Tai Chi

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. ...

The difference between constant drain and a smooth, steady reserve of energy you can draw from throughout your day boils down to how you manage your personal energy. Do you know: How to gauge your "daily juice"? Why you may not have the same energy levels as everyone else you work with? And what to do about it? How to stop the snowball-like accumulation of stress throughout your day? How to build deep energetic reserves over time? Let me help you build a personal energy management practice through movement arts like tai chi and qigong. ...

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): ...

Well, ok, let me explain. I’m moving all of the business-related posts over to the Trainerfly blog. It seems appropriate to separate writing about the benefits of daily practice from the running of a movement education business at this point. If you are subscribed to the email newsletter here on DanKleiman.com, your weekly updates will still be about chi gung practice, relaxation, and reducing the impact of stress on your life. Don’t worry! ...

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. ...

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). ...

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. ...

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. ...

Every time I circle back to extended periods of posture-holding, I find all kinds of new layers in my practice. Lately, I’ve been holding Single Whip. I was shooting some other videos and I thought, “why not see what happens over those 30 minutes”. I had a mic on, so whenever I changed focus or felt some big internal shift, I made a comment. The end result, condensed down to 3:30, includes minute markers for each of the changes. ...

What the heck does Donkey Kong have to do with the practice habits of tai chi students? It turns out the ladders and platforms in the video game are a perfect model for understanding the ecosystem of students practice habits. Let me explain the survey design and then I’ll share some really fascinating results about how people engage Brookline Tai Chi to develop their tai chi practice. ...