Chapter

1

Why Practice T’ai Chi and QiGong?

In This Chapter

The reasons behind T’ai Chi’s exploding popularity

The mental and emotional challenges to learning T’ai Chi and QiGong

A brief history of T’ai Chi

Powerful benefits from all styles of T’ai Chi

Web Video Support: Overview of Book’s Web Video Support

T’ai Chi Ch’uan (pronounced tie chee chwan), sometimes spelled Taijiquan, means “supreme ultimate fist,” or “highest martial art.” But because most people now practice it for health, it is often simply called T’ai Chi, for supreme ultimate experience.

T’ai Chi is paradoxically as simple as pie, and as deep as an ocean in unfolding complexity. I have worked with T’ai Chi and QiGong teachers all over the planet and found that it is rare that two T’ai Chi teachers will agree on exactly what T’ai Chi is. This is because these arts are such expansively multi-dimensional experiences that offer breakthroughs in health, mental and emotional growth, creativity, and other areas that often defy description. But in the end, all styles of T’ai Chi can provide similarly profound benefits, and this book has been very useful to anyone studying, or teaching, any style of T’ai Chi or QiGong.

A Harvard Medical University Publication referred to T’ai Chi as “medication in motion,” and Oprah’s Book Club selected author Eckart Tolle (A New Earth), wrote that T’ai Chi and QiGong would be a major part of global awakening. So what are these ancient arts? Practical health and fitness sciences, or are they esoteric life-altering consciousness-expanding practices? The answer is all of the above, and so much more. This chapter begins with two amazing exercises that will prove to you just how physically empowering and esoterically life expanding these tools can be.

The Chinese call life energy Qi (pronounced chee). The character for Qi is also the character for air or breath. QiGong means “breathing exercise,” but also means “life energy” exercise. There are about 7,000 QiGong exercises in the Chinese Book of Medicine, and T’ai Chi is among the most effective of the Moving QiGong exercises.

We begin by exposing you to two T’ai Chi and QiGong techniques that will take you far beyond mentally comprehending the power of these ancient arts, by enabling you to actually feel that power and expansion.

First, we’ll take a peek ahead to enjoy Chapter 9’s Sitting QiGong meditation, or by using the Web Video Support (top of Chapter 1’s listed videos, at www.idiotsguides.com/taichi). Ease back into a comfortable chair, and listen as I lead you through a soothing, mind-expanding QiGong meditation. If you can’t access the internet, you can use the text version in Chapter 9.

This QiGong meditation will enable you to actually feel the subtle energy that is your life energy, or Qi, which T’ai Chi and QiGong are based upon. If you don’t sense it the first time, don’t give up. You will eventually!

Second, do the following exercise on the power of completing your Microcosmic Orbit. After these two experiences, whether you are a rank beginner or an advanced teacher, you’ll understand the tremendous potential T’ai Chi and QiGong offer. However, this is only a taste of what these pages offer in what is hoped to be your continuing lifelong T’ai Chi and QiGong journey of self-discovery and personal expansion.

Subtle Adjustments Equal Powerful Changes

During T’ai Chi and QiGong exercises, the tip of the tongue lightly touches the roof of the mouth. Why?

There are two reasons for this: First is that by placing the tip of the tongue lightly touching the gum line just behind the top front teeth, it changes the throat structure. Research shows that long, gradual breaths are the most effective, rather than rapid inhales and exhales. When the mouth is open, the throat is open. When the tongue touches the roof of the mouth, the throat canal narrows some, causing your breaths to be longer and more gradual, thereby maximizing their healthful effects. See the Web Video Support QiGong Breathing Tutorial.

SAGE SIFU SAYS
Remember to bookmark or add to your list of favorite sites the Web Video Support address (www.idiotsguides.com/taichi) and enjoy the benefits of the videos along with each chapter.

