Balanced Tai Chi

TAIJI IS PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

No matter how much we advance artificial intelligence, no matter what app will be marketed, one thing’s certain: you have to do Taiji personally. Of course you can support the effort with good nutrition, proper rest, the latest medical advances, and study of the classics. But it will always come down to this: you have to do it yourself.

I don’t see anyone hiring another person to eat or sleep for them. It just doesn’t work that way. In this life of trying to substitute for personal effort, Taiji is one of those endeavors that you will always have to do yourself.

But that’s good, isn’t it? Because whatever you gain can’t be given away, taken away, or sold. It’s truly yours. Isn’t that a great reason to practice?

Ships Don't Sink Because Of The Water Around Them "Ships don't sink because of the water around them; ships sink because of the water that gets in them. Don't let what's happening around you get inside you and weigh you down."

Some valuable wisdom to consider here.

WHY I PRACTICE 13/17
AGING

The greatest campaign of one’s life is to age gracefully.

You can do that if you take care of yourself, exercise, meditate, attend to diet and sleep, and prioritize your personal fulfillment. That requires finding your purpose in life. It means saying you went through each day trying to achieve the utmost. It also means being flexible. I set out to be an artist. Now I know too much. It all seems so arbitrary, the careers too often manufactured, and the network and gatekeepers too intent on popularity-connected-to-profit. It took me a long time to realize that my purpose wasn’t the label of a particular role. It was about being creative and spiritual. There isn’t a specific career for that, and I’ve had to find my own way.

We need to examine the capitalist idea that a person is only as good as their job, that they need to offer their labor in exchange for money, that sacrificing one’s health and happiness is being a “good” person, and that the compensation for that is to be an excessive consumer. We are not here to participate in a mad carnival of tangled exploitation.

But even with great care, we will get older. Eyesight, muscle tone, stamina, cardiovascular health, cataracts, skin and hair will all undergo changes. Women will go through menopause. Men will go through andropause. Every decade will bring changes.

Practice is about integration. Yes, we can integrate ourselves with aging, and integrate aging with ourselves. Aging is a process. I prefer to avoid terms like decline and degeneration. There are secrets and advantages to every age and we need only be open to finding them and using them. If we are to do that, we need to keep moving.

I bet you are far quicker to make decisions, to turn from time-wasting people and ventures, and to spot deception than when you were younger. One can easily be older and wiser, and that’s the right way to age.

My body isn’t the same as it was in the first half of my life. There were years of transition in middle age when I was tired and my mind was cloudy. But I took steps to address that. That’s what practice means too: to change with age. I do more to maintain the level of health I have. I don’t know what’s ahead—doctors are eager to measure my deterioration—but I’m going to keep it up as long as I can.

The greatest challenge is coping with death. That’s probably the ultimate test of every philosophy, religion, and spiritual tradition. I don’t find it persuasive to accept fairy tale stories. I don’t see any likelihood of an afterlife and certainly not one that is going to reward me for all the travails I’ve endured. Such doctrines comfort the miserable with false hope. The premise is: “Die so you can go on to a life of great bliss.” Yeah.

I’m engaged in the process of getting ready to die. I think of dying many times a day. I don’t want that to sound morbid.* It isn’t. All the elders who died left big messes for others to clean up. I don’t want to do that. I want to be mature about it. I’m preparing my archives, getting rid of things I don’t need, and trying to write some account in case relatives have questions after I’m gone.

I’m getting older. I’m going to die. So in the time I have left, diminishing though it may be, I’m going to live well, be responsible, and continue to study. That, I have found, is the way to serenity.

__________

* BBC.com, 24th February 2022: Bhutan’s dark secret to happiness
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20150408-bhutans-dark-secret-to-happiness

At our school, we follow his grandson D**g Zeng Chen.

International Tung Tai Chi Day – November 8th All around the globe, students and teachers from the lineage of Tung Ying Chieh will take time to celebrate the Birthday of the late Grandmaster Tung Ying Chieh

Some good explanations on how Tai Chi improve one's health.

