This blog post was originally published as a podcast in June 2009. I’m slowly transcribing all of my podcasts, to share them with my readers who either cannot play podcasts on their computer, or who simply prefer reading instead of listening.
One of the reasons people choose to play T’ai Chi and learn it in Western cultures is also one of its major health benefits: it can improve your balance, and as you get older it can reduce the amount that your balance degrades and help prevent falls as you get on in life. Falls are quite dangerous as you get older in life, as your body just can’t cope with as much injury. [Don't take my word for it - checkout all of the third-party studies and testimonials for yourself - Ed].
In our form, one of the moves is called the Lotus Sweep. You can view this on the YouTube video that I have of the form [it's towards the end of the Part 2 video - Ed]. This move really challenges your balance, especially for a beginner. What you have to do is go into cat stance, weight is in the left, and you sweep in with the right leg and you then sweep out once and then twice in a big circle before placing the feet heels in line to finish.
When I play this move, my right knee (the leg that is doing the sweeping) the right knee comes up to hip height as I sweep in and out. It’s quite natural for beginners to want to try and copy that shape, because as a beginner you are learning the shapes. But what happens as you play the form with the knee up when you don’t yet have Single Weight and when you don’t yet have Relax The Hips and you don’t yet have the uprightness that comes from Head And Body Moves As One Unit … what happens to the beginner is that the sweep in and the sweep out cause the body to wobble left and right quite substantially.
It’s not unusual for beginners to fall over at this point, because they are trying to stand on one foot but don’t yet have the balance to achieve it.
I saw a great thing in tonight’s class where one of my students made a choice. Instead of bringing the knee up high, he chose to preserve his balance and his uprightness by playing the sweep low to the floor instead. He brought the right foot up just enough to clear the floor so that he could sweep in once and sweep out twice and keep his uprightness.
I must point this out as being a great choice that he made, and a great tip for everyone who is beginning to try and find their balance.
One of the reasons T’ai Chi teaches balance is that it is teaching the body to understand what it feels like and what it means to be upright. This is part of the mindfulness side of T’ai Chi. But, as a beginner, if you are wobbling left and right all the time, as beginners are want to do, and as I did too when I was a beginner, what are you teaching the body there? You’re not. You’re continuing to confuse the body by lurching from one side and back to the other. By smoothing these things out, by focusing and saying “right, being upright is the most important thing, and my form will have to grow around that core pillar,” over time it improves your balance far quicker and far better than throwing yourself from left to right.
This blog post was originally published as a podcast in June 2009. I’m slowly transcribing all of my podcasts, to share them with my readers who either cannot play podcasts on their computer, or who simply prefer reading instead of listening.
We’ve just done the Tuesday night class – the Improvers’ class – and tonight we did a recap of the principle of Elbows Low, which was highly entertaining for everybody, and quite informative too I hope.
The main thing we were looking at with Elbows Low tonight was the idea that, in order to keep your elbows low, it’s all about relaxing the shoulders as much as possible; getting the tension out of the shoulders. This results in the elbow naturally falling by your side [in much the same way that your hips naturally tilt forward if you eliminate the tension in the lower back - Ed].
We also looked at situations where the elbow is raised up. There’s a great exercise for this to let you feel the difference between what we’re looking for with Elbows Low and what to avoid. The question always is: if your elbow is not held at your side, but is deliberately held up in the air, how can that possibly be Elbows Low? The exercise, very simply, is to hold your right arm out in front of you, turn the right hand out, so that wrist and elbow are at the same height forming a bar facing to your right. From that position, raise the wrist a little bit to ensure your wrist is higher than your elbow. Take a moment to feel what that’s like at the shoulder. That doesn’t feel too bad I hope, unless you’ve had shoulder surgery or you’ve got a damaged shoulder, at which point you’ve got to learn to work within your own particular limits.
To compare and contrast this, instead of raising the wrist to be higher than the elbow, raise the elbow to be higher than the wrist. Can you feel the extra tension that has now entered the shoulder? That tension limits the mobility of the shoulder. It unbalances you as well because your shoulder has had to rise in order to bring the elbow higher than the wrist and, I’m willing to bet, that for a lot of people listening to this podcast, if someone was to stand in front of you and look at you, they’d see that you’re now leaning to one side because of the raised shoulder. It’s very disruptive to your bio-mechanical structure, just by making the elbow too high.
That’s just a little exercise we did tonight in the class to show how Elbows Low works.
We (my Improvers group and I) were half-way through our second stab at playing the form tonight, and the weirdest thing happened. There was a shift in my single weight, and for a few moments, all I could feel was the contact I was making with the floor (which I’m normally aware of) … and nothing else.
My single weight’s not bad normally (it certainly stands up to scrutiny during class, which is a good start), but this was different. This was a connection with the ground that I’ve not come to before. I don’t know what it was, or how really to describe it, but I’m going to be looking out for it in future and seeing if I can achieve it again and study it further.
