Taoist Master Liu Hung Chieh and Bruce Frantzis in the 1980's

Last week I was interviewed by China Radio International (CRI) about my experiences in China in the mid 1980′s. Please enjoy:

Born and raised in the USA, Bruce Frantzis spent a total of 11 years in China in the 70s and 80s. He was one of the few foreigners studying martial arts in this …
english.cri.cn/7146/2011/12/05/2001s670230.htm

Stay tuned for a few more blog posts from China.

Bruce Frantzis in the Tai Chi Single Whip Posture

Tai chi can be used as a powerful form of Taoist moving meditation, which starts with balancing the emotions—that is, the emotional energy body. Tai chi can also be practiced to acquire martial arts skill and as a health system.

The latter is what you might see people doing in the park. Although tai chi can also be practiced as meditation, almost all forms widely available are NOT directly connected with a meditation tradition. So if you practice tai chi, you will want to be aware of these distinctions.

Since the Wu Style Tai Chi Instructor Training is coming soon, I thought it would be useful to talk about tai chi and how it connects with emotional well being and specifically the Taoist meditation tradition.

Tai chi done for martial arts or health may have meditative aspects because, well, that is the nature of tai chi. Then, there is tai chi that is part of a more complete system that leads to meditation, which is almost completely unknown in the West.

In this case, tai chi becomes a part of a much larger game: that of spirituality.

When you practice spiritual tai chi, you will inevitably have to work with your emotional body.

What Is Meditation?

Many people have different ideas about that which can be called “meditation,” so if you want to make the distinction of practicing tai chi for meditation, you must start by examining the question: What is meditation?

Bruce Frantzis and Energy Arts Senior Instructor Brian Cooper practicing Tai Chi Push Hands

In the Taoist Water Tradition, the practitioner aims to peel away all that is false, so it’s helpful to consider that which meditation is NOT.

Just having a calm mind is not meditation. Yes, having a calm mind is important to meditate, but it does not encompass all that meditation can do for you. So, in the same vein, meditation is not simple stress reduction either.

Today, many people use the term meditation when they are really aiming for peace of mind and stress relief. These are important benefits of meditation, but they are not the end game.

So if meditation is not a calm mind or a state devoid of stress, then what is it?

From the Taoist perspective, genuine meditation is that which leads you toward complete spiritual awakening.

Meditation practices can calm you down and sooth unbalanced emotions—to a certain degree—but if you wish to resolve what lies at the depth of your emotions, traumas, essential dissatisfaction with life and the blockages lodged deep inside your unconscious mind, only then can you begin the real work of meditation.

Smoothing Your Emotions

In terms of a meditative practice, all tai chi encompasses meditative movement, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has the power to penetrate to the core of your being.

You need a specific methodology for this depth of practice, which goes far beyond thinking about being relaxed, releasing daily stress and feeling better about yourself.

A tai chi practitioner could manifest extremely smooth movement that looks like what many people would call meditation and yet the person could still be a raging volcano inside and/or spiritually disconnected.

The classic example within the tai chi tradition is Yang Cheng Fu’s older brother, Yang Shao Ho, from the third generation of the Yang family. He was small, a dramatically better tai chi practitioner than Yan Cheng Fu and in terms of martial arts, the guy was just a fire cracker. Well, he ended up committing suicide. This is not the sign of an emotionally healthy person.

Likewise, if we look back to the lifetime of the original Yang founder and his two sons, one of his sons tried to hang himself as a result of the pressure he felt from his father to become an exceptional martial artist. Fortunately, he did not succeed, but obviously he was not emotionally healthy even though he trained tai chi at a very high level.

Both of these individuals could probably take more pressure in their daily lives than most of us could imagine in the West, but at the depth of their emotions, something was rotten or shall we say unresolved.

A genuine spiritual person, who has gone through the purification process, the process of clearing out, balancing and releasing everything at the absolute depth of their emotions, does not share this negative quality – they have done the inner work to heal or resolve the inner blocks.

Some people, who are exceptionally competent in the world (business, family, government) and appear to be smooth on the surface, are actually emotionally disturbed at their core. Meditative practice will help them to cope with the stresses involved with living a life, but to truly discover happiness, balance and harmony, they will have to deal with the deeper emotional energies. Few practices offer the ability to do this, Tai chi does.

Tai Chi to Balance Your Emotions

Bruce Frantzis and Energy Arts Senior Instructor Paul Cavel

All the major styles of tai chi—Yang, Wu, Chen, Hao and combination styles—can help you deal with surface-level emotions, calm you down, release the stress lodged inside your nervous system and maintain your overall health and well-being.

Attaining these health and emotional benefits are the reasons why 95 percent of all people practice tai chi.

However, if you want to practice a style of tai chi that has within it a meditation tradition, then the style you choose is critically important. The style matters.

The only style for which I’m aware that has a meditation aspect is the Wu style of Tai Chi. Although I’m also a lineage holder in the Yang style, I teach the Wu style taught to me by my teacher Liu Hung Chieh,  a Taoist master, almost exclusively for this reason.

Many people have asked me to teach the Yang style since I came back from China in the 1980s. However, I’ve always focused on the Wu style because I learned the whole Taoist meditation tradition within it, which, ultimately, is more valuable for people than obtaining any-high performance characteristics to become a superlative martial artist.

I should mention that I’m not referring to the Wu style martial arts tradition. My teacher Liu studied with Wu Jien Chang, the founder of the Wu style who also happened to be a practicing Taoist.

