Tai Chi

When learning any of the movement arts it is suggested that you seek a qualified instructor. Unfortunately the world is moving very fast and people are forced into long schedules just to earn a living and even more cannot afford private lessons or transportation costs to attend. This leaves buying a book, which is totally unacceptable without several years practice, or using videos. The good things are that websites such as YouTube have wide ranges of excellent videos. There is a trick however to using these videos. We learn qigong and tai chi in st ages, not all at once. Teaching a person sets before teaching proper breathing and proper stance is a waste of time. Learn what the basic steps are by reading art icles like this one, then look for videos that teach those aspects. ...

Our breath has always, in all cultures, been seen as the sources of our life. In Western culture, dominated by Christianity and Islam, religious tomes speak of "God" breathing life into its creations. In Eastern religions’ breathing is used to both generate energy and move it throughout the body. If this is too esoteric for you consider that if your breathing stops, your body will die in minutes because the brain needs the oxygen that is carried in the blood. No matter what culture you grew up in, whether you are religious or not, the breath really is the life. ...

Update: After you read this post, check out my answers to some great questions that were asked in the comments,here. Last spring, I set out to enter “the 2-Hour Gate” in standing qigong. And I got there. In fact, it was easier to get there than I thought it would be. Before you think I’m bragging about my practice, though, there’s something else I have to confess. As soon as I missed a couple weeks of practice, going through the gate became impossible for me. That’s right, holding a standing posture for two hours went from feeling completely inevitable to pretty much impossible. ...

When originally practiced in Northern China there were eight basic stances in tai chi. Time and a deeper understanding of the Art have narrowed the choices to only five. One image in many people's mind when they think of tai chi is of a student in a slight squat, arms circled around nothing. This particular stance is called the Horse-Riding Stance. This particular stance is one of the most basic of the short form stances and was often used by teachers to test obedience and sincerity in a particular student. The Stance, if done properly and in harmony, can actually be quite relaxing, but if done improperly can be quite uncomfortable, although not harmful. Once properly learned this stance builds leg strength and improves balance. ...

Balance is something that we learn, not something we are born with. Infants try to walk and fall over many times before beginning to walk. The problem is that once we do finally learn how to walk we stop improving our balance. Professional athletes work on improving balance by using regular exercises but most of us get to a certain level, just enough to get around, and stop learning. The fact is however that if you continue to practice, challenging yourself, you can do some truly amazing things. This fact is so evident that the Western medical community has been using Tai Chi and Qigong to treat both Parkinson's disease and elderly patients with amazing results. ...

Allow me to share with you a Tai Chi principle so simple and clear that it is often overlooked, even by practitioners who have been doing Tai Chi for 10 years or more. The Five Movement Centers is a template for understand HOW you move and applying it to any form you know or any repetitive movement you can perform, like going for a walk, is going to have a serious impact on how grounded, fluid, and connected you feel. ...

When a baseball player drives a home run out of the park, the power that they use comes directly from the legs and is manifested in the hips. The same is true of most athletic sports. If a competitor has weak legs they often cannot rise to the challenge. The legs are our foundation and we have the same relationship with them that a tree has with its roots. The deeper, stronger the root, the better able the tree is to withstand adverse conditions and the longer the tree lives. ...

When most of us think about meditation we visualize a mystic sitting in Lotus position, eyes closed and relaxed, savoring the stillness. But the fact is this same stillness can be found in even the most energetic of exercises. A champion martial artist creates this inner stillness and uses it to perform amazing feats of strength, physical endurance and stamina. The marital artist might or might not be stronger than an average person however. Their strength comes from the discovery of an immense reservoir of energy that everyone possesses. This energy can be accessed through meditation. Meditation trains our minds to focus inward, instead of relying only on our outward experience. ...

When my first Tai Chi teacher, Bruce Frantzis, came back to the US forty years ago to spread the Tai Chi he learned in China, he found out that many basic Tai Chi concepts were not being taught, either because of communications issues or lack of knowledge. Only a fraction of the vast potential of the art was being shared. Bruce set out to teach the Inner Form of Tai Chi and that’s what I have studied for the last 15 years. ...

Tai Chi and Taoism are much more than exercise routines and the philosophy behind them. Practitioners that truly want to get all of the benefits of each consider them to be a way of life. The chi develops a great deal of its power from the way that you live your life. One testament to this fact is the large number of long lived Taoists in the world. Some have been documented to have lived to 130 years. This ability is seen by some to be a quest for immortality but in fact that Taoists are simply not terribly concerned with how long they live and eliminate a great deal of stress. ...