The Island of Crete by Wolfgang Staudt

My focus at the Instructor Training this summer is making an attempt to help you bridge the gap between your breath and chi. While your breathing is irregular, erratic and not very strong or smooth, it’s almost impossible to bridge that gap.

If you can take a 20-second breath at least you will have a stable breath, which is the foundation necessary to make the link between your breath and chi. Twenty seconds will regulate many physiological functions within your body. So a 10-second inhale and 10-second exhale (20-second breath) is what you need to come in with–no matter how you do it–to at least have a shot at the chi work.

From here at this summer’s retreat  I’ll take you through two methods to help you bridge the gap between breath and chi:

1.  The first and easiest way is through the nervous system. Understanding what your breath does to your nervous system is important. Chi flows through your nerves, so if you can recognize what your breath does to your nerves, then it can become a method by which you feel your chi. Eventually it becomes possible to then feel your chi directly.

2.  Chi moves the fluids of your body: blood, synovial fluid, cerebrospinal and more. If your mind can enter your breath and feel the way in which the fluids inside your body move, you have a second way of understanding how breath, chi and your fluids are interrelated. Since chi is in your breath and your fluids, recognizing the movement of chi in your fluids can help you make the link.

Ultimately, however, the root through which a person experiences breath and chi happens at the level of the Heart-Mind. That is it happens at the depth of the mind–not on the surface of conscious thinking. It’s not a mathematical formula: I’m doing this, I’m doing that.

Feeling your chi comes from a much deeper place inside of you. Before you can actually get how chi enters and leaves your body as your breath, you also need to allow your breath to really enter your body. So I’ll spend a lot of time helping you become conscious of your breath entering your body.

If you can prepare by working up to a 20-second breath by the time you arrive, you’ll have the stability you’ll need to make the leap possible. I make no promises though.

Of course Taoist Longevity Breathing involves moving your belly, sides, kidneys and really moving the diaphragm, so make all parts move as you practice for best results.

I hope to see you on Crete! For more info click here to learn more.

During the Chinese New Year of 1986, almost 25 years ago, around February, I was asked, along with my wife, if we would do something for China National Television on their English Sunday program.

At the time, this program was approximately an hour long and it was watched by approximately 500 million people in China. A few days before this, I was trying to figure out what I would do for the TV show, even though I was being asked to appear because I was known as a western Tai Chi Master in Beijing.

That was quite unusual for a foreigner at that time. As a matter of fact, to the best of my knowledge, there was nobody else who was thought of as such, and unlike today it was more difficult for a westerner to live in China much less study there. Anyway, it was an honor to be asked to appear on CCTV, or the the China National Television, and I wanted to make a good impression. My wife decided to recite a poem, named Down the Plughole, which is a rather funny piece.  I was then asked to demonstrate something with tai chi, I think because it was a novelty even seeing a westerner do tai chi at the time.

I asked my teacher Liu Hung Chieh a day or two before the show what should I do. What he said was do something that’s good for the Chinese people. Well, I thought about this and it occurred to me that most Chinese people in Beijing and generally in China were not happy people.

As a matter of fact, they were rather miserable. They had just gone through the cultural revolution which finished several years before. Most in the west have no understanding of what went on in China during that time. The fact is during the cultural revolution, it was at least as bad as the worst of Hitler’s Germany.  So, given what the general Chinese population had just come through, I decided what would be good for the Chinese people is something that would lighten them up a bit.

Tai Chi in those day was never thought of as a dance. As a matter of fact, if you called Tai Chi a dance in China, that was probably the strongest way you could possibly insult them because it meant the Tai Chi had absolutely no substance whatsoever. In general dance was thought of as a frivolous thing. I am talking here about the dance done in clubs and for enjoyment, not the professional ballet or other advanced forms.

Tai Chi was considered to be something quite serious and valuable. It was considered an advanced healing art to be studied with professional masters. I figured I would present tai chi in a different manner, one that was not so serious.

At that time, one of the top rock singing groups, I think it was called the Bronski Beats or something like that, had a song that was incredible bouncy. What I decided was once they started filming me, after my interview was over, I was going to first do a bit of wu style tai chi to this Braskey Beats song, first doing tai chi but then moving with the song while basically dancing the tai chi movement. Well, so what happened?

I went on the show, which again had a massive viewer base once the show aired this became quite a phenomena in China. Of course I had no intention of starting the Tai Chi Disco mini-trend. Apparently to the best of my knowing for the next couple of years, people would turn on this song and would start doing Tai Chi. And when they were doing Tai Chi they would start dancing. I thought this was rather funny.