However, he never taught the Taoist meditation material within his tai chi form. He incorporated what he knew for his personal practice, but Liu learned the Taoist meditation aspect separately while living in Sichuan Province for 10 years.

I once had a conversation with Yang Shou Zhong, who was the great grandson of the original Yang. We were moving furniture one weekend, and I asked him about meditation.

He said, “Look, I can’t tell you about it. My family has never practiced Taoist meditation.”

At that time, I assumed that he had studied Taoist meditation because he was an exceptional tai chi student. He confirmed that the Yang family had never done Taoist meditation with, “We practice qigong and there are parts of qigong in martial arts that have great similarities to Taoist meditation, but our system is based on martial arts and qigong—not meditation.”

When I studied with Feng Zhi Qiang (Feng Zhiqiang) in China, he was pretty much the top Chen style practitioner at that point. He is particularly famous for his Push Hands skills and created a well-respected short form. I once made a reference to the Chen style and meditation, and he stopped me, “No, the Chen style is not meditation. It’s qigong that can lead you in the direction of meditation. If you only want to learn meditation, you must go to a meditation master.”

He made it very clear that the Chen style did not have a meditation tradition. Like Yang, he left no ambiguity.

I am just reporting what I found from those I learned from in China. Can you practice any style of tai chi and integrate meditation. Absolutely, yes.

However, traditionally I found the Taoist meditation tradition completely integrated within the Wu Style form. That is now what I teach. The Wu Style has smaller movements enabling you to focus on what is happening inside (rather than larger external movements).

It should be obvious that each style has its own special characteristics–which is why there are different styles. Meditation can be a key feature of the Wu Style with the right teacher. Spiraling movements would be a key feature of the Chen Style. It depends what you are looking for in your practice.

Two Stages of Tai Chi as Meditation

If you want to practice tai chi as a spiritual art, then the first stage of practice is about releasing stress—just like all training in Taoism. Then, the “enlightenment process,” as we’ll call it, can begin from this space. Just as you must learn how to read and write in primary school before you can take on the more advanced work in later years.

Ordinary tai chi, or any form of tai chi that is not leading toward the enlightenment process or the depths of spirituality, cannot really be called meditation.

Even still, ordinary tai chi can balance the energy channels of your body, and the energy moving between your internal organs and glands. So with that tai chi can positively influence negative emotions.

Then, again, emotions can be triggered by more than a biological response if you have underlying anger, fear, grief—you name it. If you have more of these underlying negative emotions, then, generally, it will take very little to make you feel bad. You may become prone to emotional outbursts or implosions because there is confusion in your energy channels, the energy moving between your internal organs may not be moving smoothly, glandular secretions can be interrupted—basically, everything in your body is out of whack.

So, for example, if you were having a bad hair day, you may have just put on a hat and let it ride, but instead you find yourself tearing out your hair and going berserk. Let’s not even consider what might happen if that guy on the road cuts you off again! My point is the way in which the energy inside your body is working can make you prone toward a happy face or an unhappy face.

Ordinary Tai Chi: How Healthy Is It?

If you practice tai chi as an ordinary art, then you have to consider the underlying principles of that form and the ways in which your practice can affect your system.

For example, if you practice any form of tai chi with very, very slow-motion movements, the question is: Will it lock into your system a depressive mode? Moving very slowly can bring on the symptoms of depression for someone with the proclivity. However, that person could practice the same form in a way that could lift the depression.

An Archive Training Picture from 1994

Take a person who practices a lot of Push Hands or the Chen style with its many explosive movements who also has a tendency toward rising anger. Well, anger and explosiveness are tightly physiologically linked. How can you practice in a way that you don’t incite the anger?

A good teacher is going to make all the difference in this situation because the necessary adjustments can be made based on an understanding of the internal mechanisms at play.

Yang Sho Ho, who committed suicide, could manifest incredible explosive energy, throwing people against walls when pushing hands. He used to break the bones of his practice partners all the time when he pushed hands with them. The anger went to the extreme, and all extremes turn to their opposite.

When yang goes to its extreme, it turns yin and when yin goes to its extreme, it turns yang. The yang of all that explosiveness set him up for the depression that followed.

Now we have a much bigger issue though—depth of emotion. Some emotions get lodged in the subconscious mind, very deep, self-destructive emotions that can make people completely dysfunctional. Ordinary tai chi can smooth it out a bit by balancing the energy of the body, but the internal mechanisms also need a way of releasing and clearing. So the second stage is when we approach tai chi as a meditation and this goes much deeper to look at and clear emotional blockages.

Clearing Emotional Blockages

Taoist meditation employs two techniques for rooting out and clearing negative motions. The first is a general cleansing and the other is used to deal with a specific emotion.

Even if you have a specific problem—depression, fear, greed, insecurity, extreme arrogance, or a really horrible event that happened in your life—you can just continue on clearing out everything in general until eventually you get rid of the problem.

However, for some people, they may want or need to go for the specific problem to get some relief from the fear, grief, pain, etc. that their experiencing.

If you have a giant boil on your arm, you can try to improve the health of your skin, but it’s going to make a lot more sense to choose a treatment that goes straight for the boil at that moment in time. In the Water method of Taoism, Lao’s Tse’s tradition, you can make use of agendas when dissolving for specific problems. I have written several books about Taoist meditation and agendas so I can’t go into it here. What you can do is combine the Taoist Meditation methods with your tai chi.

Practicing Tai Chi as Meditation

Maybe it’s because I’m growing older, but I’ve come to realize that the greatest problems that plague people have nothing to do with their health. I continue to teach all of the health and martial arts applications for tai chi. Saying this, more and more I am offering the meditation tradition in my trainings because I feel this is going to be the most useful tool for people as they develop their tai chi practice.

