Taijipedia

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

You already know the next bit of the Taijiquan form.  After having done Part The Wild Horse’s Mane for the first time, you repeat it twice more so that you end up with your left leg forward.  This bit is a fairly straightforward bit of the Yang Taiji 24, as you have done all of the movements already, but we put it in so that you could have a video to “join the dots” on your Taijiquan instruction.

If you’ve started doing some standing meditation as part of your taijiquan practise, you might be finding that there are some interesting, and possibly alarming things happening to you.  Hot and cold flushes, shaking, all manner of weird things can happen.

We’re here to tell you that, weird though they may be, they’re all completely normal.  It’s just stuff the body does to deal with tension and it’s all part of the process of relaxation and more importantly, healing, both things that we’re trying to get out of our taijiquan practise.

One of the things that standing meditation gives your body is a chance to be itself.  We’re always telling the body to do this or that, be this or that.  When you just stand and be still, the body gets a chance to do its own thing, and, like one of those stressed out personal assistants, starts to get down to all the things that it should be doing, like healing that bad back that it’s not had a chance to do in years, let more blood circulate in those aching shoulders.

The thing is, we’re not typically used to feeling our body do this, mainly because when it is trying to do it, we’re probably doing something else like watching TV or playing World of Warcraft.  So, when it starts happening and our attention has nowhere else to go, it feels really, really weird.

But it’s totally normal.

Go back to the previous lesson: How To Do It Standing Like A Tree
Go to the next lesson: Your Experience is Unique.

First, an apology.. this was supposed to head up the video log posts on This Week’s Big Idea (It’s relaxation) and I got my knickers in a bit of a twist and posted the standing meditation one first.

No matter, tension is an ongoing problem in the practise of Taijiquan, and will probably continue to be so for your entire Taijiquan career.  If you’d like to know why, check out part 2 of why relaxation is an infinite onion.

In this post, we’ll give you some tips on ideas you can use for standing practise beyond the very simple (but still very effective) exercise that we’re going through in the Standing Meditation lessons.

Photo by Caius

It’s been a bad day at work, your boss is being a jerk and it’s all gone wrong.

All you want to do is bang your head against a wall (repeating as necessary)

I need to relax, you might say.

So what you do is go home, have a stiff drink or go for that cigarette.  Maybe you stick some Vangelis on and run a hot bath.   All those aromatherapy oils and soothing music will work the tension out of your system.

They’re all relaxation triggers, and we’re addicted to them

We’re relaxation trigger junkies.  We depend on things external to ourselves to help us relax.  Problems always arise when things go to hell in a handbag and we don’t have access to them.  There will be no steamy bath with Vangelis and extract of jojoba with the boss dumping on you.  You can’t reach for that beer if you’re driving home after a difficult business meeting and believe you me, a cigarette will be the last thing on your mind if little Timmy’s just crawled out a 3rd floor window to retrieve his Action Man.

When these relaxation triggers aren’t there, we kinda go through a strange sort of cold turkey process where we turn into stress bunnies, lose the capacity for rational thinking.  Sometimes we lose it and have what the English quaintly call “a Benny”.  We’re dependent on our relaxation triggers, we need them to relax.

I’m here to tell you that it IS possible to kick the habit and learn how to relax

People have known this for hundreds of years, we just forgot it recently. If you think about it how else did our forefathers chill out in the ages before Vangelis and jojoba?

It’s by using things within us to help us relax.

If this is starting to sound a bit self-help, I’m not referring to anything metaphysical and I’m not going to say that within every stress bunny is a chilled out person waiting to get out.

No, it’s even simpler than that.

It’s as simple as breathing. Sigh, go on, I dare you. Sigh. The body’s got it’s own reflexive relaxation mechanism, and breathing is part of it. If you can learn to regulate your breathing, you can help yourself relax. In fact, some military schools teach their troops to breathe when under combat stress. As situations come they don’t get more stressful than bullets whizzing past your head.

