Chapter

4

Finding Your Center—Feeling Your Center

In This Chapter

Usually we don’t think about being in or out of “center” until life is completely out of hand. Then we know we are out of it, but we’re still not sure what it is we’re out of. We often think we are just out of our minds.

Being in center reduces the melodrama in your life so you can focus more attention on the big stuff. Standing in the center means aligning your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual selves so you function at your very best, using everything you’ve got in everything you do.

T’ai Chi Walking: Practice Feeling Centered

Enjoy the following “T’ai Chi Walking” exercise, to understand the many intricate layers of the letting go, and sinking into here and now that permeates all T’ai Chi and QiGong forms regardless of which style they are.

Notice T’ai Chi Walking involves moving across the room, beginning with sinking into your left leg, then right, and so on.

Initial layer of T’ai Chi Walking:

1. Before beginning, think of your head being drawn up toward the sky, and your tailbone relaxing down, causing your spine to elongate. This will align your posture, because as the top of your head lifts up, it brings your chin in, so your head and posture is stacked up above the foot your weight is on. Too often we are leaning forward, always in a hurry to get somewhere else.

  Take a deep breath in, and on the sighing exhale, allow the weight of your body to relax down through your right leg into the earth below. Breathe in again, and as you exhale, let every cell of your being surrender, letting your shoulders sink down away from your neck. Enjoy the sense of being “right here and right now,” with nowhere to rush to.

2. Relax your body open to a deep, full breath, as you place your left heel out at a 45° angle (as in the first figure).

3. Now, as you exhale, let your weight sink downward into the left leg (second figure) as your pelvis and your upper body sink forward over the left leg and foot. Relax into this weight shift. Notice how your body remains stacked up above your foot, not leaning forward, aligned and loose. Repeat this process with your right foot out (third and fourth figures), and keep repeating across the floor.

Second layer of T’ai Chi Walking:

As you sink your weight forward onto the foot you are filling or moving over, feel the pads of the foot you are moving onto touch the floor or inner surface of your shoe. Notice how as you shift onto that foot, the pads of the toes, heel, and then entire foot spread as that foot is filled with the weight of your relaxed body.

Also, notice the opposite happening in the foot you are emptying or moving your weight off of. Don’t work at this, but just enjoy the sensations. Let the pleasure of sensation, breath, and motion expand through you.

Another layer of T’ai Chi Walking:

Feel how your movements are more effortless when your head stays posturally aligned over your pelvis or dan tien (more on this in Chapter 11). Feel your body deeply relaxing as you shift, or sink, forward into each foot (not leaning forward with your upper body, but letting your pelvis carry you over that foot as your body relaxes onto that leg). Enjoy the sensations of the body in motion.

As you practice breathing, relaxing, and staying aligned in your movements, not leaning forward, you’ll discover it will center and slow down your mind over time, and you will find yourself more “in the moment” enjoying the world within and around you. Leaning forward physically is an indication of the mind rushing forward to some other task, appointment, fear, or worry. Most of us will catch ourselves leaning forward a lot in our busy lives.

Always breathe with the tip of the tongue lightly touching the gums just behind the upper-front teeth, allowing your body to relax open to a full inhalation as you pick up your back foot and place the heel in front of you, and then exhaling as you relax your body and its weight onto that leg as you shift forward onto it. This is effortless, so don’t try; just enjoy the loosening of the body as it shifts from one leg to the other.

You will discover many other layers of inner awareness as you play with T’ai Chi or Zen Walking meditations over coming days, months, and years.

KNOW YOUR CHINESE

Take a few moments to view a video of T’ai Chi Walking in action at the Web Video Support’s T’ai Chi Walking. Note that the video is of T’ai Chi movements, so when Zen Walking your arms will just hang relaxed by your sides, not in motion as in the T’ai Chi forms. But the foot, leg, and body’s weight shifting is exactly the same as in these video excerpts.