But the second reason is an energetic-engineering one. You’ll learn more in the next chapter about T’ai Chi’s connection with Traditional Chinese Medicine’s Acupuncture energy meridians. As you see in the following figure, the curved lines on the image on the left show how the energy from what’s called the Microcosmic Orbit flows up your back and down your front.

The Microcosmic Orbit flows up from your perineum through the center of your back, over your head, and ends in the roof of your mouth. This is called your Governing Vessel. The energy flow of the Conception Vessel is represented by the curved line from the perineum up the center of your frontal body to end in the lower jaw. The Microcosmic Orbit is interrupted by the mouth.

But when you touch the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, you complete this energy circuit, and this can profoundly affect your body’s solidity and power. Here’s an easy exercise to feel that effect.

The Microcosmic Orbit energy channel is illustrated by the left figure. The right figure is the stance used to test the power of completing the Microcosmic Orbit, with the help of a friend pressing down on your resisting fist to draw you off balance.

Here’s how to do this exercise:

Note: This illustrated instruction is augmented in a Web Video Support feature in Chapter 1’s video section, Subtle Adjustment Equal Powerful Changes.

1. See in the figure to the right of the Microcosmic Orbit example with the feet close together, and fists upturned. Stand this way.

2. Have someone push down on one of your upturned fists. (Note: If you have any arm, shoulder, or back injuries, you may want to skip this exercise.) Use resistance so that they will pull you off balance. Notice how that felt as you began to lose your balance.

3. Now, smash your tongue up against the roof of your mouth, and have them push down on your upturned fist again.

4. You should notice that it is much more difficult, if not impossible, for them to pull you off balance by pushing down on your resisting fist this time.

Yeah, mind-blowing, isn’t it? I learned this technique from Grandmaster Jianye Jiang while at the Zhang San Feng Festival in New York, where Angela and I were presented with our 2009 Internal Arts Hall of Fame Induction. I had been doing T’ai Chi for nearly 30 years at the time I discovered this. This gives you an idea of just how deep and wide your T’ai Chi journey will become, as you continually learn new and profound aspects of T’ai Chi and QiGong even after decades of study.

Realize that this technique is just to illustrate the power of completing the Microcosmic Orbit, and to highlight how subtle physical adjustments make huge differences. But in T’ai Chi and QiGong, you don’t actually move around with your tongue smashed up against the roof of the mouth. They are done in a relaxed way, with the tip of the tongue just lightly touching the gum line near the roof of the mouth, because you should always be relaxed.

Where This Journey Can Lead

T’ai Chi and QiGong are both practical no-nonsense calorie-burning fitness routines and esoteric transcendental experiences. They are extremely low impact, and accessible to anyone. To give you a perspective of their breadth and depth, realize that T’ai Chi is the product of about 1,200 years of Chinese mind-body medical research, and QiGong is about 2,000 years in the making.

T’ai Chi is becoming increasingly popular for a wide range of practioners!

T’ai Chi or QiGong are at the cutting edge of health science and are perhaps the most effective stress-management exercises in the world—which is saying a lot in an overstressed world where 70 to 85 percent of all illnesses are caused by stress (Kaiser Permanente study). However, T’ai Chi and QiGong are so much more.

T’ai Chi and QiGong are mind-body tools. Therefore, for your body to get maximum benefit, it is critical to wrap your mind around the vast breadth of possibility they offer you, so you can then deeply relax into the process without having to second-guess the intellectual foundation of the practices.

T’ai Chi comes in several excellent styles. While some chapters in this book relate to particular T’ai Chi styles, you’ll find it to be a valuable resource to anyone exploring any form of T’ai Chi or QiGong.

This book will help you hit the ground running. Appendix A helps you locate local teachers or schools anywhere around the world, while Appendix C describes effective DVD programs.

Relaxing the Mind, the Body, and Our Lives

When I began T’ai Chi and QiGong 30 years ago, I mistakenly thought that T’ai Chi was hard. I used to joke, “It’s amazing how hard it is to move effortlessly.” With the help of this book, you will learn to relax through the biggest hurdles you’ll encounter in learning these mind-body arts—the mental and emotional challenges.