It was a little bit like the way there was a thing in the seventies called kung fu fighting, which had nothing to do with kung fu, but it made a great song. Anyway, this is how Tai Chi Disco was born in China, even if for only a short time. We came across the clip in our archives and have posted it here for your pleasure. So that’s the story of Tai Chi Disco.

Who knows maybe one day Tai Chi Disco or Tai Chi Dancing will once again catch on in America and in Europe?

Sumatran Tiger Photo by Brimac the 2nd

We are now getting ready to enter the Year of the Tiger and there are several things that I think are helpful for you as an update.  The first one is that we are nearing the end of winter, so within a month from now, during the winter period of time, the most valuable thing you can do is to rest so you have energy for the rest of the year.

This is so your system will regenerate, much like you leave a field fallow in the winter so in the spring it can grow again.  Now that we’ve finished the bulk of the winter and we have less than a month left before the next phase starts, you want to start just like a person who has been very, very sleepy and is waking up, very slowly.

You want your body to continue to rest, but you want to slowly start waking it up so that, when the spring time comes, rather than it being a sudden jolt like a jolt of adrenaline, you gradually slide into the activity of spring.  This is again a basic Chinese thought, a basic Taoist thought.

Along with that, we’ve also just had the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Tiger, and there are several things about this related to this time of the year.  The first one is that one of the things the tiger is known for in China, besides being an extremely powerful animal is being very directly tied to your whole muscular skeletal system. This includes everything to do with your muscles and your ligaments, etc. Tigers are also known for their bones, which are extremely heavy.

Now, referencing tiger bones is used as a metaphor by tai chi masters. For example when someone hits you and if you really have tiger bones, then that means basically the person’s arm is going to bounce off you.  If they hit you with their hand, their hand is probably going to hurt, but you’re not.

It’s the last month of the winter and you’ve just entered the Year of the Tiger. Because of this deep inside your bones and deep inside your bone marrow the energy is focused on sinking your chi. This is so it not only sinks through the tissues of your body but it literally starts sinking first into your bone matrix, the actual bone, and eventually into the marrow itself.

You would focus on the sinking of the chi with any practice you choose, for example standing Qigong or Tai Chi.  this is very useful especially with standing postures because standing is a very good practice to do in the winter . They not only give you the rest you need but also help you have the transition between the rest period and the spring when your energy is going to start turning on like a light bulb.

During this period of time, during this next month, really focus on sinking your chi and see if you can get the feeling of your chi going beyond just the sense of your flesh and your blood but actually giving you some kind of sensation in your actual bones themselves.

This would be an excellent thing to do with this final phase of the winter. We’ll re-look at the subject of the tiger when we come to the actual springtime.

Death Valley (Photo by: H Dragon)

A lot of people don’t know this about me, but when I was young I was an avid reader. I could read a 500-page book in a day and a half or two and actually digest it. Then, I went through a long period where I didn’t read at all, especially not in English.

I didn’t particularly like fiction when I was young. In fact, I almost exclusively read non-fiction with two exceptions. I actually really liked  Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which is about the French Revolution. In junior high school, when I was 12, I picked up the book The Hobbit on a Friday afternoon and I had read the entire Lord of the Rings series before the weekend was out.

Even still,  I really didn’t care for fiction. I still find most fiction novels boring as hell.

One of things that I did when I came back from China, at some point in the 90’s, was pick up the book Dune by Frank Herbert because a friend of mine said that it was really cool. I found that there are many ideas in Dune that mirror those in Taoism…

The Dune Series and Taoism

I read a big chunk of the Dune series. It’s one of the few fiction books I’ve enjoyed, and there are a lot of things about the book that are very interesting. It has an immense number of quotes and ideas that either parallel Taoist philosophy or let’s just say they can appreciate the point of view–whether or not they agree with it.

I think there are a lot of things in the Dune series that are relevant to my blog subscribers and my students. I would say that my personal appreciation and the Taoist appreciation is that if anything is true you are going to find it popping up in all sorts of different places, times and ways. It isn’t like something is true only for this moment. Truth has a way of repeating itself throughout history.

Contrary to the idea that history begins at breakfast, it actually started before you were born.

So there are lots of points in the Dune book that are relevant. Frank Herbert is a great writer. His message is delivered in a very concise way and leads into some points with which Taoism is concerned. The guy hit the nail on the head on a lot of points.