This summer, I’ll teach a month-long instructor training on the Wu Style Short Form, where I’ll introduce more elements of Taoist meditation in the Wu style of tai chi, going deeper than I have in previous trainings. Hope to see you there or at a future retreat.

Tai Chi Training this summer

Good Chi,
Bruce

Hi folks,

I am now on the road and already in Europe. I’ll be teaching soon and look forward to seeing everyone, especially for the Wu Style Instructor Training, something I have not done for about 10 years.

If you can’t make the whole training I invite you to come for a week or a weekend event. It will be fun and we have a great group attending.

If you are a student of Energy Arts, qigong or tai chi, you probably already realize that one of the fundamental principles is these practices are based on moving energy through the meridian lines of the body. With qigong practices like Dragon and Tiger Medical Qigong you learn to actually feel the chi or energy move through your body.

Understanding where acupuncture points and meridian lines are is also very useful for Tai Chi. In fact anything that deals with Chinese Medicine, including the internal martial arts, always has an energetic component. One of the primary components of the 16 neigong (internal energy work) is the secondary channels of the body, which includes the acupuncture channels.

I recently ran into an elder in the acupressure field, Michael Reed Gach, while I was having a drink in a local coffee shop. He has been writing and sharing knowledge for over 30 years and is the author of the best-selling book Acupressure Potent Points and also has some great acupressure charts (one of which is on the wall in the Energy Arts Inc office). You can check out his personal blog here. If you want to study acupressure points and meridians on your own, check-out Michael’s package here:

Acupressure Home Study Pack

I asked Michael to say a few words on the subject for this blog post:

Acupressure Potent Points have a high electrical conductivity at the surface of the skin, and thus conduct and channel healing energy most effectively. This is why the most potent healing energy work uses acupressure points.

The 12 Meridians of Traditional Chinese Medicine are the body’s healing energy pathways. Meridian massage therapy moves this life energy through the meridians to improve flow and balance. Acupressure and Acupuncture charts show where the meridian lines are on the body. The points are where vital energy gets blocked on the meridians, and where you can most effectively release the resulting tension, numbness, or pain. As healing energy flows through the meridians, it governs blood circulation and harmonizes all functions of the body. Studying the meridian pathways and Acupressure points for transmitting Qi healing energy is key to transformational energy work, including therapeutic touch and massage therapy.

I think it’s a great thing if any of my students simply know more about the acupuncture lines and have some familiarity with them. If you don’t, you can get away without it. But if you want to go for the upper end, it’s a very good idea to do so. When I was a qigong tui na practitioner I studied all this extensively.

Stay tuned for some more posts in the next few weeks – the next post will be on Tai Chi and the Emotions.

Everything furthers,

Bruce

Black Hole Simulation – CRON

I can speak from my experience about what the traditional approach is and the eclectic way I went about it, and the essential difference between an eclectic traditional approach and the approach of the dabbler, who just knows a bit of this and a bit of that.

The first issue is: why become eclectic? In some sense you become eclectic so that you can gain a really specific perspective on something.

You may want to do tai chi, but as an eclectic, you may want to do a tai chi specifically for fighting. For example, I did Praying Mantis and 8 Drunken Immortals. Doing these showed me some martial aspects of tai chi I needed to pay attention to rather than ignore. But I went deeply into them. I didn’t just skim the surface with them.

Digging Your Well

There is a very old phrase from India about the desert: if you want to strike water don’t dig 20 wells ten feet deep, dig one well 200 feet deep. That sums up the approach that I’ve taken.

My principle was that if I was eclectic in several different things, in each one of them I dug a well 200 feet deep.

Many people say, “Well, you know, I’ll do this for a month or two, and I’ll kind of just do that for a workshop.” That approach only helps you get some idea of what each thing is. You still haven’t really done a particular thing until you start to get what its special point is, after several years. So, you really need to go deep to know something and that is generally not the approach of most New Age practitioners.

My experience has been that the traditional ways were all about getting right to the central issue of your practice. By going deep, I don’t mean reading about it. I mean doing your practice until it’s in your blood and in your bones.

Now, in purely intellectual terms, you want to read as widely as possible and apply the methods you would use for any form of research. However, the great trouble with a lot of information is that you may not be able to sort out what is the wheat and what is the chafe, what is relevant and what is minimally tangential.

Grounding the Knowledge in Direct Experience

This is a problem with the masses of information available: often much is not actually grounded in anything substantial.

Another example of this is my experience with Hatha Yoga. Originally, as background for qigong, I did the 300 postures of Hatha Yoga and a lot of Pranayama. But even before that I did the Yoga postures simply to become very flexible so I could kick in martial arts better, do judo better, do ground work and what not better. In one sense, learning the 300 hatha yoga postures can be seen as the traditional approach. From the eclectic view of wanting to know the whole subject of chi, this study was only a piece; it was not the whole thing.

Also, as a Taoist Priest, we went through a great number of subjects. Each one was leading to the other and we went deeper and deeper and deeper. It wasn’t that we just got a little information on each piece. We really went deep and that is the eclectic traditional approach.

Sometimes to understand something in its entirety, you have to come at it from many angles until you can see both what is and what is not so. But again I want to say that the eclectic approach of real traditionalists is not surface knowledge in each of the approaches. It is an incredible in-depth knowledge in each of the approaches, so that even if you work and study ten things, you become a “mini-master” in each of those ten things.