At their core, T’ai Chi and QiGong are all about letting go and loosening your grip on your body, your consciousness, and your life. In this book, you’ll learn techniques like “the unbendable arm,” which are not only great party tricks, but illustrate the effortless power these tools will bring into every aspect of your life. Your athletic prowess will increase exponentially as you dive into this world.

You may begin your T’ai Chi or QiGong journey to improve your health, calm your mind, or improve your golf game, but in the end you will look back and see how these life tools not only untangled many of your mental-physical knots and problems, but also expanded your potential, creativity, and love of life.

This photo illustrates how a loose frame sends the full force of the dan tien’s motion up through your relaxed body, out the bat, and through the ball. Notice how the batter’s back foot turns as the dan tien turns into the ball he’s hitting.

Unfurl Your Constricted Creativity

My own T’ai Chi journey has been a testament to this potential of creativity expansion, resulting not only in my writing this best-selling T’ai Chi book that is published worldwide in several languages, but by my multiple-award-winning novels and essays, and by my having founded a global event now held annually in over 70 nations each year. None of this would have happened had I not been lucky enough to stumble into that T’ai Chi and QiGong class 30 years ago, where I began this journey of untangling the mental and emotional stress knots that had kept my potential constricted and limited. You may one day look back on when you first picked up this book and started your own classes with this same fondness.

Getting Centered Makes Life Magical

This book will help you understand that these exercises are celebrations of life, and an act of thankfulness for these wonderful bodies we’ve been given. You may start them in order to look more fit or beautiful, but in the end, how you look won’t matter at all because you will “feel gorgeous inside and realize that you have been beautiful all along,” and discover that is the only beauty that really matters.

You may start T’ai Chi and QiGong to become more creative and get an edge in business in order to become more wealthy, but in the end you will find these tools have helped you understand that every breath, everyone, and everything you see in this life is a treasure and that you are blessed to have this life you’ve been given already—and your desire for wealth will become less of a source of angst and pressure. That appreciation of self and life will shine through you, causing people to want to be around you, and success after success can follow.

You may be running after things by pursuing T’ai Chi and QiGong, but as they slow you and the merry-go-round you call your life down, you will ultimately find that all the things you really needed have been around you all along. You will become aware of the miraculous in the mundane.

Now, as mentioned before, T’ai Chi and QiGong are very practical no-nonsense mind-body tools that can address many basic issues, and the more you understand how these tools work, the more you’ll be able to relax into the process and get the maximum benefit. That will enable you to transcend analytical thought and be immersed in the pleasures and sensations that are much wider and deeper experiences than can be described intellectually.

So let’s expand on your intellectual understanding of these arts, before moving on to the application of these tools.

T’ai Chi and QiGong as Physical Engineering Principles

T’ai Chi and QiGong are based on physical engineering principles. You’ll learn how the “vertical axis” and the “dan tien” are at their core, not only esoteric energy concepts, but practical engineering systems that these physical sciences are built upon. They will teach you how to align your body for maximum performance with the least amount of effort. They will teach you how to untangle your knots physically, mentally, and emotionally so that the maximum amount of power and energy can flow through this vessel you call your body.

The dan tien is located about 11/2 to 3 inches below the navel, near the center of the body, slightly toward the front.

SAGE SIFU SAYS
T’ai Chi and QiGong are effortless, and should always feel good. Don’t strain at them. They may seem hard at first, but when you look back, you’ll realize it was never hard; it was just that you were making it hard unnecessarily. This realization will make other aspects of your life become more effortless, as well.