Fear is the Mind Killer

The Dune series is based 10,000 years into the future. In the world at that time there is a small segment of the population called the Bene Gesserit. “The Bene Gesserit are a powerful and ancient order of women whose objectives and actions formed a critical element in the evolution of humanity and many of the major plot developments.” These women have, shall we say, taken all the esoteric sciences to the highest level and are able to do the most spectacular things with their body chemistry, such as literally changing it at will, and changing their biochemistry if they get a disease.

The Bene Gesserit are trained from a young age and part of their training is learning to tame and use the mind. This of course is one of the purposes of Taoist meditation.

In the Dune series, when fear appears, the Bene Gesserit would repeat an incantation to help move their minds past the fear. The Litany goes as follows:

“I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.”

Now this is a nice way to look fear in the face and to dissipate its effects when faced with a dangerous situation. It helps to focus the mind inward and to have courage. However, this incantation does not really get to the root of fear and how it arises…to get to that point you have to go much deeper.

Two Perspectives of Fear

When it comes to going beyond fear you can use two different methods. One is the method of hypnosis, which is offered in a lot of the self-help material these days. The other, which is very different, is the method of meditation.

The perspective of hypnosis, to a great degree, uses mind tricks for dealing with fear at a moment in time. Repeating “The Litany Against Fear” in Dune induces a hypnotic state, so as to allow fear to wash over you.  That lasts for a few seconds but it doesn’t necessarily get you beyond fear. It is useful in the moment, but the change is not everlasting, for that we must dig deeper.

From the perspective of Taoist meditation, to get beyond fear you have to go to a place where the mind simply has the ability to stay open–allowing anything to flow through it.  Anything occurring in your outer environment does not close down that space within your mind. Fear is essentially a closing down of the space at the center of the mind and spirit or soul (depending on which term you care to use).

It is impossible to go beyond fear permanently by only having this trick or that trick that can help you for a few minutes. To get beyond fear, you essentially must change your internal landscape. So when fear attempts to grab hold of you, you reside in a place where it can’t.

Part of the process to get beyond fear will involve strengthening your kidneys. At a biological level, at least in terms of the way the Taoists and Traditional Chinese Medicine thinks of fear, it’s essentially a bodily reaction that is rooted in your kidneys.

Once your kidney’s are strong, then that fear-trigger won’t be activated as much. You can then go beyond fear to where the space of the mind, the openness of the mind, the flow of the mind is able to maintain that which allows spontaneity.

Real Fear and Fake Fear

If fear arises it may be a real fear, such as I’m going to walk over a cliff, then you just step back. Or, if a car is moving toward you at a high speed, you must be motivated to move out of the way. But that’s not really the kind of inner fear I’m discussing.

It’s the kind of fear that eats away at your insides. Real fear is nothing more than heightened awareness. That is awareness of a real situation and the fear that arises to protect you.

It is important to recognize that most fear has nothing to do with reality. Most of the time people are afraid of things that will never happen to them. This is an effect of the mainstream media and news constantly bombarding the public with negative images. This puts people in a weakened state of fear and decreases the immune system of the body. Often your mind picks up these pictures and replays them, creating a story about them. This is not useful nor is it good for the body.

So to go beyond fear, one of the first steps is to recognize that fear which is truly helpful: It makes you more aware, in real situations, in real time. Inside your fear is something that says, “Wait a minute, I think we have to do something sensible and prudent here,” rather than running around like a chicken with your head cut off, or becoming paralyzed and ducking under a chair, hoping that everything will pass one day.

Next, to really go beyond fear, you must summon the courage to look at all the fears that are inside you. Fears arise from childhood experiences and from terrible events that have happened to you or that you witnessed.

When you find these fears you can use meditation to get to a place where you simply can move to the space of awareness. Otherwise, you’ll too easily go to a space that contracts your awareness into a tiny, little box that scares the living hell out you.

As you move into the space of awareness, you can then release what is not real. This is the path to finding a peace place inside. This is a destination that can be achieved through Taoist mediation.

Budda Dog (Photo by: Superfantastic)

Is the Tai Chi tipping point on the horizon or not?

Everybody who has been involved in tai chi in the West for the past 10-15 years has known that tai chi is probably going to reach a tipping point were it really reaches the masses; where tai chi really becomes known to the public rather than being some strange exercise that hippies practice.

