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Tai chi teaches people to correct this imbalance by becoming alert to intelligence from within while learning to listen to what is happening outside and to respond to others. It teaches patience, the ability to wait, poised and quiet, for the right moment to move or act.
When tai chi movements are performed correctly, they work to calm and focus the mind, so that mind, energy, and body work in harmony. The seven dimensions of tai chi practice are described next, and represented on the graph.
MAPPING TAI CHI PRACTICE
The seven dimensions of tai chi practice, described previously, may be represented by a graph on which you map your progress along the path to natural way. The vertical axis measures your progress on a scale from 1 to 10. A teacher might help you assess your abilities in each area. Draw a new graph to review progress after a year. Your tendency to use force against force should have fallen and your energy and coordination have risen.
FORCE AGAINST FORCE
Are you trying to dominate by blocking your partner’s responses, or responding too quickly, before your partner stops pushing? If so, you are using force against force. In this interaction you enter into a dialog, inviting your partner to respond to your push. Do not try to force one. When receiving a push, listen as the movement unfolds, knowing that each push has its lifetime. Do not stop it by force, but move in response to the other person. This is the natural way.
CORRECT TECHNIQUE
Although the rules of tai chi are challenging, they are effective. Hands and feet need to be correctly aligned, placed, and arranged; doing this enables you to reap the richest reward from practice. And bear in mind that improvement often comes without a struggle. Working on the mind, for instance, sharpens concentration, which brings about improvements in technique.
JIN OR WHOLE BODY ENERGY
Beginners feel all left feet. As practice evolves, feet, legs and pelvis, spine, arms, and hands feel more connected, and movements of head and body begin to feel coordinated. There comes a time when breathing and movement of all parts of the body follow one rhythm, and this cohesion is jin (whole body energy).
CHI OR LIFE FORCE ENERGY
Tai chi movements stimulate the chi circulating in the body and the musculoskeletal system, exercise the internal organs, and open the meridians, allowing chi to build. Resting the mind quietly in the lower tantien energy center after practice also builds chi. People often feel contentment and greater vitality after practice.
MIND
Cultivating awareness is the key to mind control – if your mind keeps returning to one of the day’s events while you are practicing, acknowledge it. Notice where your mind is directed as you move. Soon, there will be moments when it becomes absorbed in the moves you are making, and the moments will extend to minutes. Then you find your mind making visualizations at will.
SPIRIT
There is a dynamic equilibrium between earth and spirit in tai chi. The way to spirit is through the earthing of the body, and the stronger the connection with the earth, the greater the possibilities for spirit. One of the joys of practice is allowing the body to radiate the spirit that powers each posture – the spirit of fire or of clarity. Enjoy the spirit of the moment; you may feel poised, like a cat about to pounce, then you might become quiet, nurturing the spirit inside.
NATURAL WAY
Follow the natural way to emerge into the seventh dimension. Let go of the binding patterns of force against force, become receptive to the natural way of things, and learn to wait for the right moment to move. Attaining natural way is a sevenfold process. The qualities work together to realign the whole person toward natural way.
MIND GAME
This visualization may take a while to become real, but it will show how your mind and your energy can work together. Turn your left palm toward you. Point the fingers of your right hand toward your left palm keeping them about six inches away. Imagine the fingers of your right hand are brushes. Paint strokes very slowly over your left hand. At first you may not sense anything, but soon you will feel the light brush strokes moving across the sensitive palm of your hand as clearly as if you were really painting it.
Movement, Health, and Body Awareness (#ulink_2fe74194-5107-5762-817c-ddff86007748)
THE BODY IS an extraordinary, wonderful instrument. It is mechanically well designed and physically intricate, yet it also houses the spirit. The body bestows on its owner the gift of movement, yet people living a modern lifestyle rarely if ever make the most of this ability, and many have forgotten or never discovered their bodies’ capabilities. Yet not only is the body designed to move, it needs to, in order to stay healthy. Tai chi provides a form of exercise that offers a remedy for the ills of modern living, a supportive answer to the body’s need to move.
While they are still developing in their mother’s womb, unborn infants know how to move. They swim, dance, push, wriggle, and kick. Immediately after birth, babies move instinctively and without inhibition, and during the early years, movement plays an essential part in childhood learning and personal development. Young children crawl, roll, totter, and fall; as they grow they play on swings, slides, roundabouts, and with each other. A child’s world is largely body-based.