You are not just a beginning or intermediate student, you go down your path picking up whatever possible from wherever available until you really clearly get the essential point of the particular piece you are studying until you get it, unambiguously and with no nonsense.

Different Approaches in China

It was very main stream in all of China for some people to do only one thing for their entire life. Others even if they specialize in one thing, want to know what tangentially or directly connects to and enhances that one thing, or whatever number of things they really are focusing on. This approach can be very difficult.

So, the traditional eclectic approach in China is that in each and every part of your approach, whatever its inclusive different components, you would be virtually at the Master level, not a casual level. The purpose of all this was to become a super master a Grand Master or what in China they simply would call a real Master of the subject.

In this archive video from over 22 years ago I talk about the health benefits of tai chi, qigong and the internal martial arts.

The message has not changed over the years – although my hair has, some say for the better.

Please enjoy, like and share,

Bruce

Click here to learn about the upcoming Wu Style Short Form Tai Chi Instructor Training in England this summer.

Bruce teaching Tai Chi in Hawaii

How do you go from Tai Chi student to Tai Chi teacher?

The transition from being a tai chi practitioner to a tai chi teacher or certified instructor can take lots of time and practice. Anything that has any depth usually does.

Add to that the esoteric or spiritual aspect of tai chi, and there are a number of really important considerations that may not figure into the picture with other subjects. When you are teaching something that helps people go inward there are always things that come up both for you and the student.

Am I Good Enough to Teach Tai Chi?

Certification gives you the confidence to teach!

Some people feel that they’ll never be good enough to justify teaching. They could train for 15-20 years and still feel the same way.

So the first questions you must ask yourself are: Do I have a basic level of confidence? Do I have enough to offer my students that there’s no way, after training with me for few months or even years, that they’re going to be anywhere near my level of knowledge? Basically, what can you bring to the table?

There’s a great need for people to learn energy arts and other practices related to spirituality, health and the nature of the mind. We live in a time when people are clearly shredding at the seams–on some level or another.

So if you can do something to help your fellow human beings, it’s a good thing to do.

If what you’ve learned from the energy arts has helped you, and you have the confidence and desire to help somebody else, and you know your subject well enough, then teaching others can be a wonderful gift.

The money you could earn should not figure in your decision. Of course, you need to make money to live though and you’ll incur expenses to teach, so you must charge something. The general rule in a capitalistic society is that if people don’t give something, they also don’t value it.

The most common form of giving in our society is money, so that’s usually the exchange. It also frees the student from going through issues about whether they’re unworthy to learn.

Now the next question is, why should you teach?

Encouragement from a Tai Chi Master

Energy Arts Senior Instructor Elizabeth Woersing (www.taichi.de) & Bruce practicing Tai Chi Push Hands

I offer instructor certification programs throughout the US and Europe, and although the purpose is to prepare those who teach as their primary profession, I also get many students who come just to learn for their own practice.

I’ll teach you regardless, but I highly encourage everyone who puts in the level of effort required to certify at one of my trainings to go out and teach. More than anything else, it’s a means for helping our fellow human beings.

There is also a secret that anyone who has achieved success in any area knows: to get significantly better at anything you must teach to others. Teaching is the fast track to mastery.

You clarify what you really know and what you really don’t know. Once you learn what you don’t know then you can focus on those aspects in your own practice.

You must also become creative in teaching different types of people. You develop your ability to look at someone doing tai chi or qigong to see the internal and external movements and alignments.

As you do this, you hone your own practice. You must not only demonstrate how to do the movements but also teach it in a clear manner so that your students can also integrate it into their form.

I realize that for many, it’s not that easy to share of themselves. Teaching can really challenge you. Students can ask you all sorts of questions and some even test your ego. If your ego is put on the line, then you must recognize it and figure out what you’re going to do about it.

Are you going to try and resolve it? Will you try reasonable methods?

Teach to Develop Compassion

There’s no question that teaching provides the opportunity to develop your ability to be compassionate for others. Some students are royal pains, and it takes a lot of compassion to look at who a person is, where they are coming from and what you can do to help them.

On the other hand, some students are a joy to be around, they may even become your friends, so you will be utterly glad you have made their acquaintance. They may train with you for a temporary or long period of time.

Whatever the case, you must expand your personal compassion to teach others, which is an invaluable lesson in life. When is someone ready to do that? Each individual must answer this question on their own.

Basic Requirements for Teaching Tai Chi and Qigong

Passing on knowledge to future generations.

Beyond a willingness to teach, there are a few critical factors that influence good teachers of all skill levels.

Beginning Qigong Instructors

Some of the arts I teach are fairly simple. For example, Dragon and Tiger Medical Qigong is not as complex as the other qigong programs I offer.

So the right person, even if he/she has very little qigong background, might be able to attend an instructor training and basically be capable of teaching at the end of it. My hope is we will have many hundreds teaching this set in the coming years. That said most people who have Dragon and Tiger certifications have studied qigong for a minimum of three and five years.

I’ll be doing a Dragon and Tiger Medical Qigong course this summer in Boston at Brookline Tai Chi for those that are interested. This is not an instructor training but will be a good way to learn this important qigong exercise and prepare you for a future instructor training.

The people at the beginning level that I’ve certified tend to have a certain level of confidence and desire to help their fellow human beings. So I feel good about certifying them because I know they’ll do their best for their students. You have to start teaching somewhere to get on the teaching path.

Generally, the instructors in this group maintain busy schedules (often 9-5 jobs) and teach as a service to students looking to maintain their practice rhythm.