The simple fact still remains most of the public know little of the tremendous benefits of tai chi, how tai chi works or how to learn tai chi. Lets connect Malcolm Gladwell, Swami Vichinanda,Jane Fonda and Bruce Lee with the Tai Chi Tipping Point…

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, he describes the “three rules of epidemics” to determine the conditions for something to go viral. What needs to happen for tai chi to meet these three rules and spread like crazy? And can we learn anything from the popularity of yoga in relation to tai chi?

Tai Chi Compared to Yoga

Yoga had been around in the West for over 115 years where, in contrast, tai chi has been around for less than half that time or about 40 years.

A little known fact is that the West’s awareness of yoga is generally considered to have been brought over by Swami Vichinanda in 1893 at the Parliament of World’s Religions. Yoga’s growth path was unremarkable for most of those years, until about 1980. So what caused yoga to take off in the 1980’s?

Well one reason is that some celebrities started promoting it. One of the foremost was Jane Fonda, who is also considered to have founded the aerobics movement. She is a Hollywood star and clearly one of the sex symbols of her generation. So when she started practicing and promoting yoga many women got on board or more literally on the mat.

It is no great surprise that Yoga exploded in part because of Hollywood publicity as many trends are created there.

The Three Rules of Epidemics

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell says that there are Three Rules of Epidemics. Here is a short summary of the three rules:

1. “The Law of the Few”—Gladwell states: “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” He goes on to talk about three types of people. Connectors link people up together. These people have massive social networks. Mavens are people who connect us with new information. Finally there are Salespeople who are good at persuading us to try or buy.
2. The Stickiness Factor—Stickiness is related to how a message is remembered and passed on. How much does something become the “topic of the day”?
3. The Power of Context—Context is an important area taking into consideration the environment and conditions that would need to be present for a trend to go viral, such as demographics and value systems.

If we look the promotion of Yoga by Jane Fonda, we could say that she is a connector, a maven and a saleswoman all in one.  In the early 1980’s one of the big new inventions was the VCR, which dramatically helped the trend to become “sticky.” Finally, the population demographics of the baby boomer generation fit the slot where yoga and aerobics would be appealing. So we could say that yoga definitely meet all of Gladwell’s rules.

Who Does Tai Chi in China?

If we look at tai chi in China, 50 percent of all people who practice tai chi are over the age of 50. Tai chi is known for incredibly regenerating people’s bodies—making them healthy—and being one of the best longevity anti-aging programs (see my book Tai Chi: Health for Life).

Tai chi is the only non-impact exercise in the world that has a dramatic track record for reversing the aging process. Nothing else has the track record of tai chi. But still, up until the 1960’s when tai chi came to the United States, tai chi was an odd “thing” out there.

Some think tai chi is just a martial art, which is just not the truth. Others will say tai chi is a dance, and of course that is not the truth either.

What can be said in the current times is that most people associate tai chi with being somewhat good for your health. It is also becoming more well-known that tai chi is also good for all kinds of illnesses, including diabetes, arthritis and fall prevention.

However, what has been missing in the tai chi tipping point equation in terms of context in the West is very simple: The baby boomer generation population in America and Europe is only now starting to reach an age where tai chi has real appeal. When you are in your 20’s and 30’s the idea of a low-impact exercise for longevity just doesn’t have the same attraction as it does for a person as they age . When you’re young, you more typically climb mountains, run long distances and do other higher-impact sports.

The baby boomer population has finished running their marathons, buying houses, tried and given up psychedelics, and gone through the householder stage . They are now just entering a completely new phase whereby health, extending their life and releasing stress is of utmost importance. They want to see their grandkids grow up.

Enter Tai Chi

To some extent, whatever the baby boomer generation decides to do, the entire society follows because they constitute something like 30-40 percent of the population. As a result a lot of money follows the boomers along with marketing and paradigm shifts.

The tai chi community has been saying for about 10 years, maybe even 15 years, “Well, ya know the baby boomers are about 40, 45, and 50.” Well right now we are in the slot because the first wave is coming when they start hitting 60.

Baby boomers will finally be confronted with their own mortality. The earlier vanities of youth will flip into the cold hard realities of getting older. This is when many may jump on board with tai chi. As I have said elsewhere, tai chi really is the foremost preventative healthcare solution on the planet. Here is the demographics in the US from the year 2000.

You can see from the graph the bulge that represents the boomers (note this chart is 10 years old). We’ve now reached the point where the first edge of baby boomers has tweaked over the 60-years-old bracket. The largest segment is just reaching 50, which just happens to be the same age in China when most people start practicing tai chi.