Relatively few adults in modern industrial countries still have to cut hay, harvest crops, fetch water, or chop wood by hand in order to survive. Most are relieved of such tiresome tasks and chores by modern economic organization, which uses machines to perform repetitive jobs, releasing people to attend to tasks carried out by telephone, pager, fax, or computer, reached by automobile, rail or air link, e-mail or internet. Many are not forced by their work to stretch or stress their bodies. Problems tend to begin shortly after the point where demands cease to be made of the body. Arthritis, for example, is associated with under-exercising the joints. One physiologist has estimated that 150 years of good service could normally be expected from the superbly designed joints of the human frame. Yet they waste away, working at a fraction of their potential, while the body sits on office chairs or lounges on sofas.
A sedentary lifestyle now can mean mobility problems later on in life.
By placing emphasis on mental achievement and a globalizing electronic culture, contemporary living draws energy from the body into the head, simply because exercising the mind draws blood to the brain. The ratio of mental and emotional stimulation to physical activity was reversed during the 20th century, and for many the reversal took place in fewer than 50 years. Modern work stresses the mind but fails to work the body, making true rest difficult to achieve.
Western society today is predominantly sedentary. Anyone doing an office or a driving job is required to sit for long periods. Then, at the end of the day they rest in a sitting position, unlike most animals, which tend to rest lying down. Tribal peoples who retain their ancient customs often rest by squatting, kneeling, or lying. Modern people sit on a chair, on the tail of the spine, a position that far from being restful is a kind of slump. In time, this bad posture can result in a tendency to asthma, lower back trouble, and prolapsed (displaced) internal organs.
Sitting back to relax and watch TV sets up another dynamic. The body responds to the visual stimuli presented on a screen by producing an emotional response in the form of energy that needs to find expression. Aware of the need for an outlet for such unexpressed energy, many people take up some form of exercise. It is all too easy, however, to overreact and pummel the body with exercise. Activity that is too vigorous can shock the body and injure its systems.
Tai chi is a holistic practice, its movements exercise the whole body, not just individual muscles or muscle groups. It works gently to encourage the body's natural harmony.
Tai chi is quality movement. It is physically demanding, yet it works with the body to encourage the gradual developing of strength and reviving of natural openness and coordination. This process is not something that can be hurried, however. Tai chi is an art that needs to be mastered through gradual learning and practice, but the benefits of investing time and effort in it become apparent very early on.
Like a door, the body must be kept moving to prevent its hinge joints – and other types of joint – from seizing up, and tai chi works to condition the elements of the human frame. It promotes greater understanding of the body’s natural alignment and stance, encouraging the habit of good posture. Its movements continually turn the spine, an action that gradually repositions misplaced organs, stimulating them at the same time through an internal form of massage. The tai chi movements dissipate excess nervous tension held in the body and so help balance the nervous system. Through apparently simple exercises, such as standing on one leg, tai chi stimulates the muscle groups to work together. Continued through life it prevents the joints of the hips and limbs from degenerating.
Working out can demand too much of the body without considering its needs and tolerances.
The unique upright stance of humans gives us a greater potential for movements than creatures who walk on four legs. The physical capabilities of humans may seem inferior when in water, yet it is the human who can walk out of the water onto the land, play volleyball, climb a tree, paint a picture, and cook a meal. Each day, our bodies perform wonders for us.
But do we know our bodies? The next section presents some of the workings of the body from a holistic point of view, from the mechanical structure of the frame to the internal systems and the location of the energy centers, and shows how tai chi encourages the development of a personal connection with the body.
The Skeleton (#ulink_5cc7e357-7d77-549d-8afd-32aa01588b3f)
THE BODY’S ARCHITECTURE provides the framework for the extraordinary variety of movement and bodily expression that is tai chi. The art makes full use of the combination of dexterity, flexibility, articulation, and movement capabilities that the skeleton, aided by ligaments, muscles, and tendons, makes possible. Knowing the basics of body architecture will deepen understanding of the tai chi postures. It will also give a sense of wonder at the sheer variety of movements the human body can perform, unparalleled in the rest of the animal kingdom.
The skeleton is the body’s frame, supporting it and giving it shape. The bony cavities of the skull, the rib cage, and the pelvic girdle provide protection for the body’s vital organs – the brain, the lungs, the organs of digestion, and the sexual organs. Design of the skeleton has evolved over millions of years to make it perfectly adapted for movement. The girders of a building are bolted into a rigid framework, but the skeletal bones are connected by joints held together by ligaments and operated by muscles. This system gives the body mobility.
Tai chi actively increases mobility in all the joints of the body, maintaining an especially strong focus on the ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, wrists, and spine. It achieves this mainly by encouraging the joints to open, that is, to relax completely.