This centering capability of T’ai Chi may seem spiritual, but it’s really a kind of science that understands that our mind, body, emotions, and spirit are all intertwined, and that if we integrate them through T’ai Chi practice, we become more powerful. If our body and mind work together to nurture our emotional and spiritual well-being rather than against each other, as they sometimes do, life may be less dramatic, but it will be much more fulfilling.

This chapter can make you an expert on what the center is. The Web Video Support’s Breath and Release Centers You also gives you an example of what is meant by centering here and now and letting go of out there. Then practicing the QiGong exercises in Part 3 and the T’ai Chi in Part 4 will further expand your awareness of “feeling” just how good being centered is.

T’ai Chi is a form of Zen meditation. A wonderful American interpretation of Zen philosophy is, “No matter where you go, there you are.” All the toys, trips, and movies in the world cannot take you away from yourself. T’ai Chi is about being right in the center of where you are right now rather than running from it.

T’ai Chi helps us stand right in the center of our lives by focusing our mind and body to release stress that blocks awareness of our spiritual nature and needs. When viewing the T’ai Chi Loosens Blocks on the Web Video Support, notice that the practitioners seem to be wholly immersed in loosening any rigid blocks their bodies may have accumulated throughout the day.

Often it seems that life is a merry-go-round, and we’re hanging on by our last fingernail as the demands of life pull at us with everything they’ve got. This is what being “out of center” refers to. When we are out there on the edge just trying to survive, we are not very creative. In fact, we often complicate our lives even more with various coping behaviors. Some people cope by overcharging their credit cards on compulsive spending. Others smoke compulsively or turn to alcohol or drugs. Still others become adrenaline junkies who can’t slow down and have to be doing something all the time. All these behaviors have one thing in common: they all distract us from the turmoil going on inside our own minds and hearts. T’ai Chi is like a Zen exercise. Zen is an art of being still, not running from problems but being here and now.

T’ai Chi slows us down inside and out. As our body begins to move more slowly, our breathing slows down. As we hear our breathing slow, our mind begins to ride on the rhythm of that relaxed breath, letting go bit by bit of the storming thoughts of the day. As the mind calms, it has a resonant effect on the heartbeat, the blood pressure, and the body’s healing systems. On some level, we begin to realize we are not in a state of mortal danger after all, which is a state that our ancient fight-or-flight response produces in us. It is this response more than the world around us that makes life seem like it is spinning way out of control. Notice on the Web Video Support’s T’ai Chi Breathing Slows the World the practitioners’ look of calm centeredness, as though life’s rushing tendencies and storms are beyond them. T’ai Chi promotes that ability to refocus, to disengage, to give the mind and body opportunities to heal so they can tackle real-life problems.

A T’AI CHI PUNCH LINE

T’ai Chi Deprograms Antiquated Cellular Programming

We have all experienced feeling panicked by life much more often than we probably want to think about. This feeling is a product of the fight-or-flight reflex response. This reflex response is like an old memory held in the cells of our body, a cellular memory from our caveman and cavewoman days, when we were the grade-A prime rib for carnivorous creatures. We automatically respond to stress by breathing shallowly and tightening every muscle in our bodies so as not to be heard and to be ready to run like heck or bash the head of our would-be diner.

SAGE SIFU SAYS

How T’ai Chi Frees Us from Ancient Patterns

Our modern cells still think they live in a prehistoric world where mortal danger is everywhere. Our outdated response to stress often leaves us in a minor (or not-so-minor) panic at every red light, supermarket line, or computer glitch we encounter.

This response worked well back in the caveperson days because we really didn’t have many options. It does not, however, serve us very well today. Although sometimes the thought of either attacking the source of our anxiety or running away from it seems mighty appealing, it doesn’t bode well for our next job performance review:

Room for improvement: Bill should attempt to attack fewer co-workers this quarter, and an emphasis on not fleeing from customers is highly recommended.

T’ai Chi Enables Us to Function Effectively in the Modern World

On a cellular level, the fight-or-flight response is just as inappropriate. When we go into that mode, our heart pounds, blood pressure elevates, oxygen consumption increases, and blood lactate levels (anxiety levels) increase. If it happens often enough, it can actually cause our brain to shrink.