What makes Tai Chi sticky?

So what could create “The Stickiness Factor”? You’d have to be living in a cave not to recognize that for the past 15 years the level of general stress in America and Europe is escalating to the point where even medical associations are saying that it is the greatest cause of disease.

Tai chi is the one exercise that actually focuses on relaxing your nerves; yoga doesn’t even really do that. With the exception of yin or Taoist yoga, most yoga is not taught with releasing the nerves as a primary focus.

Tai chi (and also qigong of which tai chi is a subdivision) systematically trains your nervous system to relax. Tai chi is about relaxation. Relaxation is the opposite of stress and stress is a fancy word for tension. Tai chi is an antidote for tension.

Tai chi’s main selling point is not that you are going to look good, but that you’re actually and truly going to feel better. And it’s not a psychological thing about “everybody loves me.” When you wake up with aches and the pains and stress that kills you, you don’t feel good.

People get hooked on tai chi when they hit the “aha” moment where they realize they have a fewer pains and also can relax the nagging thoughts and stressful events that overwhelm the system.

It can be said that a large number of people who start and continue practicing tai chi get REAL results or they wouldn’t bother with it. Tai chi works. It addresses the biggest issue of our times directly—relaxation to counter the stress. It also doesn’t take five years of practice five hours a day to feel results. You generally feel results rather quickly, especially if you are training with a qualified tai chi teacher.

I might also mention another important aspect that makes tai chi sticky. In most cases tai chi is practiced in groups. This in itself is “sticky” because people like to get together, socialize and practice together. I have seen time and time again long-term bonds and friendships form in tai chi groups. As more and more tai chi groups form, the entire tai chi movement will build.

For tai chi to take off, it will need to be a grassroots trend. I have witnessed it happening in both China and America.

The unblocking move is that people have to realize that they can do tai chi in gym clothes. You don’t have to wear some fancy silk outfit. As tai chi makes it way into gyms and parks the momentum will pick up and it will spread quickly. The last point here is that tai chi does not generally require a massive investments – most tai chi classes are affordable and compared to the cost of healthcare tai chi is a great bargain.

Learning from the Kung Fu Boom

So we have covered “The Stickiness Factor” and also “The Power of Context”- both are in line to have tai chi go viral. But the last piece is Gladwell’s “The Law of the Few” rule which basically answers the question, “Who is going to promote tai chi and bring it to the masses?”

If we go back to the yoga movement what drove the popularity was NOT a bunch of fancy new yoga studios, nor its century-long history. It was the simple fact that famous people promoted it via the media and Hollywood – lots of videos and DVDs were sold. Hollywood integrated it into their culture and sent it directly into your living room.

We can also look to another fitness mega-trend that went over the tipping point in the 1970’s when martial arts, especially kung fu, boomed. Two things in the media and Hollywood ignited the kung fu boom.

The first was the TV series Kung Fu with David Caradine (who wasn’t even a martial artist, but that even didn’t matter). It was the fantasy, the illusion that got people interested. Half of the stuff that he was saying, which people thought was the Shaolin or the Buddhist, was actually straight out of  Tao Te Ching. It came from Taoism.

Interesting the one thing all Taoists have in common is tai chi. The ideas were powerful and they still are today.

The second factor was Bruce Lee coming onto the scene. He did the big movies with the hyper emotions of youth—anger, angst, and all the explosion of those ideas. The kung fu and karate trend exploded everywhere. I won’t comment on the fighting skills but for entertainment check out this clip of Bruce Lee:

So the missing piece is to have a celebrity, TV series or large movie in America that features tai chi in a big way. The tai chi craze will not be the same kind of an emotional explosion as the martial arts trend—one driven by youth. Nor will it be about looking good or stretching.

It’s going to be a different kind trend. It will be more like, “I’ve got to do something about all this stress that is destroying my life from the inside out.” “I want to live longer to see my grandkids grow up and not be in pain.”

Everybody knows this stress and tension exists internally. On a day to day level most know they are hurting, they can’t sleep and their nerves are on the edge. Most people in our culture simply don’t have a way of relaxing in the moment.

The Tai Chi Tipping Point Slot

Real tipping points are usually caused by a real need. We’re in the tai chi tipping point slot now. The only thing that’s missing is the TV show and/or a movie with some celebrity endorsement.

So now it’s a question of the first media channel recognizing the power of tai chi and who will become the poster child for the tai chi mega-trend.

What celebrity out there is willing and ready to take this forward? Who do you think would be the best person to promote tai chi? When do you think this will happen?

