Taijipedia

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This week’s Big Idea is Breathing

Breathing in Taiji is one of the big kahunas. It’s because breathing is a primary way we relax ourselves. Think about what you do when you sigh. It’s a way for us to relax and let go of tension.

Try it now, breathe in… and sigh…

Some part inside of you just lets go doesn’t it? It may not come as a surprise then that breathing affects us physiologically in a million different ways. It isn’t a coincidence that so many internal arts and qigong forms empahsise the importance of correct breathing to help the body heal itself.

If you hold your breath, you’re automatically going to hold tension in the body. It’s an unnatural state for your body to be in, stuck in some sort of limbo between breaths, because the body’s natural state is one of constant breathing, constant change. Try it, hold your breath for as long as you can and you’ll notice that there will come a point when your body starts to tense up. Holding the breath is stressful.

What happens when you’re stressed and thinking about a difficult issue? More often than not, you’ll be holding your breath. If you work in an office, watch someone who’s having a bad day. As they concentrate intently, they’ll inhale and hold their breath whilst they’re thinking or trying to do something, then instinctively exhale and sigh as if to try to relieve the stress. When you’re holding tension mentally, or emotionally, you’ll more than likely start to manifest it physically by holding your breath.

As another example, what happens when you get startled, or surprised? Say someone hides behind that tree and jumps out shouting “BOO!”. You get startled, and you breathe in sharply, and then you hold your breath

If you do any sort of martial art and have done some sparring, you’ll know that when you get hit or put under pressure you start to run out of energy quicker, unless you can stop the panic and clear your head. I’ll bet that it’s because you’ll be holding your breath at and the added pressure from your sparring partner just saps your strength quicker.

To handle the stress of childbirth both mentally and physically, pregnant women are taught to breathe. Soldiers in some forces are taught breathing techniques to handle the stress of combat. Just as our internal state can affect our breathing, so can our breathing affect the rest of our physiology.

If you can focus on your breathing and breathe in a more controlled manner, or better yet, just let your body do the breathing, it’ll start to let go of the tension that’s been collecting in the body. If we focus on calming the breath, the body and mind will follow.

This is why breathing is important in Taijiquan.

It’s not because breathing during Taijiquan practise will make our Taijiquan better, it’s because practising breathing correctly will make every part of our life better.

It’ll do that by making you a lot more relaxed for a start.

Once your body gets used to breathing correctly during Taijiquan practise, it’ll start to remember it when you’re in your everyday life. When you hit some turbulence, you’ll instinctively start to breathe more gently to relieve the pressure. You might even find it’s a conscious thing. When you start looking at a new problem at work, you might even catch yourself doing a “Deep breath… let’s go” sort of thing.

It’s the same idea that you’re re-programming the body to do something it does naturally. Just as we can have bad postural habits, we can have bad breathing habits, and practise of Taijiquan with the right breathing can really help us let go of these habits.

And that, can only be a good thing.

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.

Photo by Delmonti

In my previous post, I made a promise I did not keep. I talked about our addiction to relaxation triggers, but..

I did not mention the infinite onion

In this post, I will rectify my transgression. I will deliver.

I’m going to tell you a really cool thing.

You may or may not have experienced it yet. If you haven’t don’t worry, it’s not like telling you how the Sixth Sense ends. I can’t possibly ruin it for you, because when it does happen to you, it’ll be something so cool that nothing I could say could possibly ruin it for you.

So… you’ll be practising your taijiquan form, or your standing meditation, you’re slipping into the zone, everything is becoming crystal clear, it’s all slowing down, and then…

Some part of you lets go

You’re not sure what’s let go, but you know something has, all by itself, has loosened its limpet grip on some other part of you.

And it feel soooo good

You’ll have passed through one level of tension, let go of it and moved down into the next, deeper level of tension where you’ll go through that really cool process all over again.

It’s like an onion you see. You have many layers of tension.

But here’s the nub of it. The miracle of nature that is you has more dimensions to it than simply the physical.

Tension manifests in the physical, mental and emotional

Bear with me, I’m not being deliberately metaphysical. To justify that statement, I have prepared a little case study.

You’ve had a hard day at work and you’re getting ready for bed.

Argh, my back’s stiff and so are my shoulders.