So they usually only offer classes one or two times a week, typically in a community center or a college. They might teach a workshop here and there, but their focus is not intensive training.

Beginner-to-Intermediate Qigong and Tai Chi Instructors

If you plan to teach more, make teaching a full-time profession, you need no less than five years experience under your belt. You must also have a great level of honesty about what you can do, and maybe more importantly, what you can’t do.

The type of person who fits this requirement usually starts teaching because they think it’s such a cool thing that they really want other people to know about it. They generally like to share what will benefit others and they naturally grow into a teaching position over time.

That said, most of the instructors I certify that teach on a more regular and in-depth basis have ten years experience or many years more. They are passionate about the internal energy arts and devote their lives to helping people in a wide range of health-care professions.

The Teaching Trap

The danger can be when instructors get really positive feedback, they start believing that they are wonderful and can start teaching with an attitude to match. Many do it. At the end of the day, this approach slows down personal progress, and it’s clearly not the best way to go about it.

If you actually are having a positive effect on people, then do the best you can and slowly recognize that you have an ego. Recognize that the more you reduce it, the happier a human being you will be, and the less mental and emotional dissatisfaction you will suffer. This is true for your whole of your life–not just teaching.

We live in a culture where many people are satisfied with taking a weekend workshop and then going out to teach. When I trained in the martial arts, there were students who would receive their green belt and then go around acting as though they were fifth-degree black belts. They would push people around and do things for which they weren’t qualified.

I obviously would never recommend this approach but encourage you to dig your well deep, putting in the practice time required for excellence.

Many people will be satisfied with learning something, trying it out for awhile and making some money from it. Teaching the internal arts is about a lifelong pursuit for personal development though.

I love martial arts and equally love teaching people martial arts. It comes easy for me.

I also love studying chi and teaching people about chi. However, it requires much more energy to teach people about chi. It can be tiring because you must literally take energy and give it to someone else to show them how chi flows operate. I do it because I think it’s a good thing to do.

Teach! The World Needs You

When I certify people, I encourage them go out and teach. Just begin even if it is with family and friends because you may find you love it.

In fact, the primary reason why I offer instructor trainings is because we’re now in a time when there is a great need for people to help each other. This era of history is a bit of a dark period. Part of the journey in this particular moment in time is to offer gifts to people that bring more positivity to life.

Tai chi and Qigong help people feel more alive. What could be better than helping people become healthier and more aware of what is happening inside of themselves?

I encourage anyone who has been trained in an authentic lineage – either my own or with other knowledgeable teachers – to go out to teach because there is a lack of highly qualified teachers in the marketplace. Make a commitment to yourself to keep advancing your studies getting better and better every year.

If I’ve certified you in the past (or you get certified with me in the future), please go out and teach with my blessing. Just be sure you keep up with your re-certifications because it is essential to maintain standards and know that what you’re doing is the proper thing, the right thing for the people you encounter.

So if you have the desire, skill, patience and all the other elements needed to teach any given subject, especially the chi arts, then share it.

The world needs it. Do it as honestly as you can. Do it as well as you can. And don’t look back.

Keep practicing and keep teaching,

Bruce

Click here to Learn More about the 2011 Tai Chi Instructor Training in Brighton/Hove, England

Tai Chi and Traditional Chinese Medicine traditionally were connected and used together to treat patients in China.

From the perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine you can say there are two levels of healing injury, illness and diseases. The first involves hands-on energetic healing work, which can get rather complex with the thousands of meridian lines on the human body. The second involves specific qigong or tai chi exercises that can be taught and learned which often are sufficient to heal a health issue.

But the question is: Can tai chi really heal specific health issues rather than just maintain a good standard of general health and enhanced longevity? Also, how can Tai Chi evolve into a health and healing art in the West?

Prescribing Tai Chi and Qigong

There is a growing database of research on how Tai Chi is effective both as preventive medicine and to address specific health issues. See www.taichiresearch.com for a summary of studies.

Often an existing tai chi or qigong exercise set will do the trick for a specific health issue. There are many tai chi forms and qigong exercises that have been refined and developed for centuries enduring because of their effectiveness. One of these qigong sets Dragon & Tiger Medical Qigong is based on moving your hands along your acupuncture meridians.

Alternatively, a high-level professional can design a movement exercise in the same manner that an herbalist prescribes formulas, whereby the prescriptions change over the course of the disease, illness or injury healing.

In the same way, qigong tui na doctors and specialists create qigong movements or standing postures that enable a disease to be cured. This has been done for thousands of years in China.

The postures and movements to be done are largely determined by the stage of the disease and what is necessary and possible for a patient to arrive at the next stage of the healing process.

In my own training, I treated 10,000 patients as a qigong tui na doctor. Then, my teacher Liu shed more light on these methodologies since healing applications is one of the legacies of the Taoist lineage to which I belong.

But to get to the point where you can connect Tai Chi and Traditional Chinese Medicine requires intense and extended training. Lets look at what it takes.

Four Levels of Tai Chi Healing

We first have to consider the different categories of practitioners and what it is they each bring to the table in terms of health and healing.

At its baseline, tai chi is very useful as physical therapy: healing bad knees, backs, shoulders and joints. People who practice tai chi typically do so for the same reasons people go to physical therapy–only tai chi is incredibly sophisticated–much more so than most modern physical therapy programs.

The average tai chi instructor, who has reached some genuine level of proficiency in their own practice and who can teach, will be capable of explaining what most students need to heal themselves. This level of instruction will be sufficient for most students to heal minor injuries, aches and pains, and ward off small problems before they become big ones.