Bone is living tissue made of active cells served by blood vessels and nerves, and the tissues in its spongy center carry out the vital task of making bone marrow. The red blood cells, which transport oxygen, are formed in the bone marrow along with white blood cells, which fight infection. Bones are fundamental to the body’s immune system.
Tai chi attributes another important function to the bone marrow. The teacher Cheng Man-ch’ing described the cultivation of chi in the lower tantien energy center, how it warms the fluids of the body and fills the hollow spaces of the bones. An adhesive substance forms, which turns into marrow and plates the insides of the bones like nickel or gold, giving them greater weight and pure hardness.
THE BONES
All bones begin as flexible cartilage, which forms in the womb. As the baby grows the cartilage is gradually converted into bones, which continue to lengthen and grow until the end of the teen years. A baby’s skeleton has more than 350 bones, many of which eventually fuse, so that an adult’s skeleton has only 206 bones.
THE SPINE
The spine is made up of 33 bones but only 25 joints because the last four bones are fused to form the coccyx (tail bone) and the five bones above them are fused to form the sacrum. Each bone is called a vertebra, and the vertebrae form groups, each of which differs slightly in its function. The vertebrae are separated by disks of cartilage, forming a slightly movable joint. These cartilaginous joints work together, allowing the spine to move forward, backward, and sideways. The spinal cord, a bundle of major nerve fibers, travels along a channel through the center of the vertebrae from the pelvis to join the brain.
The coccyx or tail bone consists of five fused bones. Like the sacrum, it moves only during pregnancy.
The bones, or vertebrae, and joints of the spine.
THE SACRUM
The broad shield-shaped bone at the base of the spine transmits the weight of the body from the fifth lumbar vertebra sideways to the pelvic girdle. The sacrum “sacred bone” forms the bottom bend of the spine’s s-curve. It forms a slightly movable joint with the fifth lumbar vertebra, but its side “wings” fit perfectly into the corresponding surfaces of the pelvic girdle, and ligaments secure the sacroiliac joints so firmly they are almost immobile. The sacrum is fundamental to the mechanics of tai chi movement.
THE JOINTS
The body has many other moving joints (see below). Although tai chi movements exercise all the body’s joints, they focus on opening and exercising the joints of the ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, and wrists, and on maintaining the mobility of the multi-jointed spine.
Ball and socket joint
A ball and socket joint is where the rounded head of one bone fits into a socket or hole in the adjoining bone. Ball and socket joints at the shoulders and hip allow the arms and legs almost 360° of movement.
Hinge joint
The knee, toes, fingers, and elbow are examples of hinge joints, which permit bending and straightening in one direction. A rounded bulge in one bone fits into a corresponding hollow in an adjoining bone. The two bones are held together by ligaments and encased in a capsule filled with a lubricating fluid.
Pivot joint
The first two cervical vertebrae in the neck form a pivot joint. A protuberance in the second cervical vertebra, called the axis, fits into a ring formed in the vertebra above it, called the atlas, allowing the neck to pivot from side to side.
The Muscles (#ulink_821decae-0a0b-51dc-baf9-2831b1b60200)
ONE OF THE first things people notice when they start tai chi is that their legs begin to feel different. To some it can be a shock to find that the gentle, flowing movements, so attractive to watch, can require such hard work from the muscles of their thighs and calves. But it is the demands made on the muscle groups of the legs combined with the ability to fully relax muscles elsewhere in the body that gives tai chi its unique grace of movement.
Gymnasts may seem to achieve the impossible, but they are in fact demonstrating the full flexibility that the skeletal muscles can achieve.
We often need to retrain some of the muscles under our conscious control through tai chi, especially those of the lower limbs, which play a major role in bodily expression. For this reason, after a tai chi posture is learned there may be a time-gap before it can be performed with real ease. This is the maturing time the muscles need to strengthen and learn the new movements.
The muscles execute commands from the brain carried along the motor nerves. For the muscles to be able to react so quickly, the nervous system maintains them in a half-alert state called muscle tone, ensuring that voluntary movements are not started from cold.
This link with the nervous system means that emotional stress registers in the muscles, however. Feelings of fear or anxiety show as a measurable rise in muscle tone. This reaction is appropriate as a “fight-or-flight” response, enabling the body to react instantly to an emergency, but people who suffer from recurrent fear or anxiety may be held in a permanent state of tension and find it hard to rest and impossible to relax, a state of chronic stress,
On one level tai chi deals with stress by relaxing the muscles. “Soft” does not mean flaccid, but a way of using muscles exactly as required for each movement. This allows a release of unnecessary muscular tension. More fundamentally, however, tai chi teaches people to relax the body instead of tensing in stressful situations. This is a major benefit of partnerwork. By repeatedly giving and receiving a push, each partner is offered an opportunity to transform the tension it raises into an alert and dynamic relaxation. With training they discover that a more effective way of dealing with a push is to embrace it rather than deny it. The practice strengthens mental and physical confidence, so that body and mind become reprogramed, reacting with the fight-or-flight response only in moments of real danger. The overall level of tension in the body falls significantly.
