Tai Chi

There is no other book I return to more for my qigong practice than Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body by Bruce Frantzis. It’s the one I consistently recommend to students and anyone who emails the school to inquire about starting a qigong practice before they have access to a teacher. Here’s how to get the most out of it, whether or not you have someone who can give you regular feedback on your practice: ...

If you don't have regular access to live instruction, getting good feedback and improving your personal practice can be a challenge. Over the years at Brookline Tai Chi, I've seen how having a place to come and practice with other people has made a huge difference for our students. Having a sense of community strengthens your motivation to practice and getting feedback from an instructor keeps you moving in the right direction. ...

When people explain the connection between the mind and the body in tai chi, they often use the breath as a bridge between the two. In other words, you can unite the mind and the body through breathing practices. This is true, but it’s only one technique. In fact, good tai chi includes several methods for making this link. Breathing is only the beginning. Here are a few other things you should be looking for: ...

The next time you go to class, watch out for these 4 practice partners. While they all start out with good intentions, if you hang out with them too much, you’ll get sucked into their quirky habits and slow down your own progress. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! 1. Checklist Charlie Checklist Charlie is the tai chi student who is forever stuck in his own head. Every time he practices, instead of feeling his body, he recites a list of stuff he is supposed to be doing. For most people, “soundtracking” your way through the form is a legitimate learning phase, but Checklist Charlie is stuck there forever. ...

Can you take 5 minutes to help me with a survey? I’m compiling a report on the state of Tai Chi. I want to know what teachers and practitioners think is important about their Tai Chi practice. We’re also trying to figure out where Tai Chi stacks up for people who don’t do Tai Chi, but have another movement/wellness practice. You can take the survey here and if you could help me spread the word about it too, that would be great. ...

We've heard from hundred of teachers and practitioners about what Tai Chi means to them in 2012. Later this year, we will release Tai Chi: State of the Art 2012, a collection of stories and interviews, as a free ebook that you can download here. People have been candid about sharing all their different reasons that they practice, from making them physically healthy and strong, to finding emotional and mental balance, to forging ahead into deeper territory that connects to their most central values. ...

As you explore layers of relaxation through standing qigong, you’ll hit a point where everything starts to feel fluid, as if you’ve dug down deep enough to find a rich aquifer, filled with nourishing water. We describe the experience with words like “sinking” and “soaking” the mind into the body, and that’s literally what’s happening. Remember the qigong expression, “your mind moves your chi and your chi moves your blood”? When they say “blood”, they mean all the fluids in the body. When you truly start to fuse your mind and your body, your insides start to feel more wet, fluid, and connected. ...

Stability and flow seem to be at odds with each other. Stability can mean rigidity, or at least, it seems to conjure up something fixed, sturdy, and unmoving. Flow isn’t any of those things. It’s fluid and changing. So how does Energy Arts Senior Instructor Craig Barnes blend the two so seamlessly? Recently, Craig taught a workshop about awakening energetic sensitivity, drawn from principles of Dragon and Tiger Qigong. We worked a lot on the opening of the set. The goal was to “fill up your chi” before you start doing the movements, so that the body is awake and engaged and each movement is more alive and more connected. ...

You can encourage your body to relax just by paying attention to it the right way. Using standing qigong, you can build up a relaxation feedback loop between your feeling awareness and the body’s natural ability to soften when circulation improves. The qigong expression, drawn from Chinese medicine, is, “your mind moves your chi and your chi moves your blood”. In the first lesson on standing qigong, we worked on creating a buffer between “real life” and “practice time” with five minutes of settling in. Now we want to move a little deeper into the body and explore how increased you can trigger relaxation with increased feeling awareness. ...

Check out the updated “Code of Practice”. These are the rules you need to follow to make sure your practice is energizing, nourishing and rewarding in the long run. You must follow these rules 100% to the letter, unless you think that kind of rigidity violates either #2 and/or #4. Let me know what you think. Did I miss anything?