WHY I PRACTICE: HEALTH

I had night terrors in my teens and my early twenties. The dreams were always the same: I watched myself in the basement of my family’s Victorian home. The windowless space morphed into a nighttime forest where armored swordsmen chased me. As soon as they caught me, the dream’s point of view changed. I saw them from within my body as they seized me and pinned me face up to hack at me. I screamed as I felt every agonizing cut, unable to die—until I woke up.

I told no one about this. I merely suffered for years. I tried correlating it to some waking experience that might have triggered them, but what good would that do? How could I change my family, my relatives, or my life predicaments? I just gave up. I was helpless.

About two weeks after I began learning Taijiquan, I turned around in my dreams and fought back. I still got painfully split apart. About three weeks after I started practicing, I drew even. One month after learning Taijiquan, I fought back—and won. The dreams vanished. They’ve never returned.

The prevailing thought is that Taijiquan heals. I’ve seen it happen to other people who take up a regular practice. They improve their balance, strengthen their legs, and relieve their tension. Taijiquan puts a great emphasis on relaxation, and it helps with circulation, pulmonary problems, and the nervous system. A great many issues are matters of mind and body together, and Taijiquan’s long practice facilitates that connection.

The masters’ explanation is deceptively simple: qi heals everything. The body naturally seeks balance (homeostasis and smooth functioning). When there’s a problem, it’s because of imbalances (something is either deficient or excessive, thereby throwing the body’s function off), or because of stagnation (due to an invading pathogen, weather disturbance, physical damage, chronic stress, or mental difficulties). By using the entire system to restore balance and clear away impediments, Taijiquan restores who we naturally are.

I eventually learned how this connects to deep Taoist thought. We are urged to be plain and simple because we are already good. We need to let the body take care of itself. Medicine and therapy are assisting modalities, not “solutions." Nonaction (wuwei) in this context means not to do anything that is incompatible with our natural health, and not to strain to do anything beyond our capacity or that isn’t positive.

Taijiquan restores—because it returns anyone who practices to the health that is their birthright.

I keep practicing because I want to stay as vital and healthy for as long as possible. I am careful about diet, sleep, and stress. Yes, I’m older, but at the same time, I don’t have to struggle as much as when I was younger. Candidly, I am still recovering from decades of working for a living. I’m grateful that things are easier now, but that’s because I worked hard to make that happen.

If you’ve ever been in a sad situation where a person is injured, you’ll probably hear someone cry out: “They aren’t moving!” Yes. To move is to be alive.

Tao is movement. Life is movement. Health is movement.

"Needle at the Sea Bottom" is a movement or posture, in the Yang style forms.

I've titled this cartoon "Needle at Sea Bottom" For more Tai Chi humor, visit:

https://taichidaily.co/blogs/tai-chi-blog/tai-chi-cartoon

Not much to do with Tai Chi, except when I get new inquiries, and they ask me what they should where, I always respond, where loose and comfortable clothes.

For all you students that have stuck with learning Tai Chi, give yourselfs a big pat on the back.

DON'T GIVE UP

Most people who start Taijiquan end up quitting.
Most people who start a spiritual practice end up quitting.

Why? It’s damn hard. It’s discouraging. Sure, you practice at first, and then you find that it takes a lot of persistence to secure the tiniest toehold. Pretty soon, you feel like a slug with the insane ambition to scale a Himalayan mountain.

Unfortunately, there’s no other way. You have to live with your inadequacies for years and try each day to overcome them. Just when you think maybe you’ve got a chance, illness, and aging show up. Then you either redouble your efforts or you give up.

I know that people say, “well, if you can’t do it, maybe you’re not meant to do it. There are better ways to spend your time.” Yeah. And then you’ll never do it. And when you check back with those “experts” later, you’ll find that they haven’t done much with their shrunken lives either. Maybe it’s “unrealistic” to try to be “something that you’re not.” But with everything you learn to do, you grow. Eventually, the something that you are will far exceed the “something that you’re not.” Continuing to try to grow offsets the typical attitude that aging is a slide into decline and dwindling options.

