HEALING AND MARTIAL ARTS BLOG

There is a battle going on inside of us for control of the body’s posture. Our instincts urge us to posture our bodies for maximum efficiency and health. Our emotions try to express themselves through the body’s posture.

So if we try to push in the push hands exercise, our emotions tell us to expand the upper body and rise up so as to express power as we would imagine a muscle bound weight lifter to have power. Yet that is not an efficient posture for pushing because we would be top heavy and tense.

When I correct a posture in a Tai-chi form I have to take into account all the emotional expressions that control the body. Each part of the body is in an emotional relationship with all the other parts and as a whole, the body expresses very complex emotions.

If I were to correct only one part of the body the student would feel very awkward because he is used to a particular configuration of expression and now, one element of that expression is in the “wrong” position. So at the beginning the student doesn’t appreciate the corrections because he is still judging his posture by how well it expresses his emotions.

I have to correct as much of the emotional control of the body as possible to give the student an appreciation of how beautifully the body is designed and how good it feels to be in the natural, “neutral” postural position.

I taught a group of physical therapy students a few days ago. This workshop that I give every year gives the students a different perspective of how to bring a patient’s body back to a healthy state. While a physical therapist only works on the physical level, they have to deal with all the emotions of their patients as well. Sometimes that is the greatest challenge.

My ending point in that workshop is that in order to be effective in dealing with the patients, the therapist has to be comfortable in his or her own body. If your mind, body and emotions are not connected, balanced and centered, then your patients will certainly not feel comfortable with you and you will not be able to connect with them. Learning something like Tai-chi or Zookinesis can be a very valuable aid in working with physical therapy patients.

We also discuss how the way be breathe, walk and do other everyday activities can either help our physical condition or deteriorate our bodies. By understanding Tai-chi principles, you can make suggestions to improve these everyday activities to strengthen the patient in general. In this way you will not only be helping the particular condition they came in with but help to prevent other problems in the future.

Unfortunately, most physical therapy practices only give ten or fifteen minutes to each patient, certainly not really as much time as they need. But due to economic considerations, many practices just try to get as many people through the door each day as possible.
A good physical therapist would suggest that a patient get involved in a more thorough practice of exercise once their physical therapy sessions are over. This is why some schools of physical therapy expose their students to several exercise modalities so they can make intelligent suggestions to their patients once they are in their own practice.

The physical therapist may not directly address all the dynamics of a patient’s condition because they are only licensed to correct a physical problem in a physical way. But in a Tai-chi class (or Yoga or Pilates or Zookinesis class), it is more informal. You can work on many levels at the same time and explain how a human being works on all these levels in an integrated way. Tai-chi practice is not limited by law to only fixing a physical problem in a physical way.

I believe that our modern day culture makes us a foreigner to our own bodies and disrupts the integration of body, mind and emotions. It makes sense that we fix the fundamental problem with our health and not just patch up the symptoms as they pop up as in the “whack a mole” game. Many people get involved in Tai-chi practice because of health problems. They know that Tai-chi can improve general health and put them back on a path of general health recovery.

We hear that Tai chi exercise is much more healing than other types of exercise. It strengthens the internal organs, makes you more flexible, improves the flow of blood, lymph and intercellular fluid, improves the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the lungs, sharpens your attention and strengthens your immune system. How can a simple exercise do all that?

We hear that it has something to do with improving the flow of “chi” energy but for most of us, that means little. The idea of chi is not part of Western culture and we don’t have a feel for what it means. In the almost 40 years of teaching Tai chi and Zookinesis (a type of chi-gung exercise) I have found ways to explain how these exercises work beyond the benefits of other exercises and offer an explanation below:

We modern people pride ourselves in being somehow superior to animals. We think great thoughts. Our behavior is not controlled by instinct. We feel that our superiority is demonstrated by our technology. We have advanced drugs and surgery that save lives.

Yet our general health and feeling of well-being may not be superior to people of older times. In fact our world is filled with emotional stress and chemicals, which stress the body biologically. Heart attacks and other heart disease strikes earlier and earlier in life and the rate of cancer has greatly increased.

How does Tai-chi strengthen the body’s health and calm our emotions so we are resistant to stress? I have proposed in my writings and classes a simple theory that can make the logic behind Tai chi and Zookinesis more understandable.

In our modern world our basic instincts are almost irrelevant. We don’t live in natural surroundings for the most part and our instincts have been molded by natural environments. So we now rely on our minds, which tell us how to work our devices and how to tell time so we won’t show up for work late. This requires a subduing of natural instinct which hasn’t had time to evolve to function in the world of computers, cars and cell phones.