But wait.. there’s another bit to it.

I want you to get back into the habit

Rather than being a relaxation-trigger junkie, I want you to become a relaxation junkie. Yeah, just take out the “trigger”.
Learning to relax is just like learning to ride a bike. Seriously, once you learn how to do it (without props) you’ll be able to do it wherever you are, or whatever you’re doing.

Now, the best way to learn how to relax, is to become aware of how it happens, and the best way to do that, is to do standing meditation. It’s simple, it’s easy and anyone can do it. Just 10 minutes a day is more than enough.  Once you know what it feels like to relax by yourself, you can then just do it whenever you need to.  Incidentally once you’re into the relaxation habit, you can do it just before you start your form.. and how much more relaxed will that form be?

And it really IS that simple

I appear to have waxed lyrical about being a relaxation trigger junkie, but have shamelessly omitted the bit about infinite onions (that’s why you were reading this in the first place right?).   That will be in part 2.. I promise.

As This Week’s Big Idea is relaxation, we thought we’d post a video on one of the most simple (yet powerful) relaxation exercises, standing meditation.  It’s also known by a few other names, Zhan Zhuang, Wuji, Tadasana, Standing Post.  They’re all names that describe the principle of standing in a fixed position and relaxing into the posture.

The posture demonstrated, this “Standing like a tree” is named as such because someone thought that standing upright with your hands in front of you either made you resemble a tree or because you looked like you were hugging one.

If you’ve not done much standing before, start with 2-3 minutes, and gradually work it up to 10.  When you begin Standing Like A Tree, you’re really going to feel like a tree as the tension starts to come out of your body.

Try not to judge the process, all the time you spend doing standing meditation is time well spent, there is no such thing as a “good” session or a “bad” session.  The standing practise sessions are just different, as the myriad of things you experience will vary from day to day.  It’s perhaps the only practise where you get immediate benefit from (even if you may not be aware of it straight away) as there is practically no learning curve.  You just have to GOYA* and do it.

Standing meditation is beneficial to your Taiji practise because it starts off the process of relaxation.  You may be Standing Like A Tree, but you’re actually more like an onion. There’s layers and layers to it.  As you let go of tension and reach one layer of relaxation, another one awaits you beneath it.  As your practise progresses, you’ll peel away more and more layers, and standing meditation is the most effective way to kickstart the process.

This is the one single exercise that made the most difference to Tannage’s back and Greeny’s knee.  It was standing meditation that allowed our joints to relax, and start healing themselves, so if you have joint problems or a bad back, you might do well to do this practise, 5-10 minutes a day, every day.  Regular practise is far more effective than sporadic long practise sessions.  Think of rolling a snowball, the longer you roll it, the bigger it gets, but you can’t stop or it’ll stop rolling, and you’ll have to put all that effort into getting it going again. Tannage did standing like a tree for years, just 5-10 minutes a day, every day almost without fail.

Don’t worry if you’re not as um.. militant about it as Tannage is, he’s got a back to keep in good shape and wants to avoid middle-age agony. Try to do standing menditation every day but if you hit maybe every other day you’re doing pretty well and it’ll give you a lot of benefit.

Although there are lots of other postures, Standing Like A Tree is a good one to start with. If you never learnt any other standing postures, then this posture will serve you very well. It’ll build internal power, and also strengthen you (did I mention it can fix your back and also heal bad knees?)

The next lesson is all about things you might experience when doing standing meditation.

* Get Off Your Ass – I credit Naomi Dunford of Ittybiz.com for coining this phrase.

Most students feel somewhat self-conscious when they start practising Taiji, thinking that they’re not very good and you can see it sometimes gets to them.  The good news is that it’s ok to “suck”, it’s ok to be terrible at something.  Everyone’s got to start somewhere, and in this vlog post we introduce the idea of the “heierarchy of suckage”, which is something both depressing and inspirational for everyone out there practising Taiji.