Tension in muscles is normal, enabling us to stand and walk. As one group of muscles tenses for action, another relaxes. Normal muscular tension is also beneficial, since in well-exercised legs it will stimulate the upward flow of blood circulating through the veins and lymph flowing along vessels rising from the feet and legs to the heart. The deep veins of the legs send blood flowing upward against the force of gravity to the heart. During exercise, the moving muscles press against the wall of the veins, acting like a pump to speed the blood flow through them. They have the same effect on the lymph vessels.
THE VOLUNTARY MUSCLES
Tai chi is concerned with the muscles we use consciously when we move. These are the voluntary muscles, attached by tendons to the skeleton. Tai chi encourages the muscles to work together. This is believed to promote the development of jin, or whole body energy.
THE VOLUNTARY MUSCLES
Body Alignment (#ulink_625f6643-9453-5c8f-9a11-b3dd405ca54d)
ONE OF THE first benefits of tai chi is a rapid and noticeable improvement in basic posture. Tai chi encourages students to key into the natural design of the body. It restores an awareness of alignments that enable the frame to function with greater ease and strength. Most children enjoy a natural relationship with the body, but as they grow up, some lose this freedom and begin to move awkwardly, or gradually forget how to move in a natural and unrestricted way. Exploring body mechanics helps mind and body to regain some of these lost abilities.
The body is flexible and mobile. Its frame is designed to enable it to sit, lie, stand, walk, run, jump, lift, and carry, and its postural alignment enables the body to perform its movements in a dynamic relationship with gravity.
The human frame is the structural system of skeleton, tendons, ligaments, and muscles, which give the body its shape and alignment when moving or still. The frame is not inert like the frame of a building, but kinetic. Each bone has its correct position in the skeleton, a certain range of movement, and a specific alignment with its neighboring bones, the tendons and ligaments that hold it in place, and the muscles that make its movement possible. The body works as a whole, so the misalignment of bones affects posture and movement.
Stooping and slumping, lifting heavy weights with the body wrongly aligned, aggressive exercise, and tension all affect the body’s frame. Years of such misuse can undermine its alignment, and this can result in back pain, headaches or migraines, and malfunctioning joints. However, the malfunctions that are caused by poor posture can be prevented and eased by realignment through tai chi.
Tai chi works with gravity, allowing it to anchor the body into the earth, working to restore the frame’s natural flexibility. It achieves this by relaxing muscles and releasing tension all over the body, allowing bones to resume their intended alignment relative to one another. Many people who learn tai chi feel a sense of strength that comes from having restored the body’s natural relationship with gravity and from the fact that bones and muscles that are correctly aligned can be exercised more effectively.
The spine is an excellent example of the body working as a holistic system. Its 33 bones or vertebrae are aligned in an s-shape and its two flexible curves, combined with the ability of the vertebrae to work separately yet together at the same time, give the back its marvelous mobility.
Incorrect alignment of the frame – the bones, joints, and muscles – can lead to structural problems such as slipped disks, back pain, and malfunctions of the joints. Tai chi teaches body awareness, so that good posture when lying, sitting, standing, and moving becomes natural.
STANDING LIKE A MOUNTAIN BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH
This exercise aims to raise awareness of the body’s physical support system, and of the relationship between the parts of the body and their alignment, from the feet on the earth to the head in the sky. The thighs and pelvis meet at the hip joint, the largest in the body. Your hip joints are being asked to “soften” and to open up or gently stretch. Your knees are sensitive to alignment. They act as channels, allowing the force of gravity to pass through. The position of the feet affects the alignment of the frame, which rises from them; and from them descends an imaginary channel that anchors the body to the earth center. Become aware of the relationship between your feet and legs and your upper body.
1 Stand comfortably with your feet well apart. Notice how and where the weight of your body comes down though your feet. Is it toward the toes or the heels, the instep or the outside of each foot, or somewhere in the middle?
2 Rock your weight slowly forward to the front of your feet and bring it back. Repeat two more times. When you stop, allow your feet to meet the earth fully, the weight evenly balanced.
3 Bring your weight to the instep. You immediately feel unwanted strain on your knees. They are misaligned and not designed to work properly in this position. Redistribute your weight evenly across your feet.