Yet our bodies still have to function biologically. The molecules and cells within our bodies aren’t controlled by computers. In fact, the entire body is a sort of biological computer, with its trillions of molecules all containing a kind of information as to how to function and adapt to varying situations within the body.

If the thinking mind imposes its patterns on the body’s functioning, there is a conflict. The body has to function one way in order to be healthy but the mind is sending signals into the body to behave quite differently.

With instinct the information in the biological computer moves upwards to control the organism and make it behave in order to achieve maximum health. With the thinking mind the control moves downwards to subdue the body and even its biochemical activity.

When we practice Tai chi, especially in the push hands exercise, we have to yield our attention to the body. We train each muscle and joint to respond with ease, precision and intention. At the beginning this requires the thinking mind (to learn our forms or the principles of push hands, for example). But then our minds have to let the body go and the movement of attention must be from the body’s individual body parts upward to the organism as a whole. The thinking mind could not possibly process all this information in real time.

We get to such a degree of precision that the decisions of movement are not made by a muscle as a whole, but rather, each nerve energizing a part of the muscle must act independently so that the muscle contracts in a wave. The smaller and smaller you can get in this precision the better. But even more importantly, you need to allow each tiny part to “make its own decisions”. If you are still making those decisions in your head, you counteract the precision of the body.

But, you might ask, if the thinking mind is not controlling all these precise movements, then what is? Now we get to the question of “chi”. The experience of chi is that of a communications system other than the thinking mind, nervous or endocrine system, that coordinates all this activity.

The real secret of chi is that it is a conscious energy that works from the level of the very small, upward into the body as a whole. Unless we cultivate this “chi consciousness” (known as “Body-Mind”), the body loses its precision – not just in practicing a form, but in staying healthy in general. The movement of consciousness from the tiny to the large must not be dampened by the movement of consciousness from the large (the mind, the feeling of ourselves as an identity) to the small.

To allow the movement of consciousness in both directions allows us to remain intelligent and also healthy. Each movement of the Tai chi forms or the Zookinesis exercises and each principle of movement of push hands, promotes this upward movement of consciousness, that is, of course, if it is done correctly.

Simply memorizing a Tai-chi form or pushing someone will not have this beneficial effect. Only a legitimate teacher can explain and teach you how to practice Tai-chi in the proper way that promotes this healing effect. This is why even teachers keep learning from other teachers to understand the best ways to practice their Tai chi to promote this effect.

Few people in modern times have experienced the upward movement of consciousness emanating from within each part of the body, let alone how this movement of consciousness is completely connected to the natural environment. When you live in a simple and natural way you soon can feel how the cycles of nature promote similar cycles within your body, which then promotes adaptive behavior on the chemical level and on the level of how you live your life day to day. You feel very connected to your environment.

The disconnected way we live our lives now leads not only to poor health, but also to a feeling of isolation, which then reverberates into the fabric of our society. We do not feel as connected to other people or other living things. That disconnection leads us to order our society in such a way that we can easily ignore the suffering of others or of the earth.

Tai chi practice has the potential of transforming our society, our health and our happiness by restoring the natural flow of consciousness that rejoins us to the earth.

On our youtube channel “zookinesis49” I have a sample video of the “Native American Sacred Sweat Lodge Ceremony”. Several comments by Native Americans have expressed the view that this ceremony is only for Native Americans and other races should not be allowed to participate in this ceremony. This is my response to those comments.

I am a teacher of Tai-chi-Chuan. In my efforts to become a better teacher of this system I spent many years studying the teaching methods of traditional cultures. Each of these teaching methods had a common goal – to help the student become more aware of the world of spirit both within him/her and in the world as a whole. Each taught how to participate in the common spirit of humanity, with its many expressions.

While my goal was to specifically teach Tai-chi I realized that the other cultures I experienced had the same goal, although at the surface the paths to getting there were very different. Even different Tai-chi teachers have very different ways of expressing the same principles.

When you become more aware of your spiritual nature, you become more aware of the common bond of all humanity on that level. You tend to become more open to and appreciate the diversity of humanity. Anger towards those who express their humanity in different ways seems ridiculous.

There is a tendency in Tai-chi to just memorize forms or push hands techniques rather than to understand the underlying principles. In other cultures there is the tendency to emphasize the mechanics of a ceremony rather than the underlying spirit. (Not to say this is necessarily the case with those commenting on the Sweat Lodge video).