When we enter this state, the energy flowing through our body becomes very erratic, like a stormy sea. When we practice T’ai Chi and things begin to calm and center, our energy begins to flow more smoothly and evenly. The Chinese call this “smooth Qi.” Smooth Qi is a healthful state produced by doing T’ai Chi. It soothes our body and begins to soothe our mind as well. Some would say T’ai Chi actually starts calming the mind and then the body becomes calm. Either way, it’s a pretty helpful thing to be able to do. So these techniques actually de-program our cell memory so we can adapt to our modern world’s needs.

As you view the Web Video Support’s T’ai Chi’s Physical Smoothness Reflects Emotional and Mental Grace, you will feel a sense of progress with your T’ai Chi and Qigong learning and practice. It is difficult to describe, but watching it can help.

Adrenaline Withdrawal

Many of us have actually become addicted to the feeling of anxiety, just like a cigarette smoker gets addicted to the energy level nicotine doses provide. So at first T’ai Chi or QiGong may cause you to feel drained.

If this happens to you, hang in there. You are going through an adrenaline withdrawal. As you continue to practice T’ai Chi and QiGong, you will eventually break through that wall of drowsiness and boredom. You will discover that you can have the best of both worlds. You will experience the relaxed energy that T’ai Chi unleashes within you as you find your center.

As the flow of Qi opens throughout your mind and body, you will have limitless energy, but without the edge. You will run with plenty of juice, but you will be attuned to when it’s time to rest, and you will be able to rest when it’s time. You’ll feel less and less need to be endlessly busy all the time, but you’ll have limitless energy for the truly important things in your life. Furthermore, the calmness that T’ai Chi fosters will grant you the wisdom to know which activities are important and which are not.

Today is a good day to get off adrenaline and get to the real juice. Breathe, breathe some more, and do T’ai Chi.

T’AI SCI

Demystifying What Makes a T’ai Chi Master

T’ai Chi and martial arts abound with myths of superhuman feats performed by masters who defy physical reality. These feats may be true; some masters have been known to break bricks with their heads.

These performances are compelling demonstrations of the power of internal effortlessness and focus. Often, however, these bizarre demonstrations are a distraction from the real point of these wonderful tools. You are as unlikely to be attacked by a brick as by another person. However, what we are all attacked by every day is stress—often caused by our effort to grip control in a chaotic world.

What T’ai Chi and QiGong offer us is much more miraculous than the ability to break bricks: they help us understand ourselves and how we fit in the world. They make us masters of our own destiny instead of victims of circumstance. Of course, real masters understand that we are never in control, but merely co-pilots of our destiny. However, a co-pilot is preferable to and more powerful than being an unwitting passenger on this first-class ride we call life.

Overcoming Unconscious Issues Affecting Conscious Actions

Does it seem like life is one surprise after another? Look again. Our physical bodies are the manifest part of who we are. Our thoughts are the unmanifest part of us that creates our body. So our bodies are like reflections of our mind. Our thoughts are energy that triggers feelings or emotions, and that actually changes our physical body. These emotions turn the energy of thoughts into physical responses, just as chronic worry can create ulcers.

Thoughts change our bodies through the communication of emotions. Put simply, our mind in some ways creates our body.

T’AI SCI

One of the fascinating things QiGong shows us is that the thoughts we are aware of are actually just reflections of what goes on inside us on even deeper levels. Most of our consciousness is subconscious, or below the surface of our awareness. Our thoughts and emotions, and our physical bodies, are results or reflections of an even deeper part of us. That deeper part is the unmanifest part of ourselves. QiGong and T’ai Chi’s ability to connect us to that deeper, unmanifest part of ourselves is a potent self-improvement tool.

Imagine that our lives are like a big, clear glass of sparkling water. If you stand up and look down into it, you see only the bubbles bursting up into the air from the surface. This represents the manifest, or obvious, part of life. From this angle, you don’t see the deep liquid below that formed these bubbles.