The vertical axis is your postural alignment. Most of us are leaning forward, always in a hurry to get somewhere else, always feeling five steps behind the rushing world. This postural dysfunction causes many problems. For example, the tight shoulders we often feel are largely due to the head leaning forward all day long. That 8- or 9-pound melon we call our head, held out of alignment, causes those little muscles in the shoulders to overwork all day long as the head leans forward in a rush to get somewhere else all the time. As T’ai Chi teaches you to align your posture day after day, a lot of that chronic shoulder tension will dissipate over time. You’ll feel some relief right away, but the full effect may take some time. In the end it will amaze you how much pressure it will unload off of your body!

Lower-back issues will often disappear as well, because stress causes lower-back muscles to tighten up, causing an over-curvature of the back, pressure on the vertebrae, and thereby back pain. The physical adjustment will result in a mental shift, as you stop propelling forward and stand in the center of yourself, noticing the world around you rather than anxiously rushing to a place you can never quite get to.

OUCH!
T’ai Chi’s spinal lengthening offers the opposite of what high heels do to your back, because high heels cause your back to over-curve, putting stress on the lower vertebrae. T’ai Chi will give you great legs, so you won’t need to torture your back with high heels to look good!

T’ai Chi and QiGong posture lengthens the spine, stacking up the vertebrae in alignment, and taking enormous pressure off the back, shoulders, head, and more.

Getting Daily Biofeedback Untangles Life Issues

T’ai Chi and QiGong’s slow, gentle, inner-mindful movements are unlike any other exercise, in that they give you the opportunity to go within to see issues beneath the physical ones. This can be a powerful therapy on several levels, enabling T’ai Chi’s engineering alignments to untangle mental and emotional knots.

T’ai Chi and QiGong as Biofeedback

T’ai Chi and QiGong show us that the entire body is a connected whole, not individual parts. Fixing your posture can help eliminate chronic headaches, etc. We’ve all heard, “the head bone’s connected to the neck bone; the neck bone’s connected to the ….” It’s true, and the biofeedback element of T’ai Chi and QiGong will help all these parts relax into a loosening flow of motion that will untangle many knots beyond the places you begin to align, loosen, and relax.

T’AI SCI
Biofeedback uses a computer program to train people how to deeply relax. Leading biofeedback specialist Dr. Gary Green refers to T’ai Chi as “biofeedback without the computer.”

As far as chronic pain issues, you will discover that your bones are often not the problem, but rather that muscle tension was pulling the bones out of alignment. So your stress levels, or in other words, the accumulated unmanaged mental-emotional stress that we collect or grip in our cells, is at the root of most of our physical problems (see Chapter 18).

Therefore, the physical engineering of T’ai Chi and QiGong will take stress off the bones and connective tissue, as taught by the “unbendable arm” phenomenon taught in Chapter 3—an exercise meant to show students how they can be much more powerful by relaxing. Yes, that sounds like a paradox, but as you progress through the exercises in this book and later in a live class, hopefully you will feel that relaxed power expanding through you.

OUCH!
Never force yourself through motions when doing T’ai Chi and QiGong. The biofeedback slow-mindfulness quality will enable you to be aware of your body’s limits, and ease up against those limits in a way that feels good. Your range will increase over time.

As you learn to move from the dan tien (which will be expanded on later), lengthen your spine, and relax around this elongated posture, you’ll actually learn how to let the earth beneath you take most of the pressure caused by work or exercise. Your relaxed body, through a series of subtle release visualizations, will pass all the strain down through your body to the earth under your feet.

This image illustrates the vertical axis and dan tien in alignment (left), and how you will learn to allow the force of your effort, in this case a push, to transfer through your relaxed body (see Unbendable Arm in Chapter 3) into the earth below you.

The new way you will begin to approach mowing the grass, shoveling snow, pushing a shopping cart, or hitting a golf ball will greatly reduce strain on your lower back, while adding much more power to your actions.

After a few months of T’ai Chi, because of this subtle internal biofeedback-like awareness, next time you shovel snow or rake leaves, you’ll feel much less sore than you did the year before, because of these small core adjustments in posture and movement.