Don’t give up. If you want something simple to cling to, it’s just that: don’t give up.

FORM IS ENERGY, ENERGY IS FORM

The teachers speak of the primary importance of form: xíng, 形. It means: “form; shape; appearance; look. The ideogram combines bristle, 彡, to convey the meaning, with the glyph, 幵, to suggest pronunciation (happens to mean flat, level). But let us not think that we have an empty body into which energy flows. Form, energy, mind, and movement are one.

To make a movement in itself takes a mental command and energy just to start qi flowing. Having done that, the questions are how easily the energy flows, how much there is, and what it powers.

The first Taoist imperative is to have all channels open. That requires alignment. Just as the best drains are vertical, the greatest openness is what is naturally aligned. The amount of energy is cumulative; we have to build it up through practice. Finally, if we align our body correctly, then the psychic centers can be activated. That releases spiritual abilities.

This question of alignment is inherent in meditation—everyone says to straighten the back. Why? It has to be because the right alignment is the prelude to the proper flow of energy.

Our muscles are set up in antagonistic systems. For one set of muscles to move, a corresponding set must relax. Both sets consume energy. So if we learn to move well, then this necessary antagonism is minimized and less energy is wasted. More importantly, when this system is clumsy, then we not only waste energy, but we are working against ourselves.

Qigong and martial arts make use of locks (hand or body positions which temporarily inhibit flow of energy) to direct energy into meridians and organs. Each form has a specific set of effects it's supposed to achieve.

Finally, there's flow. In Taijiquan and other internal styles, we try to move gracefully from one posture to another. That means that we're not just trying to achieve effects posture by posture but that we're also trying to achieve continuity and the ability to command energy while we are active.

Form, energy, mind, and movement are one. That’s why qigong and the internal systems are so effective.

Well said.

The seemingly profound Taijiquan is actually "nothing but a circle".

Taijiquan master Yang Chengfu said: "Taijiquan is made up of circles. Its entire combative capability is not based on individual techniques or set moves. Instead it’s all about circles - vertical circles, horizontal circles, oblique circles, countless and continuous rotating circles in the limbs, waist, whole body. When it reaches the peak of perfection, it is impossible for the enemy to break through. An exaggerated description mentions that a drop of water cannot pe*****te. Whatever comes in contact with it will be thrown out”.

Taijiquan theorist Chen Xin wrote: "Taijiquan is spiralling (reeling silk) method: Forward and Backward, Right and Left, Upward and Downward, Inward and Outward, Large and Small, Positive and Negative”. He also said, "As for the movement of hands and feet, there is nothing more than a circle. There can be no straight line. Simply, every circle is a circle of Taiji”.

The words of these past masters explain the characteristics of Taijiquan movement. That it is inseparable from circles. We must pay attention to and train our bodies, hands and feet to draw and walk circles, and for these circles to be connected before and after. Taijiquan is made up of these countless circles that are connected and unbroken to form spirals. The traditional theory of Taijiquan called the circular and the spiral rotational movements reeling silk movements, and the circles reeling silk circles.

Chen Zhaokui added: "Although each limb makes a spiral circle, but on the whole, Taijiquan is a holistic sphere”. From the surface Taijiquan is our body and hands and feet drawing circles, but from the overall point of view, these spiral circles are in fact our whole body rotating and rolling like a ball. Therefore, he urges players to have an overall concept of the body as a sphere when practising Taijiquan.

This applies to Tai Chi as well.

"Relax and calm your mind. Forget about yourself and follow your opponent's movement."
- Yip Man

Couldn't of said it better myself.

You go ladies!

It looks like some really good classes coming up, especially for those interested in expanding their Tai Chi and Qigong knowledge.

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Guilty as charged.

“The man who chases two rabbits, catches neither.”
— Confucius