However, someone who knows Chinese medicine (i.e., a Chinese doctor) could take tai chi healing to the next level. That said most Chinese doctors (normally acupuncturists) don’t know how tai chi and qigong work as one of the eight specific branches of Chinese medicine. Just as a surgeon may not know about internal medicine or a guitarist may not know how to play the piano. In each case, they’re related, but they’re not the same.

So a trained professional of Chinese medicine will know about chi flows in the body and be able to offer a diagnosis accordingly. If this professional is also a tai chi practitioner, then it would be incredibly obvious on what areas a patient should concentrate his efforts when using tai chi as a form of medicine.

One of my teachers, Cheng Man Ching, a famous tai chi master from Taiwan who taught in America for a long time, was also a very, very good herbalist.

He brought this training to his teaching by showing his students movements based on their individual needs to bring about healing and health according to the principles of Chinese medicine. He himself had tuberculosis and used tai chi to heal it.

Deeper still, you have specialists who have the greatest depth of knowledge in their field. They can go on treating people in a clinical setting–prescribing herbs, qigong movements and offering qigong bodywork and acupuncture–to the tremendous benefit of their patients because they will recognize the nuances associated with their particular focus.

When I came back to the West, many people advised me just to treat people, make some money and work during business hours. But I chose to try and spread the internal arts and make them more available, so they can have a greater affect on many more people than I could ever treat in a clinical setting. Specialists are needed to fulfill both clinical and teaching roles.

Now, very often when I teach, I find that I can almost instantaneously see what people need because I had such a large clinical base during my training. I tell my students what to do in terms of their tai chi practice, but I won’t necessarily give them the 400, 30 or three reasons why they should do it.

Furthermore, anyone who trains regularly with me knows that when I teach tai chi, especially in my instructor certification programs, I don’t only teach the general movements–move your arm here and your leg there, or make your chi sink when doing this or that.

Instead, I try to help students understand why each movement is useful and how it can be applied for health and healing. I do this with the hope that I provide a context for tai chi for healing. Whether or not a particular tidbit of information is helpful to the students learning in the room, maybe they will take away the information to help others downstream.

So there are four levels of tai chi in the context of healing:

• A tai chi student who learns enough to heal his/herself.
• A tai chi teacher who is adept enough to explain what a student needs to do to heal his/herself.
• A Chinese doctor who is also a tai chi practitioner and can properly diagnosis and then prescribe qigong movements/postures based on a patients’ needs.
• A Chinese medicine specialist and tai chi adept who has the greatest depth of knowledge and who treats the most challenging/abundant medical conditions, and trains the next generation of professionals.

Tai Chi: More than Physical Therapy

Most people only look at tai chi and qigong’s healing benefits from the perspective of physical therapy; e.g., “I can heal my shoulder.” Tai chi’s healing potential goes way, way beyond that.

However, to go way beyond, a practitioner has to have a lot of training. I personally studied qigong tui na clinically for 10 years continuously, working on patients almost daily while I was in China.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book The Outliers that it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert in any field. The Chinese have a similar principle, which says that a practitioner must dedicate 10 years to their tai chi practice before they go outside the gate. They don’t mean 10 years until you’re a master, some great tai chi expert, but 10 years until you can say you’re a tai chi practitioner.

And, I’m talking about minimum requirements, which many tai chi teachers in the West simply cannot appreciate.

Even still, most tai chi teachers who’ve met this minimum requirement that also have knowledge about general health and longevity could provide particularly useful instruction to help people heal certain conditions. Those who know a lot about Chinese medicine and are genuine tai chi practitioners could really help tai chi evolve into the health and healing art it was designed to be especially in the West.

Upcoming Tai Chi Instructor Training

We have a little less than four months for the Wu Style Short Form Instructor Training and its related courses such as Tai Chi for Beginners, Tai Chi Push Hands, Tai Chi Fighting Applications and the Tai Chi Classics. This training is a once and a lifetime opportunity and will be held in Brighton/Hove, England from July 17th to August 12th.

If you are currently studying Yang style or with another teacher we will be sharing information about cross overs and the principles you learn you will be able to put right into your existing practice. We have about 80 people already signed up so if you are interested grab your spot while they last:  Tai Chi Instructor Training

Good Chi,

Bruce

Everest Base Camp Photo by ilkerender

Very often as you learn tai chi chuan or qigong, you may feel as though you have reached a plateau. When this experience happens there often is a sense that practice is boring. The same stuff keeps on happening.

We all want to have tai chi practice breakthroughs moving to higher levels of sensitivity and awareness, but it is important to respect and even embrace the plateaus.

Tai Chi Integration

These plateaus in tai chi and qigong are actually necessary to your forward progress. You learn so much, you do so much. You’re inputting new information and it then needs time to fully input into your body. These times are essential for integrating your tai chi learning.

Additionally, as you input things into your body you are also inputting more information into your mind. But then like eating a meal, there has to be a point of digestion for what you have just eaten.

If the digestion of the food does not happen, you can’t really put any more food in. The way you make patte is that you keep stuffing food down a goose’s mouth until it explodes.

This is not a sustainable way to approach tai chi or any energy art.

Refining Tai Chi Movements

What occurs during these tai chi plateaus when you think things are boring is your body is absorbing everything it’s learned before. You are digesting the new tai chi movements and techniques. You are integrating them into your body and nervous system.

During a period of a practice plateau, it’s also very useful if you don’t try and put a lot more new material into your system. Just keep on working with what you already have learned. Focus on making what you have already learned better and better.

