Tai Chi

Follow these rules, as best you can, to make sure that your daily practice is safe, sane, rewarding and rejuvenating. Hopefully, some of this spills over into how you live the rest of your life! 1. You become what you practice. My teacher's teacher, Liu Hung Chieh, would always remind him how deeply what you practice shapes who you are. In Western neurophysiology, we are seeing more and more how the brain and the nervous system change through training. Just to be safe, assume this rule applies on all levels. ...

Do you include a “settling-in” phase each time you practice? If not, you’re wasting time and energy resolving issues from your day when you could be going deeper into your practice. A settling-in phase acts as a buffer between your busy day and the place you’d like your practice to take you. Standing qigong is one of the best buffers between “real life” and “practice time”. You could jump right into your tai chi form, but you’d need to do 10 or 15 minutes of “cold” tai chi, with no warm-up, to arrive at the same place, ready to practice, after 5 minutes of standing and settling in. ...

Z-Health Master Trainer Jen Waak is a self-described “recovering management consultant”. These days, she helps other “Keyboard Athletes” improve and maintain their bodies and stay healthy even when they’re stuck behind a desk all day. What surprised me about reading Jen’s advice on “what you should do at your desk”, was that it sounded a lot like what she did last year to get ready for a climb up Mount Kilimanjaro. ...

As you’re sitting here reading this, I want you to try something. I want you to push yourself back away from your desk, let your arms hang by your sides, close your eyes and see how many fingers you can feel. Go ahead, try it. Now do the same thing again, but stand up and count your toes instead. Could you feel more fingers or toes? Chances are you have much greater feeling access to your fingers. But how does the sensation of feeling a finger compare to the clarity of a thought you just had or an image you can generate in your head? If thoughts and images are much clearer than feeling sensations in your body, you might have a problem. ...

We are about to start the Early Fall session at Brookline Tai Chi and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to teach the introductory class. The challenge, when you learn tai chi for the first time, is all about mindset. I want to see if I can teach them “how to learn tai chi” as much as actually teaching tai chi. This might sound like a beginner-only problem, but I have a challenge for more experienced readers at the end of this post and I’m wondering if you can keep up with my beginners on this one. ...

Check out this advice from Jack White on why you should limit yourself with formal constraints if you want to be creative. The lesson here for anyone who does tai chi, qigong, or meditation is “stick to your form”. Inside the limits of the form, you’ll find vastly more inner space to explore than you ever would in free-form movement.

I teach regular tai chi workshops in Farmington, ME. It all started when a Brookline Tai Chi student moved back up to Maine and asked me to come teach her meditation group (thanks, Iris!). Tai Chi Fundamentals We started by going through some basics of tai chi: sensitivity, posture, alignment, and body mechanics. Here's an example of exercises from our first workshop: Wu Style Short Form Since then, we've been working on the different sections of the Wu Style Short Form, just like we teach at Brookline Tai Chi: ...

So, I know I’m writing this on vacation where the most pressing decision we make each day is whether to hike, kayak, or swim, but I’m going to go ahead anyway and recommend that you practice twice a day. Here’s why… What I Learned from a Month-Long Tai Chi Intensive After a month in England, practicing 10 hours a day at the Short Form Instructor Training this summer, I have a renewed appreciation for daily practice rhythm. At the training, there were three distinct types of training sessions we would go through each day. In the mornings, we would practice in our groups. Most of the day, from 10am to 5pm was reserved for class time with Bruce. In the evenings, we would be free to practice again, ideally training the pieces of what we did in class that day. ...

After a month-long instructor training this summer, I’m itching to get something off my chest. Let’s talk about real tai chi and fake tai chi. I want to get clear on what tai chi is and what it’s not. To see the difference, you have to look at where the instructor is coming from and how they structure the stages of learning for their students. Let’s start with the fake, low-quality stuff, because that’s what most people are familiar with. ...

When you think of "movement arts" as a big collection of practices, think in terms of a spectrum that runs from stillness to movement. See, the "art" in movement arts is all about finding stillness inside of movement (this is why our favorite athletes look so at ease under highest pressure) and movement inside of stillness (this is what is so endlessly fascinating about meditation and other inner work -- you learn to follow the movement of the mind). ...