As we experience events in our lives, we are seeing only the bubbles popping up from the surface, not what formed them. These emerging bubbles may take the form of successes or recurring problems. Perhaps we go from one bad relationship to another or constantly fight with our kids.

However, T’ai Chi meditation, and especially QiGong meditation, lets us sit down and look at the water in the “glass of life” from the side, enabling us to see the source of the bubbles. From that angle, we can see that those bubbles, or events of our lives, actually form way down below the surface. This is the unmanifest, or unconscious, part of life.

So our quiet meditations place us sitting on the side, observing the true depth of life. Here we see that experiences are really end results rather than big surprises. Events in our lives are actually results of patterns or habits we have below the level of what we usually see and feel. We set ourselves up for success or failure by how we think of ourselves every day. If we think of ourselves as valuable human beings capable of success, then we’re much more likely to form bubbles that pop on the surface of our lives in the form of success stories.

Likewise, if we continually think of ourselves as bad or worthless, we will probably create bubbles to reflect that worthlessness in the form of relationship problems. If on some deep, unconscious level we believe that we are unworthy of support, we will attract people into our lives who will reinforce that reality. Pop, pop, pop. Seeing only the pops makes us feel like victims of life. (See the Web Video Support’s Sitting QiGong exercise for a personal experience of this deeper awareness. Appendix C describes other effective Sitting QiGong techniques available.)

Becoming a Master Entails Not Being a Victim

Being a T’ai Chi or QiGong master means we are no longer content to remain ignorant of the unmanifest part of life. However, it’s not enough just to know that our responses and actions in life have deeper roots. We have to find ways to change the patterns that form those bubbles way down below the surface of our lives. T’ai Chi and QiGong can help us do this. By quieting our minds and bodies, they can enable us to feel inside where we hurt or hate. By feeling the source inside, we can begin to let it go. For example, if we have a grudge or unresolved hatred in our hearts, we may walk around with a chip on our shoulders. The world will quickly give us confirmation of that grudge or hatred because people we meet will seem cold to us as we greet everyone with the chip on our shoulders, which makes us seem cold to them.

By being more aware of the dynamics of our lives, we feel less like victims. We can begin to affect our world more clearly.

As our lives become less cluttered with bubbles of discord, there is more room for a limitless flow of life energy or Qi to course through us. We become a geyser, watering and nurturing everyone and everything lucky enough to be around us.

T’ai Chi and QiGong’s daily pattern of reminding us that we can change with ease, and feel safe in the world without constant muscle-tensing apprehension, is a powerful tool. Sometimes it seems as though the body literally squeezes past burdens within each and every cell. T’ai Chi’s ability to allow the body to release those burdens held from the past so each cell can fill with and be nurtured by life energy is a powerful way to affirm that we are worthy of success and love. On levels deeper than we can ever understand, T’ai Chi’s easy and pleasant tools help create bubbles in the deepest part of our hearts and minds that burst outward and upward in lives that reflect our very best potential. Cheers, Master! Yeah, that’s you.

OUCH!

Overcome Nature with Nurture

As discussed earlier, the six leading causes of death are stress related. Because stress is something we can control by practicing T’ai Chi and QiGong, using these tools means we can powerfully affect our future in a positive way.

We all are born with genetic tendencies to a certain height or weight, or for some, diabetes or heart disease. Our genes give us those tendencies. However, we can play a big role in how those genes play out. If we drink or smoke heavily and ignore a healthful diet, we can help increase the possibility of the onset of diabetes and heart disease, while likely stunting our growth and expanding our waistline.

On the other hand, we have been lucky enough to live in an age when T’ai Chi and QiGong are available to nurture us to perhaps avoid some of what nature has planted in our cellular structure. We have the ability to put an eternal ace up our sleeve, which heavily stacks the odds in our favor to live long, healthful, productive lives.