So everything that you have practiced, whether it’s moving chi or learning new body movements, practice to refine and hone it. This embeds the learning deeply into your system.

Tai Chi Breakthroughs

Now the experience is very often that you don’t feel like you’re making much of a refinement, but regardless of that, you should still keep on plugging at it. What happens at a certain point is that all of the sudden you break through the barrier. Everything that you were working on jumps to the next level.

This is how true tai chi mastery is developed. You reach a new plateau, stabilizing that level and then moving on to the next level.

This process is equally true for martial arts, dance, yoga and just about every movement form.

Rather than get frustrated, you can take a different approach and really go deep to refine and embody what you are working on. What you will find is that the more you do this, you’ll be able to learn tai chi or any movement form at a much higher level. Your form will improve dramatically.

Building an Internal Base Camp

It is quite mysterious and it’s quite unknown when exactly it’s going to happen when you practice an art form like tai chi.

So this is why very often you get periods where you feel as though for a month or two or three that you’re progressing forward quickly and then you go through a few months when you feel like you’re just covering the same ground and asking why isn’t anything new happening.

What you have to realize is you’re solidifying what you learned before in your tai chi practice. It is like you are building an internal base camp. Without that base, you can’t jump to the next level.

So I think this is an important point when you practice tai chi or qiong or any energy art.

I hope this will encourage you to stick with your practice during the plateaus, using them to make your tai chi form better.

I’d like to hear what you have to say about this and your experience – just leave a comment below.

Keep practicing,

Bruce

Tai chi can be used as a meditation to calm down your nervous system and smooth out all the deeper energies of your emotions, your mind, your psyche, your karma and your essence.

The energy in your body creates the energy upon which the waves of your mind ride. If the chi in your body is disturbed, when it reaches your brain your thoughts get disturbed. As the chi in your body becomes balanced, calm and smooth, all of a sudden your mind calms down.

There are essentially two ways you can learn tai chi for meditation.

Tai Chi to Relax the Nerves

In terms of ordinary stress management, tai chi can calm your nerves. Simply put, the meditative movements of tai chi regulate the flow of energy in your body.

In terms of Chinese medicine and philosophy, your internal organs are responsible from a pure, physical level for generating your emotions.

For example, your liver can either make you very angry, or can induce compassion, or it can provide the energy to deal with fear and be aware in a given situation.

As the chi in your body normalizes and steadies, a state is produced where your mind is calm and relatively centered, which most people consider meditation. Ordinary tai chi does this.

Tai Chi for Enlightenment

Now we go to the next stage where we move into meditation as it is classically considered in Asia. This is where we discuss enlightenment or achieving the awareness level of a Buddha or a Lao Tzu or having the ability to have the degree of the love and compassion of a Jesus Christ.

This capacity does not come from just getting the energy in your body to become calm, it obviously requires you to go much deeper.

The overwhelming majority of all tai chi that is out there, although originating from martial arts, is mostly done purely for physical health and balancing the chi of the body. Very few teachers actually ever get into the meditation aspects, either because they don’t know them or because most of the time is spent helping students get the basics of the form they are learning, which is all good.

That being said, you cannot expect to go to the deeper aspects of meditation by practicing just the physical aspects of tai chi.

The Traditional Qigong Path

Within Taoism itself, all the long qigong forms were practiced as a pre-requisite to sitting Taoist meditation. These qigong forms in their first stage develop ordinary chi in your body in the same way tai chi does. However, in the second stage these qigong forms move toward what in China is called shengong or spiritual qigong. This is virtually unknown in the West.

After stabilizing the physical movements, you can then use the moving practices of tai chi or qigong to work out the depths of your emotions, your thought processes, your psychic world and your karma. Ultimately the goal is for a person to arrive at their essence.

At this level, sitting meditation, moving meditation, standing meditation, lying down meditation or interactive meditations such as sex or talking are all the same in that they engage similar processes to clear to the absolute core depth of your being.

Energy Arts Tai Chi Instructor Craig Barnes

Connecting with Your Essence and the Tao

In Taoism the higher levels of meditation only begin when you actually arrive at understanding your essence. Using tai chi, you can clear out your mind and make your body smooth to arrive at this point.

The next stage of the game is recognizing the Tao.  Here, you make the jump from anything that has to do with you personally, to actually understanding what the Universal flows are so that you, individually, become calm and smooth within the flows of the Universe.

Ordinary tai chi allows you to stay centered within your body regardless of the nervousness or stress that runs through your nerves and mental agitation.  This gets you into the game where eventually through much practice and meditation, you are able to comprehend and are able to stay centered inside, the flows of the Universe.

Qigong and the 16 Neigong

Since tai chi is a Taoist art, and I am speaking from the perspective of Taoism, I must explain that the longer forms of qigong had very specific methods to move from purely doing the motions to the higher levels of practice.

In order for a person to engage at the level of shengong (spiritual work), an important point is that you must do whatever your tai chi form is, without thinking about it because if you’re still thinking about ‘how to do the movements’, you’re not focusing on what is happening internally.

When you can get to this point it is then that you can focus specifically on the 16 neigong, or internal components that generate the advanced capabilities of tai chi. In this sense tai chi does the exact same thing as qigong because it is effectively a form of qigong. Many people find qigong an easier path because often each qigong set focuses on a couple of the internal neigong components at a time and the movements are often more simple. Whereas with tai chi all 16 neigong components are folded into the movements.