It’s been a while since I’ve published an article on here. Work has been manic to say the least. But an article in today’s Guardian has prompted me to write something :)
In “Intimate Secrets of Sarkozy’s fitness regime“, Guardian feature writer Jon Henley describes how pelvic floor exercises have helped the French President Nicholas Sarkozy lose weight and girth. Jon seems to think this sort of exercise is “innovative”. Pregnant women everywhere, pilates devotees and Tai Chi players know better :)
This exercise, known as pelvic floors, is designed to tone your core muscles, not just the perineum as suggested by Jon in his article. It improves the strength of your muscles around your centre of gravity, reduces (and often completely prevents) incontinence as you get older, and has a ‘corseting’ effect in narrowing the waist (provided you get rid of the love handles layered on top!). And, although it’s not something one normally talks about, it really does improve the sex lives of both sexes too.
In our school of Tai Chi, we do these exercises in three ways:
After lowering the centre of gravity, but before starting the Salute, we do 15 reps of the pelvic floor exercises. For each rep, we breath in (down into the belly) and relax, and then breath out and pull up at the same time. With each rep, we move from one point of the microcosmic orbit to the next.
During the form, we pull up the entire time.
After finishing the closing Salute, we do 15 more reps of the pelvic floor exercise. For each rep, we breath in (into the top of the chest) and pull up, and then breath out and relax at the same time. With each rep, we move from one point of the microcosmic orbit to the next.
Sadly, the Guardian’s article doesn’t have comments enabled, but with a bit of luck Jon has a Google Alert set up to track the propagation of his work around the ‘net, and will find this article eventually :)
At the start of our form, we give the following instructions:
Set your feet shoulder width apart, and in your own time, lower your centre of gravity. Tension below the belly button, relaxed above the belly button. Eyes looking forward, and the tongue up to the roof of the mouth. Attention on tan tien. Deep breathing in and out, contraction and expansion of your belly.
In the beginner’s class on Thursday, I was asked about the purpose of the tan tien. I normally give the following explanations:
It is a little bit below the belly button, and a little bit inside.
According to Western science, it is the centre of gravity for the human body.
According to Eastern philosophy, it is an important part of taoist internal alchemy.
But what exactly is taoist internal alchemy? That was an excellent follow-up question :)
I don’t practice taoist internal alchemy myself, as it’s something that isn’t part of the system handed down to me by my teacher. It wasn’t that my teacher didn’t believe in chi and its cultivation per se, it was simply the case that my teacher rightly believed that we have no place teaching things we cannot demonstrate and put to the test. As a result, my knowledge on the subject is simply theoretical, and I have no formal teaching in it myself.
Taoism is one of the oldest surviving philosophies in the world, best known through the great work the Tao te Ching attributed to Lao-tzu. At the core is the concept of The Way (the do in Japanese martial arts such as akido, iaido, judo and kendo) and how we can all find our own harmony with The Way. Practitioners of taoism are known as taoists. As a way of living, it has a lot to offer us Westerners, and it is said to be the underlying philosophy that Tai Chi is based on. (More on that in a later article!)
Man everywhere is obsessed with his own immortality, and taoists it turns out are not immune to this desire :) The difference I guess is that some taoists believe that real immortality is not only possible, has actually been achieved in the past (by such as Cheng San-feng, the legendary creator of Tai Chi). Just as western alchemists attempted to turn base metals such as lead into pure gold, so taoist internal alchemy is concerned with practices to turn the base energy into a refined spirit.
One of the practices of taoist internal alchemy is to turn ching (generative energy) into chi (vital energy), and then to turn the chi into shen (spiritual energy). The area we call tan tien in our class is actually the lowest placed of three separate tan tiens (the second is at the solar plexus, and the third between the eyebrows). The lower tan tien is used to refine ching (generative energy) into chi (vital energy); very appropriate from a western point of view given its location at our centre of gravity, at the place in Tai Chi where all our movement is controlled from.
This is a gross and decidedly ill-informed over-simplification of the subject, I must stress! Anyone interested in learning more should seek out a qualified instructor on the matter, or failing that start with reading Eva Wong’s translation of Cultivating Stillness.
I freely admit that I’m not all that comfortable talking about my own experiences with the mystical side of Tai Chi. Part of it comes from my teacher’s own understandable feelings on the subject, and part of it comes from my own training as a scientist and qualification as an engineer. There’s also the important matter that, if we tell our students what feelings to expect, the mind has a funny way of manifesting those feelings whether or not the work has been done to make them real! And, as if that wasn’t enough, I’m sure that there are some in our community who exploit students’ interest in and (dare I say) desire for such experiences. I do not want to become one of them, even unwittingly.
But what it comes down to is this. At the end of the day, how can you share your experiences with someone else? You can’t, not without a common frame of reference (a teaching tool I need to write a lot more about!) As teachers, it must be our role to direct our students through a programme of learning that will result in our students having these experiences for themselves. How to achieve that is perhaps the ultimate question of teaching, and it was the last question my teacher and I discussed before he left us.
And, as I experienced on Tuesday night watching my Improvers’ students explore the principle of Relax the Waist, on those rare occasions when we pull it off, there are few pleasures in life more satisfying :)