My T’ai Chi classes for children always began with one simple question: “Can you feel the inside of your bodies?” With little hands pressing into tiny rib cages, their puzzled faces usually answered no. My next question was, “Have you ever felt a stomachache or a headache?” Obviously, they all had.

T’ai Chi and QiGong are about moving the body, but they are also about feeling the body from the inside. We can feel pain inside, so we can also feel pleasure. Awareness of these feelings enables us to detect normal or abnormal function at a very early stage. By becoming attuned to our internal function, by quieting down, moving slowly, and listening to the signals inside our body, we tune our T’ai Chi antennae. We become conscious of our heartbeat and our respiration rate. The T’ai Chi players in the T’ai Chi exhibitions on the Web Video Support are obviously enjoying the sensations of effortless movement, which provides the added benefit of an internal scan throughout their bodies, alerting them to problem areas long before they would be if they were sedentary, and perhaps before they would be with more stressful exertion exercises.

OUCH!

What amazes most people is that we can affect our heart rate and respiration rate by using some simple QiGong methods to become aware of them. But this is only the beginning. In my children’s T’ai Chi classes, I asked children how it felt when they got nervous in school or were in trouble. They described feelings of “tight shoulders,” “tight hearts,” “tight chests,” “hard to breathe,” and so on. I asked them to make themselves feel that way, having them clench their shoulders and tighten their chests. Then I asked them to take in a deep breath and to let their chest and shoulders relax like a cloud floating in the sky on the exhale. I asked them to close their eyes and repeat this until they could feel their shoulders and chest relaxing and expanding from the inside.

Try it. Pull your shoulders way up by your ears until your shoulders are very tight and you can feel that tension. Tighten all your head muscles as well, and feel that tension. Now take a deep breath, close your eyes, and let go of everything as you release the breath; feel every cell of your body releasing that breath—absolute effortlessness, absolute letting go on a cellular level. Feel how good that release feels in your shoulder and back muscles, and how with every breath you let out, they relax a little more. Enjoy the tingling as blood and Qi flow back into those areas.

Our body is a playground of sensation. T’ai Chi exercises and QiGong methods are games we can play in that playground. It’s fun, and it makes us healthy. What a deal!

SAGE SIFU SAYS

T’ai Chi Can Affect the World Around Us

As you practice T’ai Chi daily, you begin to find that it has an effect on the world around you, not just the world inside your body. Shao Lin folklore spoke of T’ai Chi masters being invisible. That may have referred to the way their nonabrasive personalities enabled them to blend in unnoticed. For example, if two men walk into the same bar, one pushy and ill-tempered and the other very unassuming, the bar will be more dangerous for the ill-tempered man.

T’ai Chi and QiGong can help us focus our view of the world. Look out your window. Do you see a tree, the sky, traffic, smog? Move your chair until all you see is the most pleasing aspect of what your window offers you. Each time you take a break from your work, resume this position and enjoy the view.

Our lives are our minds looking through a window at the world. At any given time, we can see the best our world can be or the worst it can be. In fact, the state of our world has as much or perhaps even more to do with where we are as it does with where the world is. Two people can look at the same situation and see two entirely different things. For example, one person could look at a family and see a miracle she is blessed to be a part of, while another might look at the same situation and view it as a burden on her life, a prison she is sentenced to. In fact, the same person may see her life as either of those things on any given day.

After seeing our world from space, astronauts have experienced a dramatic change in the way they viewed life. They spoke of how precious life on Earth seemed from out there; even the things we think of as annoying—the arguments, the traffic—seemed so precious from outer space.

T’ai Chi and QiGong give us a view adjustment. We begin to notice that the irritating things our children or co-workers do are often irritating because of the way we look at them. With T’ai Chi and QiGong, we get to pull back and remember how precious each moment is. What could be more helpful? This doesn’t mean life is a bowl of cherries and that we don’t ever have to enact changes to get our needs met. But you’ll discover that as these tools help you become calmer and clearer, those conflicts that do arise can be handled more fruitfully and more often in ways that can benefit everyone involved.