I understand the desire (and need) to maintain the individuality of one’s culture and the pride in one’s culture, but at some point, doesn’t the awareness of the common spirit of all people play a part in the practices?

Everyone who practices Tai-chi understands that it is of Chinese origin. No one thinks they are going to become Chinese by practicing Tai-chi. But people are attracted to this method for improving their health, their spiritual awareness and yes, their self defense. I don’t know of any Chinese person who says that only Chinese should be practicing Tai-chi.

When my Jewish family and friends have our Passover ceremonies, we welcome anyone to the ceremony. We don’t expect them to become Jewish but are happy just to share the tradition with others. Their participation increases our pride.

Both Native Americans and Jews faced a holocaust (although the Native Americans lost so many more millions) and I remember the anger my parents had towards the German people. But should a person of German descent want to participate in the Passover they would be judged as individuals – not on the basis of their background.

The teacher on the Sweat Lodge video is a close friend of mine of Indian background who loves his tradition so much that he shares it with others. His behavior is not guided by anger but by love and I believe that he has truly learned to express the principles of his Indian heritage in his everyday life.

Certainly those who have known him and who have joined him in his tradition have benefited greatly. Some have been “stopped in their tracks” in the sense that they have suddenly understood how our society’s way of conflict and aggression have affected their lives. And their lives have changed for the better.

Bill Elwell teaches with gentleness and humor. There is no pretense in any bone in his body. There is no reason to be angry with him.

Certainly most cultures in the world have experienced violence against them and it is anger that perpetuates the violent feelings, if not the violence itself.

Can we remember the common humanity that each tradition tries to teach us and not turn each tradition into another reason to separate ourselves from that common bond? There can be diversity AND unity.

I would suggest that the central conflict in our society is not between the many cultures, but between those who would destroy the earth for their individual profit and those who would protect the earth for all creatures. It is not so much about protecting tradition against “outsiders” but of all people protecting nature. If we fight each other and hide our wisdom from each other, how are we to have the wisdom and strength to protect the earth?

Many conflicts between cultures can be traced to small groups of people who profit off of that conflict. Let us not fall prey to that game! It is common, when an outsider visits a village, to “break bread” with that person; to offer them some of your food. Is the sharing of a ceremony any different?

When I approach a person I am looking for the qualities of his humanness. Is he nasty and violent or is he kind and relaxed? Is he comfortable with himself or is he filled with unease? If he is a beautiful human being I want to know him and will enjoy spending time with him.

When I see a ceremony I look for the same things. If it is a beautiful ceremony, expressing the best of the human spirit, I want to spend time with it. I don’t view a ceremony as a roll of money, to be hidden and kept away from others lest it be stolen. Its value to me is in what it expresses and how it leads us to our own humanity.

To those who have made comments on the Sweat Lodge video on youtube – do your practices lead you to your own humanity and to the connection of your humanity to our common bond?

I am putting together a dvd series on How to Teach Tai-chi. It will focus on the basic principles of Tai-chi form practice and how to convey those principles to the students. While someone may be skilled at a Tai-chi form, they may not be aware of the issues of teaching. I think this series will be helpful and may inspire people to dedicate themselves to teaching Tai-chi.

I like to say, “I’ve been around the block a few times”, meaning that at 64 years old and teaching for almost 40 years, I have become familiar with how to express Tai-chi to students in a way they can grasp and to appreciate their difficulties in learning.

First of all, each student comes to the class with his or her load of tensions, misalignments, emotional fears and mental programming. Tai-chi has to be taught to each individual differently, considering what they come in with. The teacher must develop methods to become aware of the state of the student in order to fashion a teaching approach for that student.

When you are teaching a group class and are correcting postures, for example, you have to remember what approach you are taking with each student as you move from one to the other. It is like playing multiple games of chess. You can’t make too many corrections at one time because the student will become frustrated and won’t remember what you did anyway. So you have to stick with a theme of correction (e.g. “relax the hips”) throughout the class, for that student.

You realize that the real benefit of Tai-chi training is not memorizing a form or chi-gung set, but that the student has worked through all of his or her issues, whether physical, mental or emotional and come out as a truly free and powerful individual. That is what the teacher should be going for, not just to teach people to memorize yet another thing.

The teacher must know how each principle of Tai-chi achieves that. While all the students will arrive at that same free, powerful state, they are each taking different paths through Tai-chi training. If you force them to take only the path you yourself learned, then they will never really learn.