4 Realign your knees so they follow the direction of the feet. This maintains the correct relationship between the feet, the knees, and the hips. Feel it by dropping your spine a few inches. Look down to see that your kneecap follows the direction of the toes.
5 Stand upright again. Turn your feet to point slightly outward, and once again drop your spine and bend your knees. Check that your knees are in line with your toes. Notice the effect on your hips when doing this.
6 Keeping your legs and upper body still, rock your pelvis backward and forward, then from side to side. Feel your pelvis floating. Circle it a few times in each direction. The pelvic girdle is basin-shaped, a holder and carrier. Feel the link between your lower pelvis and your hip joints, and the relationship between your pelvis and your feet.
7 Dropping the spine and bending the knees softens and opens the hips. Repeat this movement a few times, allowing your hips to move and open. Feel the connection between feet, knees, and hips. Your feet are anchored to give you stability; your hips allow mobility. Now return your feet to parallel.
8 With your feet planted on the ground, your weight distributed evenly so your knees and toes are aligned, and your pelvis free to move, feel how the spine carries you up through your neck toward the sky. Drop your spine to sit into the earth, relax your muscles downward (yin) and simultaneously feel the upward and outward support of your bones (yang).
9 Lift your arms out a little way away from your body. Imagine your shoulder joints open, letting in space. Feel your arms lift farther out. Explore the movement possibilities of your elbows, then your wrists, then turn your fingertips toward each other. Imagine your arms are growing out from your spine, and make a connection between your fingers.
10 Direct your attention to the top of your head. Soften the muscles here and downward through your body. At the same time imagine the bones of your spine lifting you to this point. Feel the polarity between your feet in the earth and your head in the sky. This keeps your spine open or stretched up and down, so that it falls into its natural curved shape.
Stability and Mobility (#ulink_b039647f-1af1-5059-877a-c7f5445562c1)
HERE, WITH THE HELP of two guided exercises, you can develop a practical understanding of the qualities of stability and mobility. Let your feet meet the earth. Let your knees follow the direction of your toes. Soften your hips. Let your pelvis float and your spine anchor you in the earth and carry you to the sky. These injunctions are the basis of stability and the key to understanding the nature of tai chi movement, for the body’s relationship to the earth is like that of an underwater plant, which is anchored to a rock yet moves with ease in the current.
Many people who begin tai chi are not used to maintaining a low center of gravity, or to using their legs so much. Aching legs are a sign that tai chi is gradually strengthening the limbs. The process works in two ways, so it is through the movements that a beginner develops stability. Trying to deepen the stance by dropping the spine while moving accustoms the legs to work harder and makes it possible to achieve a still lower center of gravity.
This exercise in stability begins with the principles expressed in the posture Stand Like A Mountain Between Heaven and Earth (#u6025ba71-7e5e-40ad-a164-82099075c4a1). It ensures every stance or movement is rooted to the earth, but reaches up to the heavens.
STABILITY
This is a two-person exercise, although the role of your partner is to act as an assistant. Ask your partner to build up the pressure very gradually as you learn to deal with it. Before you begin, find the position Stand Like a Mountain Between Heaven and Earth (#u6025ba71-7e5e-40ad-a164-82099075c4a1), and take a moment to relax into it.
1 When you are feeling comfortably stable and your body has a sense of wholeness, ask your friend to lean in toward you from the side, gently and slowly.
2 Drop your spine slightly and let your arms move a few inches out to the sides, meeting the weight leaning against you and channeling it into the earth. If your partner leans too heavily against you, you may have to hold off the force with your arm. This should not happen, so rest and begin again.
3 As you become familiar with the feeling of the weight of another body leaning into you from the side and channeling down through your body, ask your friend to roll around you slowly and lean into you from different angles. Notice how you have to make slight changes to your frame to adjust to pressure from different angles.
4 Remain solidly stable as your partner turns while orbiting around you.
MOBILITY
For this exercise you need a safe, comfortable space to move in, and a blindfold. Play some of your favorite, soothing music. While doing this exercise you will be blindfolded, so you will not be able to read these directions at the same time. Rather than try to memorize them, record yourself reading them or ask a friend to read them out to you. Take your time with this exercise. It will probably last 10 to 20 minutes, but there is no time limit. You may find yourself drawn into the meditation for as long as an hour.
1 Stand, blindfolded, imagining you hold a ball of light in your hands. Play with it for a minute. Now imagine the light pouring from the ball into your hands and wrists. Imagine the light soothing and oiling the joints, and massaging your hands and wrists.