Yet, there is an even more important lesson to be found in this physical loosening. You will realize that the world does not fall apart when you let go of the tendency to feel like the world is on your shoulders. The physical letting go of effort and strain will translate into a mental and emotional letting go. This doesn’t mean you’ll become an uncaring sloth who is of no value to the world. Quite the opposite; you’ll discover that the fewer burdens you grip in your muscles, mind, and heart, the more energy you will be able to access by allowing it to “flow through you.” Most T’ai Chi and QiGong practitioners find themselves becoming more caring people, more relaxed, creative, and effective workers, and basically better at everything—clearer, happier, and more fun to be around. (Notice the unhurried, relaxed flow of T’ai Chi’s flowing forms in Chapter 1’s Soothing Unhurried Flow of T’ai Chi.)

Seeing the Physical and Mental Health Link

So, the physical engineering of the body mentioned above is inextricably related to your mental and emotional states. As QiGong meditation/visualization and breathing techniques begin to relax your mind and emotional state, the muscles will relax and the bones will align.

Our muscles are like a thermometer, in that they show you what you can’t see. The tension we hold in our muscles is an indicator of the tension we’ve held beneath the surface in our mind and heart, and in the field of energy that we are when we get down to the tiny subatomic bits that make us up.

In the classic golf movie The Legend of Bagger Vance, actor Will Smith’s character spoke a quintessential T’ai Chi line: “The way you hold your club is the way you hold your life.” When we get challenged in life, we tend to hold our breath, and that causes us to tighten up, which causes us to get more rigid emotionally and mentally.

T’ai Chi is a form of Moving QiGong (pronounced chee gong). QiGong means “breathing exercise.” By practicing these breathing techniques that include what the Chinese call “the sinking” or the “letting go of our entire being on each exhale,” our entire body relaxes more, and our life relaxes more, as we let the “vertical axis” hold us up and everything else lets go. See Chapter 1’s video Sinking Your Qi.)

T’AI SCI
This book’s author is the T’ai Chi expert for famed naturopathic physician and best-selling author Dr. Andrew Weil’s popular website. Dr. Weil has written that most of our health problems are caused by poor breathing habits.

So, as you are fixing your physical tension issues, you will often discover that the depression and anxiety issues we face in this fast-paced modern world begin to dissipate as well through our T’ai Chi and QiGong practice. In the medical research in the next chapter, you’ll see that this assertion has been validated by studies again and again.

OUCH!
When you catch yourself trying too hard or notice your head and shoulder muscles tightening—just stop. Take some deep breaths, and on each sighing exhale think of every one of your 50 trillion cells absolutely letting go of everything they are squeezing on to. Feel your entire being lightening up on itself, permeated by a silken effortlessness that expands through you. Feel the weight of the world lift off your shoulders. Go ahead! Do it right now; don’t wait. And repeat this several times. Now, doesn’t that feel nice?

One amazing benefit you will realize over time is that as your muscles relax and your bones align, you will find that you not only move through life more effortlessly, but more powerfully as well. Your sports performance will dramatically improve, and sometimes quite quickly. A student in one of my classes, a psychologist who later authored a book that advocated T’ai Chi for mental-emotional issues, reported to me that after only a few months of T’ai Chi and QiGong classes he had increased his golf drive by 100 yards, adding happily, “I don’t have to swing nearly as hard now, so my drives are more accurate, too!” In a recent major pro golf tournament the champion of the event was asked how he did it, and he replied, “I relaxed out of the way of my swing.” This is the essence of T’ai Chi and QiGong.

As T’ai Chi and QiGong fix your physical and mental/emotional issues, they will also become a powerful medical tonic that will expand through your life, heading off or even treating many health challenges you may encounter. This isn’t meant to replace your physician. It’s mentioned so that you can bring it to your doctor’s attention. Many major medical schools in America are now training medical students in T’ai Chi and QiGong, not only to prescribe to their patients but to use for themselves to help them cope and be more effective in the high-stress career they are pursuing.

