Practice Tips

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. When you’re going through a period of sustained practice, integrating stuff you’ve learned before, you need external tools less. However, when you shift back into learning mode and set a specific training goal, getting extra, regular motivation from an outside source can push you over the line from wanting to learn something to ingraining it as a habit. ...

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. ...

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 â€" 1936) as researched by Lee N. Scheele and published on http://www.scheele.org/lee/classics.html. Scheele’s translation is first and my notes are in italics following): ...

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). ...

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. The stability of the nervous system is a good thing from a survival and energy management point of view – it doesn’t cost you a lot of cognitive energy to get through your day if you run on habit. In that sense, the plasticity of the nervous system – your ability to change and learn new things – has to deal with the inertia of stability in your nervous system. When we are trying to learn new behaviors and forge new habits, these two things can be at odds. ...

Most of the practice tips on this blog are about setting good practice habits in motion, but bad habits, like poor breathing, need to be disrupted too. The tools you use to disrupt bad habits are the same ones you use to create good practice habits: Make the “when” and “how” of your practice highly contextual: “On Tuesday, I will practice for 15 minutes between meetings in my office, so that I can feel more energized as I head into the afternoon.” Focus on small chunks of skill: “As I do my qigong form, I will focus on how the weight-shifting connects my feet to the floor.” Finally, leave yourself wanting more. If you always finish a practice session feeling like you’re not burnt out, but actually a little bit hungry for more practice, you’re going to crave your next practice session. Over time, you create a practice snowball, where the little doses of highly contextual practice add up to a greater inner drive to practice, more practice stamina, and the ability to focus on meaningful aspects of your practice. This is the best path to acquiring new skills. ...

Implementing a breathing practice that has an impact on your energy levels and actually chips away at stress can be tricky. It requires a blend of persistence and relaxation that can seem like a paradox at first. That’s why I recommend the 20-20-20 Rule (which I made up) for better breathing. I explain the 20-20-20 Rule in this clip, pulled from the breathing course in my Foundations of Relaxation series:

Update: We’ve just released a new video-based course that shows you how to loosen up your hips and become stronger and more flexible! [CSSBUTTON target="/fix-your-frozen-hips/" color=“66ff33”]Check It Out[/CSSBUTTON] Original Post: I know the weather is getting warmer, but as I look around, all I see are frozen hips. We just aren’t a squatting culture. We sit in chair, couches, cars. Look around the room you are in right now and see how all the furniture is designed. ...