And so you not only have to learn chi-gung, forms, push hands, fighting etc. to be a teacher; you also have to learn how to teach. You have to leave the limited path of your own journey to see the whole landscape and appreciate the many ways students can travel through it. In doing this, you gain a greater insight into the magnitude of the training itself and of the genius of the thousands of teachers who contributed to it.

I am a bit fearful of embarking on this project, which would include videos and writing, because I don’t really have the time for it. But I think it could make a positive contribution and will be worth pursuing even if I accomplish only a little of it.

In my book, “Movements of Power”, I introduced this subject in the last third of the book. I will also be putting up some videos about how to teach a Tai-chi form on our youtube channel “zookinesis49”. I would appreciate your comments about whether you think this will be a worthwhile project.

Breathe in and ignite the sun within your belly.
Breathe out to release its rays to join the sun in the sky and the earth below.
Center your breath and relax your body to the four directions.

Expect to receive energy from everything you see and feel.
Leave space inside of you for that energy to move.
Allow the energy to continue on in its journey.

The breathing process is essential to understand in order to promote healing. Proper breathing organizes the posture and functioning of the entire body.

When you breathe in the diaphragm pulls downward. This inflates the lungs. When we practice Tai-chi, this pulling down of the diaphragm towards the feet not only aligns the body, but also provides some of the power of the movements. Breathing in requires relaxation of the abdominal muscles, which then promotes the relaxation and sinking of the entire upper body. As the neck and shoulders relax, the head can sit comfortably in its position. Breathing becomes easy and full.

The downward pull of the diaphragm also coincides with the broadening of the bottom of the foot through relaxation. As the foot relaxes and the diaphragm presses down, this creates a pressure that connects the feet to the ground. This and the general relaxation of each joint and muscle create the “root” that makes your stance solid yet your body loose and flexible.

Each in-breath creates a pulse of downward pressure into the root, which creates a wave of energy through the body upward. It is important to maintain the downward pressure even while the wave of energy moves upwards or else the wave will pull you out of your own root.

As your diaphragm pulls down, the lungs fill up from the bottom first, and only towards the end of the breathing in do the upper lungs fill. If you fill up the upper lungs too early you stop the downward pressure and the whole process of generating the wave of energy.

Imagine that your lower abdomen is a clamshell and that as you breathe in the lower part of the clamshell opens downward and presses into the ground. The breath then flows forward (as you are still breathing in) out of the opening in the clamshell.

Advanced Tai-chi students learn to breathe precisely so that the way the diaphragm presses down varies in order to create certain effects in posture and movement. In this way the form and push hands are really controlled from the abdominal area downward with the upper body just responding to the dynamics of that area. The result is that an intricate complex of “waves of energy” are created to give the form more substance and to make the push hands more effective.

Unfortunately most of our attention is in our heads and it is difficult for us to work with the dynamics in the lower area of our bodies because that area is “so far away”. So we say that you have to “live in your legs and pelvic area”. This means that your attention is not stuck in your head but can fill the lower area and operate from that area. The lower area of your body becomes the “home” of the attention just as much as your head is its home now.

For most people the attention is stuck in one location like a king sitting on a throne. In order to achieve the high level of health and awareness required in Tai-chi, the attention has to be able to move and flow just as the body moves and flows. The attention must be like water, not like a king on a throne. Achieving this change can be frightening. We are so used to the attention being frozen in place that we usually cannot even imagine it moving. Yes, we can pay attention to one thing and then to another, but the “seat” of the attention remains frozen.

This frozen attention then freezes the entire body down to the organ and cellular level and inhibits the activity on those levels. When we practice Tai-chi the fluidity of the body influences the fluidity of the mind and the fluidity of the mind releases the body.

It all starts with understanding Tai-chi breathing (natural breathing) and its role in “melting” the frozen mind and body. This can only be accomplished by working with a competent teacher. Make sure that your teacher understands these principles so that your Tai-chi practice will be truly a healing experience.

I am going through my old archival footage and finding gems of Tai-chi masters demonstrating their skills. The videos are going up on our youtube.com channel which is called zookinesis49. Plug in zookinesis49 into the search bar.

Here is an example of my teacher, William Chen, performing his Yang style form with voice over. It is very old footage and the video quality is not the best. But it is really worth watching.