T’ai Chi and QiGong are Powerful Life Medicine

In 2009 I was invited to speak at what was to be the National Institutes of Health’s first-ever Mind-Body Week event in Washington. The event was later postponed to 2012, but the winds of change for American healthcare began then. I was later commissioned by the world-renowned health journal Prevention Magazine to create the T’ai Chi tutorial for their December 2010 issue article titled, “Boost Your Immune System Naturally with T’ai Chi.”

If a pill could do what T’ai Chi and QiGong can do, it would be the top-selling drug in the world. But in spite of what profound health tools they are, you won’t be bombarded with T’ai Chi and QiGong TV advertising because there is no fortune to be made in teaching these arts—therefore, no massive advertising budgets. So hang on to this book and keep it by your remote control and when TV ads come on, hit the mute button and pick up this book again and again. And tell people you care for about T’ai Chi and QiGong, because research shows when you help others it makes you healthier.

T’AI SCI
Harvard Health publication recently wrote that T’ai Chi might more accurately be called “medication in motion,” because of all the myriad health issues it is now proving to prevent or treat, according to mounting medical research.

T’ai Chi and QiGong use breathing/ visualization relaxation techniques in combination with effortless gentle movements to loosen up all the collected stress grit in the body, and, as you read previously, in the mind and heart as well. This has a profound impact on the various health systems, which are all integrated together. At the core of our health is stress management. When the physical body practices poor postural habits, poor breathing habits, and poor mental/emotional habits, this weakens the immune system. You may be wondering, how is that?

T’AI SCI
T’ai Chi and QiGong are part of Traditional Chinese Medicine, as is acupuncture. The gentle motions of these exercises help massage and stimulate the 361 main acupuncture points through the body to facilitate a healthful flow of Qi, or life energy.

Reboot Your Nervous System for Clarity

The body, mind, and heart (or emotional body) are made of energy, as is all of existence when you get down to the subatomic bits. Chinese researchers began exploring this energy aspect of us millennia ago, and found that a radiant flow of energy moves through us all the time, but is constricted when we hold on to stress loads. It is like static interrupting all the minute, subtle signals powering all the health communication networks and systems in our being, and especially our immune system.

These tools’ ability to help us unload that accumulated stress on a daily basis has profound implications. It’s exactly like when you’ve overstrained your computer by running multiple programs and it becomes intermittently paralyzed by multiple conflicting signals (as when stressed thoughts spin through our minds chaotically), until you reboot by turning it off to let the circuits clear. When you turn it on, programs run more efficiently and smoothly. This is exactly how the hard drive of your mind, the electrical pulses of your nervous system, and the hardware of your muscle and organ tissue are slowed down, cleared out, and reinvigorated by T’ai Chi and QiGong’s slow, contemplative breathing, motion, and visualization techniques.

OUCH!
Nearly one third of adult Americans have chronic high-blood pressure, while over 70 million suffer chronic sleep disorders. Medical research shows T’ai Chi and QiGong can help with both, which can also un-gnarl, or head off, many other related problems.

Just to give you an example of what a powerful health science T’ai Chi is, take a recent study from UCLA that showed T’ai Chi practitioners boosted their Helper T cell count by 50 percent over the control groups not practicing T’ai Chi. These T cells are the foundation of the immune system, consuming virus, bacteria, and even cancer cells. T’ai Chi profoundly boosted the practitioners’ immune system. You will be stunned to learn of the growing number of major health issues medical research is now showing T’ai Chi and QiGong can help with.

The next chapter covers some of those medical benefits. As mentioned before, T’ai Chi and QiGong are mind-body exercises. The mind-set that you approach them with will make all the difference in how effective the actual exercises are. So by knowing and believing that these tools work, you actually enhance their effectiveness. But before moving on to that, let’s look at a couple of other life issues T’ai Chi and QiGong can help with—beginning with career success.

