who comes to see me for pain relief or to learn tai chi did this first.” In fact, that’s how I developed the whole series. There are a few simple things that don’t take a lot of oversight or feedback from an instructor that everyone can do to move better (meaning more gracefully and in less pain).
Over the last month or so, I’ve gotten Trainerfly out into people’s hands and I’ve been learning some really interesting lessons. I think it was easy for me to get wrapped up in how I’ve evolved it as a tool in my business over the last two years and lose perspective on how other people might be trying to add it into their business from scratch, with none of that prior history.
As a tai chi teacher and movement coach, I get to meet a lot of people who want to relax, slow down and have more energy for the things they love to do in life. But there’s a very common misconception that I encounter and I think it leads people to spend too much time chasing the wrong things when it comes to a relaxation practice. Hopefully, this series will begin to clarify what the best way to start a relaxation practice is and how to most efficiently get the results you want.