All of it is interesting and shall be fun to see unfold…I welcome your comments below.

Going for it! (Photo by: nimish_gogri)

7 Stages of Learning Tai Chi

Having taught tai chi and qigong to more than 15,000 students, I have come to a deep understanding of seven distinct stages that my students have gone through in learning and adopting tai chi into their daily lives.

Stage 1: Starting the Tai Chi Search

Students talk to their friends and health and fitness practitioners. They read tai chi books and tai chi research on the Internet about practices that can help them achieve their goals. They find something that rings true intellectually or emotionally—it seems right, it makes sense or they think it will solve their particular problems. They look for intellectual confirmation to bolster their view. They narrow their choices to a few.

Stage 2: Seeing What Fits

In this stage, people research what tai chi teachers and tai chi classes are available. They may take an introductory tai chi class or weekend seminar and talk with different tai chi students and teachers. They may purchase a tai chi video and try a practice on their own. They find out about the challenges involved and then must make a decision if it is something they want to do.

Stage 3: Committing to a Tai Chi Class

In this stage, people commit to a tai chi class several times a week. External factors matter: the setting of the tai chi class, the personalities of the teacher and other students.

Stage 4: Practicing Tai Chi Outside of Class

There is an ancient phrase that tai chi teachers like to quote: “The teacher leads you to the gate, but only you can pass through.” At some point, students must take tai chi unto themselves and make it their own.

That begins with practice tai chi outside of class. The tai chi teacher will show what the next learning phase is and ask students to practice in order to progress. At first tai chi beginners will feel happy to learn the basic tai chi movements and get better at them. But, the bigger challenge is to learn them well enough to feel their impacts deep inside the body and mind and develop the new inner rhythms that will lead to adopting tai chi as a daily practice.

When students begin to practice tai chi outside of class their practice is often erratic. There is no support from their tai chi teacher or other students when they encounter moments of forgetfulness or awkwardness.

There are also the very real challenges of encountering negative emotions without anyone to provide guidance. In addition, there is the inherent slowness of the process in learning and remembering the tai chi moves and feeling the benefits. The best strategy for success at this stage in learning tai chi is for students to find a consistent time and place to practice—a time that is held apart and becomes routine and inviolable in a place where the tai chi practice cannot be interrupted.

Stage 5: Committing to Tai Chi Mastery

Students have stuck to the tai chi class long enough to learn basic tai chi movements and have developed the practice habits that bring about new internal rhythms. While practicing tai chi, there will be breakthrough moments when new plateaus are reached. In these moments students suddenly feel more agile and alive; their minds and spirits have moments of great clarity and focus; they feel moments of total relaxation combined with a new ability to handle tensions and anxieties. They recapture the sheer joy of learning they once had as children.

Stage 6: Facing Challenges

Chinese energy practices inherently come with inner difficulties to overcome and pass through. Plateaus may be followed by periods where not much seems to happen, the practice seems to be going nowhere and self-sabotage is likely. This is where tai chi students feel their negative karma and the effects of the accumulations of negative emotions.

They may quit just before a new summit is reached and sink back into self-destructive habits. Tai chi brings them increasingly into contact with their ego and the flow of their energy. When they begin contacting that energy, for better or for worse, they will contact areas of their emotions or thinking that may make them feel out of control. When they start traveling in unfamiliar territory they might become uncomfortable and afraid of working through these feelings. They become fearful of what they may encounter and stop practicing tai chi.

One of the warning signs of self-sabotage is disassociation. Students do the tai chi movements on automatic pilot and remain unaware of their effects. They will have to make peace with themselves before they can pass through it and head towards the sublime. With diligence and perseverance students will build a solid tai chi foundation that will effectively and increasingly enable their practice.

Stage 7: Re-inspiration

In the period that follows a plateau or an encounter with a self-destructive habit, students need approach their practice gently and find ways to challenge themseves with small successes so that their tai chi practice inspires them again.

They might try:

• Focusing on relaxing particular body parts as they do the tai chi movements, such as softening their shoulders or relaxing their stomachs.
• Making their tai chi movements more connected and smooth.
• Doing tai chi movements extremely slowly.
• Practicing one tai chi movement over and over.
• Relaxing into one tai chi posture and hold it for a minute or more.

Thinking of ways to continuously re-inspire themselves will keep the tai chi practice fresh and alive. Satisfaction must come from the inside and increasingly this is what the practice of tai chi can provide.

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