T’ai Chi and QiGong for Career Enhancement

You should show this book to your company’s human resources wellness director—especially Chapter 20, “T’ai Chi as Corporate Wellness”—for it is estimated that U.S. business is losing upwards of $300 billion per year due to employee stress (that’s $7,500 per employee per year). You may be able to get your company to spring for T’ai Chi and QiGong classes at your workplace. It’ll save them money and make the work environment so much more pleasant. Trust me, I was an HR administrator for years before becoming a T’ai Chi teacher full time. I finally made the decision to spend my life teaching people tools to manage stress, rather than expending all my energy refereeing internal stress-driven squabbles between edgy employees.

T’ai Chi and QiGong can also help you advance your career. While that may sound like a stretch, as your practice expands over coming months, you’ll quickly realize that we don’t practice T’ai Chi and QiGong to get better at T’ai Chi and QiGong—we practice to become better at everything.

Here’s an example. At the time I began learning T’ai Chi and QiGong I had no real training or education in business, for I’d been an art major in school. My first serious job after college was as an entry-level temporary office clerk who went from company to company entering data at very low pay. But my practice of these meditative arts had so de-stressed me that I became a much more affable person to be around. It was because of this that one of the companies where I temped hired me on as their 401k/payroll administrator, dramatically boosting my salary, and getting me out of a cubicle and into a corner office with a window. With zero business background, I was nevertheless hired for this administrator position over all the accounting clerks in the department, simply because of being more enjoyable to be around. T’ai Chi and QiGong then helped me manage the enormous stress of learning in a few weeks what these people had spent years preparing for, and I did it successfully, doing payroll, related taxes, and managing retirement funds for five international corporations for several years! These powerful stress-reduction tools very literally changed my life!

We tend to think of “professionals” as very analytical people who check every detail on our resumé, etc., to find the most highly qualified people to employ. But the real world is filled with real human beings who much prefer spending their days around those that they can enjoy working with.

Of course, you need to be competent as well, which you definitely are, or you wouldn’t be reading a book meant to improve your life and make you more efficient. While your mental and emotional flexibility and affability is an enormous part of getting that job you seek, T’ai Chi and QiGong will enable you to be effective at actually performing that job successfully, because the same loosening of the muscles, body, heart, and mind that makes you easier to get along with also makes you more creative and flexible in dealing with challenges.

Psychologists have written that T’ai Chi is a perfect microcosmic working model for understanding how we handle the macrocosm of our lives. As you learn T’ai Chi, you quickly realize that the more you breathe and release all your tight efforts to learn, the more easily your mind and body can absorb information. As you learn how to relax into the learning of T’ai Chi, you are also discovering how to relax into learning new computer programs or changing business systems, and so on.

Multi-Tasking: Meditation, Fitness, and Massage

Meditation is a powerful health and self-improvement tool. There are many wonderful forms of meditative practices. However, T’ai Chi and QiGong offer something no other meditations, other than perhaps yoga, do—a physical-ization of the meditative state. Several meditations use a repeated word or phrase, known as a chant or a mantra, to keep the mind occupied enough not to worry or wander, but simple enough so that the mind can transcend analytical thought, and sink into a deeper alpha brain-wave state of mind. Chinese masters over all these many centuries have evolved a “physical meditation” system that uses the “pleasure sensations” of our body as the mantra. In our fast-paced lives, to get the benefits of meditation while also getting physical fitness benefits can be a huge time-saver.

Now, there are standing or sitting forms of QiGong meditation that don’t involve movement (see Chapter 9), but even those use this physical-awareness mantra to focus the mind and clear the heart. Using these still forms can greatly enhance your moving practices by cultivating a deep inner awareness of your state of mind and physical sensations. As you delve into these practices, you will discover that emotional and mental blocks or discomforts also have a physical sensation related to them, and as you utilize the powerful threefold combination of breathing, visualization, and gentle motion to relax and untangle the physical sensations, the mental and emotional issues beneath them will also begin to dissipate.