Yup, so many hours at the desk slaving away with the mouse in one hand has stiffened you up, all that not moving around and you’ve got a back that’s stiff and shoulders that won’t roll. It’s the stuff that we’re all familiar with all that physical tension of locked and tight muscles.

You get into bed anyway, turn out the light..

And lie awake blinking at the ceiling. Your brain is whizzing

That presentation wasn’t up to scratch, you were pissed off with the boss when you put it together. It was sub-par and he’s not going to be happy. Oh, and there’s the shopping list you need to make. Do we need more milk? Doesn’t the lawn that needs mowing and little Alice needs new shoes, and Byron has to be taken to swimming lessons tomorrow. Must take a look at that really cool Taijiquan site. What was it called? Something-pedia?

The brain, is still clinging to all that, and it’s creating mental tension, constant chatter in the head is the mind’s way of manifesting that tension. It’s not going to be a physical sensation.

No matter, sooner or later you’ll get so tired that you’ll fall asleep right?

OH MY GOD! That presentation I sent to the boss!

You were bored, upset and feeling undervalued, so for a laugh you replaced every instance of “Gross Domestic Product” with the childish and inane word “farting”.  You meant to change it back but forgot due to the unfair amount of stress and pressure.

You can already see your boss spitting venom, his portly frame resonating like a lava lamp to the sound of his baying for blood.

You’re feeling stressed.

That’s emotional tension getting its hooks into you. That “AAARRGHH!” emotional response is the beginnings of this tension, and anyone who is a chronic worrier, will know that it can go on for extended periods of time.

So.. if I’ve convinced you that tension can manifest in three dimensions, it’s time to introduce the “infinity” bit.

The human body is in a constant state of flux

Your body is constantly changing, physically, mentally and emotionally. With all these changes happening, you’re constantly letting go of tension, and building tension in these three dimensions.

So whenever you peel off one layer of tension, another will always await you beneath, because there are other ways you have been storing tension, and when you let go that bit, there’s the tension underneath that layer and so on. There are an infinite number of layers.

There you go.. relaxation is like an infinite onion

What regular practise of taijiquan helps you do is constantly let go of tension in whichever dimension you’re building it up on. Think about it as a maintenance on your tension valves. As tension builds up in the physical realm, you relieve it, and then if emotional tension builds up, you can help let go of that too.

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.

Finishing off this.. er.. last week’s big idea on purpose, here’s a few more ideas on what you could do to focus your purpose.  Any principle from the Tai Chi classics can be a purpose you can practise, and we introduce the idea of “psychic bandwidth” to help you with your practise.

Books are good places to find out about the classics of Tai Chi.  Online articles are also easily found when you go google “tai chi online classics”.

I’m shamelessly ripping off Stephen Covey. This week’s big idea is “Purpose”. Taiji training has to have an aim, a goal, a point to the training. Before you start, you should have an idea what you’d like to achieve, you should decide on your purpose.

Purpose focuses your training. It’s your own personal Taiji google

Purpose will focus you in a way that “just doing the training” cannot. In fact, it’s like your personal Taiji-sphere Google search term. If you’re interested in healing a back, then that intention will naturally lead you to filter out any information relevant to healing, exactly like Google brings back the most relevant information to your search term.

Imagine what it’d be like if you were searching for “blue widgets” but had to wade through all the information on the web. Given enough time you’ll find it, and you’ll also learn a lot of other cool stuff in the meantime. Howevever if all you wanted to do is heal your back, that’s a lot of time sifting through material that’s not helping you achieve your purpose.

Purpose applies at all levels of training.

Your high level purpose for training Taiji might be healing a damaged back, or improving your health, or it might even be curiosity. You’ve probably already got one of these if you’re training.

You can also drill down to a finer level, and get more specific, to a purpose of training a movement, a posture, or an awareness of a certain feeling within the body.

You can make it finer still, by making your purpose to train a specific skill, such as body connection, relaxation, or specifically train a limb or joint so that it is strong enough to let you do the form comfortably.

There’s also a ripple effect, your finer detailed purposes will all naturally lean towards helping you achieve your high-level purpose. The filter will apply at all levels of your training, making you focus on the information that will get you the results you want.

With a purpose you know that everything you train will be helping you achieve it.

It’s a way to ensure that you make progress as quickly as you can towards your goal and the easiest way to get one is to start your Taiji training knowing what you want to achieve in mind.