Next, when you reach the point where your body is okay, you are calm, you have the stress management abilities, your chi is flowing and you are essentially healthy, then you move into shengong using the exact same motions, using essentially the majority of the same channels and a few extra ones sooner or later. You go to the next stage beyond ordinary tai chi when your form is completely smooth and you can do the movements without thinking about them; when you have undergone the physical training to the point where your motor memory system knows the movements.

You have created within your body a glass, an empty glass, and now you can begin filling that glass with the liquid you wish to put in it. So the next step is to learn all the aspects of the 16 neigong and put them consciously into the form.

At this point, which not many reach, you move to the next level where Taoist meditation really begins.

Stay good,

Bruce

This summer is the Wu Style Tai Chi Instructor training where we will go over a lot of the meditation aspects of tai chi- to find out more click here:  Wu Style Tai Chi Instructor Training

The Taoist Meditation Circle is in month 2 of 16 – not too late to sign-up:  Taoist Meditation Circle

US Cold Pills in Abundance – Photo by kalleboo

There are many studies that show tai chi and qigong (chi gung) benefit in reducing stress, but what about helping with allergies?

Connecting the dots between stress and allergies and asthma is easy. The most common symptoms of stress are achingly similar to those associated with allergy and asthma: tight chest, shortness of breath, insomnia, fatigue, muscular pain and headaches. Unfortunately, the more run down you get, the more susceptible you become to seasonal illnesses, such as colds, bronchitis, sinusitis and pneumonia.

Moreover, clinical evidence backs up what sufferers know first-hand: tension and anxiety make symptoms worse. It is a bit more difficult to connect improvements in these maladies with the slow, benign-looking, gentle movements of qigong and tai chi, however lets look at the whole picture.

Tai Chi and Qigong Reduce Stress

Both tai chi and qigong develop in you the ability to let go and relax—physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. This is the heart of Taoist energy and breathing practices. These techniques directly train the central nervous system (the intermediary between the body and the mind) to relax and release tensions that have built up inside the body and its internal organs.

This allows the production of stress hormones to slow down. Working with the body, tai chi and qigong train you to focus your awareness inside your body so that when you try to release specific points of tension with your mind, your body will listen, attempt to obey the suggestion and finally relax.

An art such as Tai Chi is a very sophisticated and systematic process of mind training.

Tai Chi and Qigong Train You to Relax

First, tai chi and qigong movements are a container through which you learn to recognize where tension and stress are lodged inside your body and mind.

Second, the slow motion movements help your nervous system to relax. They give your mind the time first to recognize, and then to exert conscious effort to change a host of specific interactions with your body, chi-energy and emotions. Moving too quickly—physically or mentally—causes many to miss these interactions.

Third, the movements encourage chi to flow progressively more smoothly and powerfully, promoting relaxation with full awareness.

Finally, they teach you how to conserve your chi and not to dissipate it.

Harvard Study Aborted

Although there have been many clinical studies that clearly demonstrate that chi energy practices such as tai chi and qigong mitigate many chronic illnesses and improve circulation, no formal studies have been completed that directly link the benefits of these practices to the mitigation of allergies and asthma – that I am aware.

The only study I know of was one conducted by Harvard University in 2003. Taoist breathing was taught to 48 asthma patients, most of whom were middle-aged. The purpose was to determine whether it would alleviate asthma symptoms. The study was aborted after 3 months.

According to Bill Ryan, founder of Brookline Tai Chi and one of the teachers, few were willing to practice by themselves on a consistent enough basis to gain results. And some, told that they would have to learn to breathe from the belly and relax their stomach muscles, were afraid of having big bellies.

That is a sad commentary on some of the conditionings imposed in our culture that were strong enough to overcome the desire and motivation to potentially reduce the suffering that results from asthma attacks by so simple an exercise as breathing.

Qigong and Tai Chi: Gentle and Safe

Qigong and tai chi are gentle enough that they can safely be done if you have allergies and asthma. You can practice indoors when pollen levels are high. The slow movements will not cause exercise-induced asthma attacks.

In addition, the adrenalin rushes and release of hormones that sometimes accompanies vigorous exercise or team sports are seldom triggered by the practice of tai chi or qigong. Over time, qigong helps the body and mind adopt habits of moderation.

As the body and mind let go, the nervous system relaxes. The circulation improves. The immune system is strengthened. As I like to tell my students, no one goes to the hospital for a relaxation attack.

Miracle Cures Are Not Always Instantaneous

People who have experienced the benefits of qigong often call them miracle cures. However, practitioners also know that improvements happen incrementally and synergistically. The symptoms of allergy and asthma slowly settle into the background, and more miraculously, there is a decrease in use of inhalers, antihistamines, decongestants and anti-inflammatory pain medicines.

The beneficial effects of tai chi and qigong are as gradual, natural and inexorable as water etching out a canyon, or the warm sun melting an iceberg. The lack of pain and strain means that everyone can do these exercises, whatever their age or body type.

Taking Control of Your Health

At a deeper level, these practices provide you with the ability to feel deeply inside your body. You can gain the ability to recognize what triggers symptoms and to work with your limitations rather than fight against them. The feeling of being in control of your body helps to build the foundation for wellness.

Becoming proactive against allergies and asthma helps your anxiety levels drop. And so does the physical tension that can accompany it, such as the tightness of muscles that cause headaches and neck and shoulder pain.

Being in control of your body and your emotions and feeling the beneficial results inside you helps encourage you to continue. You can make healing yourself your business and not someone else’s.

Find out about:

Wu Style Tai Chi Instructor Training this Summer