As you relax into these gentle forms of movement, your internal relaxed awareness becomes like a massaging of all the 50 trillion cells of your being, as you let your center move your bones, causing your relaxed muscles to be massaged by the motion. This may sound too good to be possible, and it’s really impossible to convey in words. You’ll just have to dive into it. You’ll feel benefits right away, but this will expand for a lifetime as you continue your T’ai Chi or QiGong journey.

Styles of T’ai Chi

There are many T’ai Chi styles, and even more subsets of those styles, and many QiGong styles. As a beginner, finding a teacher who is right for you is more important than pursuing any given style. The question often arises, “How do I know if a T’ai Chi or QiGong class or teacher is a good one?” This author’s stock answer is this: if you feel better after class than you did when you went in, then it’s a good one. Those who dive into these arts often find they want to try many styles and teachers, and Appendix A will help you connect with teachers worldwide of all different styles.

OUCH!
Although most styles of T’ai Chi are slow, some are faster and more demanding, and all can be modified. So if you have physical limitations, talk to your prospective teacher to learn how to make T’ai Chi accessible to your condition. T’ai Chi should always feel good.

Most (but not all) of the main T’ai Chi styles reflect the family names of who created them: Yang, Kuang Ping Yang, Chen, Wu, Sun, Wu Hao, and Mulan styles are among the more common styles.

The Chen style was the original style of T’ai Chi, founded by Chen Chang-hsing. The Yang style was founded by Yang Lu-chan, who studied under the original T’ai Chi master Chen Chang-hsing. The Kuang Ping Yang style (exhibited in the Long Form in Chapter 13) was brought to the United States by Kuo Lien-ying, who studied under Yang Pan-hou, son of the Yang style founder. The Wu style was founded by Wu Quan-yu, student of the originator of the Yang style and his son. The Sun style was developed by Sun Lu-t’ang. The Mulan Quan (Chapters 14, 15, and 16) is the only major old style that was created by a woman master, Sifu Mei Fing Ying, although since there have been other great women masters who’ve created styles.

Years ago I saw T’ai Chi history being made when I attended the International T’ai Chi Symposium at Vanderbilt University. Six grandmasters, descendants of the original Chinese T’ai Chi creators, came together and stated that “all” T’ai Chi styles offer the same benefits when done properly. This was a testament to the non-contending humanity T’ai Chi cultivates in practitioners, to see these men who one would have thought might see one another as “competitors,” embracing the value and wisdom of each other, and considering the other style grandmasters as “compatriots” with one common goal—expanding world health.

Authors Bill Douglas and Angela Wong-Douglas met with the six grandmasters of the major T’ai Chi styles at the International T’ai Chi Symposium at Vanderbilt University, all direct descendants of the Yang, Wu, Chen, and Sun family styles.
(Photo courtesy of Rod Ferguson, Australian Academy of T’ai Chi.)

If you aren’t excited yet about your new or continuing T’ai Chi and QiGong journey, you should be. Think about it. This is pretty heady stuff: increasing your personal power on many levels, and cleansing your mind and heart of stress; boosting your health and mental acuity to become more creative and effective at everything you do, and doing all of this with just one easy, low-impact exercise system. Whether you are a rank beginner, a long-time enthusiast, or even a teacher, the profound depth and breadth of T’ai Chi & QiGong’s multidimensional benefits, when illuminated as they are in this book, can take your (or your students’) practice to a whole new level. Now, let’s further enhance your intellectual awareness of T’ai Chi and QiGong’s potential in the next chapter on T’ai Chi and QiGong as medical therapy.

The Least You Need to Know

Everyone can do T’ai Chi or QiGong.

T’ai Chi and QiGong are highly effective mental/emotional therapies.

T’ai Chi and QiGong are powerful performance enhancers: sports, business, and more.

T’ai Chi and QiGong are “medication in motion,” preventing or healing many health challenges.

T’ai Chi and QiGong should feel easy and good, without strain or pain.

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