Taijipedia

This is something of a shameless plug, I do Taiji for back pain. That’s the main reason why I do it, and why I’ll carry on practising. Not having to live stabbing pains and terrible stiffness in my lumbar region is all I do Taiji for. Back pain is an affliction of modern times. If you’ve not suffered from back pain, you’ll probably know someone who has.

So, in this video post we cover the most common causes of back pain, why poor posture causes problems and say why it happens, but more importantly how the simple act of relaxation and the retraining of your back muscles into good habits can fix it. You can use almost any method to get your back to relax, lying on a wooden floor, going to a bodywork professional or chiropractor. We’re Taiji people so we recommend doing Taiji for back pain.

Now, the easiest thing to do is to just do Standing Meditation. Standing practise is very easy to do, but ruthlessly effective at getting you and your back to relax. You can find the first lesson on Standing Meditation here.  Standing is very effective at getting your back to start relaxing.  It’s what I started doing to fix my back as it’ll start the process of making your body aware of the misalignments and start re-training your back to hold itself correctly.

Or you could learn the Yang Taiji 24 Form.  It’s a dinky little form that ‘s easy to learn.  This will gently flex and stretch your back and stop it from stiffening up again, so it’s a good “maintenance” thing to do.  Tai Chi instruction on the form can be found here

OK, the first slightly tricky bit in the Taijiquan form.  This next lesson on the Yang Taiji 24 is structured as a  “Watch Me, Follow Me, Show Me” lesson as two separate videos, as we promised in the TWBI post.

In the spirit of keeping this as simple as possible, we’ve left the footwork detail to the next lesson so we don’t pack too much information into one lesson.  If  this is all new to you, or even if it’s not try out the learning technique on this Taijiquan posture.

The Watch Me Bit

The Follow Me Bit

The Show Me Bit

For this bit, you can practise quietly by yourself or if you feel adventurous, film yourself and send us a clip.  We’d love to see how you’re getting on.

This little Taiji video clip was almost a blooper, but repeating the “Watch Me, Follow Me, Show Me” drives a good point home.  If you’re trying to learn Tai Chi online from our videos or from a DVD or other video, this little tip is something we think is going to really help you.

This model for learning movement is effective, and I have it on good authority that they use this method to teach Olympic gymnasts new moves.  As far as movement goes, gymnastics is pretty difficult, and to top it all off, you can’t break down a Geinger, Tkatchev into a straddle handstand and teach it by the count.  You kinda got to teach those things as complete movements.  Gymnasts can only watch, then try the whole movement, however complex it is, and it works for them.

So if this method can be used to teach gymnastics, it’ll be all the more powerful where you can break a movement down into a count, like in Tai Chi. Online videos on this site all have counts to them so it should make the process easier.

So we’ve structured this week’s lesson as a “Watch Me, Follow Me, Show Me” session, you can find it here.

If you already know this transition, I’d urge you to watch the lessons anyway to see for yourself how the method works, or you could check out some movement you don’t know and apply the principle to learn it

If anyone out there is following our videos and learning Tai Chi online, we’d love to hear from you! We’d love to see how you’re getting on.

This question came in from one of our students of Tai Chi online. They asked “What is Chi?”

Taijiquan, Bagua, Xingyi and all of the interal arts are riddled with references to “chi”, or qi, ki, prana and so on. Now, this esoteric and fiddly thing that everyone calls “Chi” is many things, it’s an energetic phenomenon, a concept of life-force amongst other things.

Chi is a big part of Tai Chi, online searches for this will give you lots of different answers for what it is, and this confusion is something we’re going to see if we can clear up for you here and now.

Tai Chi online resources will also have you believe that Chi is a bit like money, everyone wants more of it, it’s never clear how to get more and when you have more it’s never enough.  The other difference is that Chi has something of a mythical image within the Taijiquan and martial arts community.

Now, most people who practise Taijiquan for health aren’t interested in going through hours of research to figure out what this esoteric property of Taijiquan is.  So to cut a long story short, we’re going to tell you exactly what you need to know about Chi.

It’s all just a feeling

As you get more sensitive to the feelings within your body when you practise your Taijiquan, you will start to notice more and more about the way things work and some sensations are very much like flowing energy from one part of the body to another.  Well that’s your Chi working.  The good news is that you don’t need to figure out exactly what it is, knowing that it’s there is more than enough, and feeling it is even better. It’s something inside of you, so no definition of it in books or on resources for Tai Chi online will be able to show you what it really is or means.

As promised, the link to Standing Meditation Lessons

The main thing that makes Taijiquan an “internal” (as opposed to external) pursuit is feeling.  As you practise, the feelings that you get within your body tell you whether you are doing it right, and more importantly, tell you if there is something within your body that needs to be healed (such as an injured back or dodgy knee).  This internal awareness isn’t just limited to the physical, it can also be emotional or mental (You’ll know what we mean if you’ve read the post about the infinite onion) and allowing yourself to feel these things being there is key to Taijiquan skill, healing and all those goodies we know and love.

If you’re at a bit of a loss as to how to go about starting to feel what’s going on inside your body, you can do standing meditation, or as another exercise, just take a look at your breath.  What does your breath feel like?  Is it tense, is it too fast, too slow, uncomfortable, does it feel restricted, is it even comfortable when you breathe?  It’s a great place to start,and once you get the idea of how to feel inside your body, you can start to develop it to feel what goes on when you’re practising Taiji, or when you’re just hanging out at home.

A special Taijiquan bonus for you today, two videos!  The next posture in the Yang Taiji 24 is the rather fancily named White Crane Spreads Wings.  The first video above is a summary of how to do the posture.  If you’re learning the Taijiquan form from these videos, then I’d watch that video several times and visualise yourself doing the movement.

Once you’ve done that, follow along to the movement as you see it done on screen.  Do this a few times and when you’re reasonably confident, then go ahead and try to do this on your own without any help from the Taijiquan video.

Over the years we still use this method in our own training whether it’s picking stuff up from our teacher, a workshop or a video (Yes we have learnt some very cool things from videos too!).  We’d watch it, follow it and then do it.

When you’ve done that – you’re ready for the details!

This next video in the Yang Taiji 24 is all about the details of the posture, these are the things that are going to flesh out your movement and are the nuts and bolts of how it make it feel good when you do it.

One of the great difficulties of teaching standing meditation or (Zhan Zhuang) is that there is no clear progression, no clear path that the student will follow.  This is because everyone is unique, and everyone’s different.  The things you experience when you do standing meditation are mostly feelings, and human language has never, ever been able to master the description of a feeling.

You can take a group of 10 people and teach them standing and all of them will have broadly similar, but still very different stories about their practise.  Everyone has different levels of tension to let go of, and therefore their experience will all be different.

So, when you do your zhan zhuang practise, remember that what happens is unique to you and nobody else.  There is no real danger of “doing it wrong”, so long as you’re feeling new things you are doing it right.  Progress is non-linear, there is no clear sequence of stages you will go through because we’re all so different.

The important thing to do, as we’ve said before is just do it.  You might literally feel like you’re standing like a post when you start (That’s what Zhan Zhuang actually means), a lot of us do the first time we do it, but keep at it, do a little bit often and you’ll feel the goodies before long.

Go to the previous lesson: Things You Might Experience