The Tao Te Ching is one of the formative books of the philosophy of Taoism. Written by Li Ehr (Lao Tsu) in the 6th century BC, this little book of 81 paragraphs provides a mysterious and poetic view of this naturalistic way of life.

The first paragraph states:
The Tao that can be told
Is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
Is not the eternal Name
(translation by Stephen Mitchell)

This paragraph can help us to gain greater skill in our Tai-chi forms and push hands practice. It suggests a way of “knowing” that is different than memorizing facts. This little book points us in the direction of a depth of awareness that lies beneath our normal way of perceiving and analyzing. In Norse mythology this same substrate of awareness is called “The Underworld” and the “Tree of Life” is what connects the deeper, surface and higher levels of awareness.

When you begin to learn Tai-chi you have no choice but to use your programmed mind (thinking mind) to memorize movements and principles. You feel that if you can do all the movements in the proper order and write down all the principles, then you have learned Tai-chi.

But there is still more to learn. The purpose of Tai-chi practice is to lead you to the deeper level of awareness and to understand the nature and dynamics of consciousness. The exercises are just a means to an end. Without full access to this deeper substrate of awareness you don’t have your full power in life.

At a certain point in your practice you must be willing to “not know”, that is, to allow the intelligence of your body to take over the movements and let the “head” (thinking process) to just sit there and not get involved. At first the student feels that if he lets his head just “sit there” he will not be able to function. How can he exert his intention without thinking?

There is a different type of intention possible that is organic. It is like dropping a pebble into a still lake. The ripples emanate from the initial action (of the pebble). Feel your belly area as the still lake and your tensions and thinking as the pebble. Drop the pebble into the lake and then do your Tai-chi form or push hands. At every moment your movements should come from dropping pebbles into the lake.

This means that the grabbing, tense, unsatisfied mind ceases to “claw at the world” and just takes a break. This frees up a lot of energy for the natural mechanisms of the body to work. If we claw at the world our perceptions are limited to what we are grasping for. When we give up grasping, then we can really see what is going around us and inside of us.

“Naming” in the paragraph of the Tao Te Ching refers to the tendency to making the world we perceive conform to the world we expect. I call this, “The Echo of Expectations”. (What you see of a reflection of what you expect to see). Your body activities, down to the cellular level, then conform to your expectations rather than to your perceptions. You are locked into what you “know” (the story you tell yourself about what is going on). Your world becomes small and your ability to react appropriately becomes limited.

And so Tai-chi practice is a process of “not knowing”, i.e., being willing to not control every movement with the thinking process but to remain in the feeling mode, to participate in life and allow yourself to “not know” where that will take you. Your attention should be within the action, not in the head looking down at the action.

And then you find that you are now outside of a cage you didn’t even know you were in, a cage of “knowing”, of “naming”.

The concept of “Individual Consciousness” or “Individual Tao” in Tai-chi theory is very important to understand in order to practice properly. Individual consciousness is like a wave in the ocean, from origin to its end on the beach. Universal consciousness is the ocean.

If you can detect the universal consciousness within yourself, you will understand the point of view that there is no real birth and death. Waves flow across the ocean all day and night yet the ocean is not depleted by this action.

When we grab for things, ideas or even for an imagined perfect emotional state, we are like the wave, racing to reach the beach. In meditation we are like the calm sea.

When we practice our Tai-chi form we sustain a wave of momentum through our bodies. It may change angles, circle around in different directions, sink into the earth and rise into the heavens, but its course is even and steady. In this way the momentum of the form is like a wave in its movements and like the calm ocean in its slow steadiness and depth.

When our daily interactions are fully intricate and effective yet not rushed, we have brought the principles of Tai-chi into our lives. We can enjoy the things in our lives without desperately grasping. We can appreciate each experience no matter how simple.

Recognize your identity as the life force of nature and you will be able to let go of fear. When you let go of fear no one can manipulate you. Even your habits of tension and patterns of thoughts won’t be able to control you. You will become creative and be able to appreciate beauty more deeply.

This meditation helps you to stay centered, relaxed and energized.

Breathe into the belly, gradually opening up the palms and flexing the feet and slowly looking slightly upwards as you widen your eyes. At the end of the inbreath, continue the breath into the upper area of the lungs, so that now both the belly and chest is expanded.

On the outbreath, slowly relax the palms and feet, slowly looking slightly downward, relaxing the eyes, and concentrating on your tan-tien (the area about one and a half inches below the navel, in the center of the body).

Repeat four to six times. This exercise also helps cleanse you of stagnant energy. It can be done standing or sitting.