2011 Tai Chi Instructor Training Group

Hi folks,

I am still traveling and currently in Beijing where I am getting ready for an interview with China Radio International. They will be filming me in the park doing tai chi. I have been making short posts about my trip on Facebook if you are interested.

Thanksgiving is not celebrated here in China but tonight we are thinking of going out for a Peking duck as the closest substitute. If you celebrate the holiday wherever you are located, I hope you enjoy your turkey rather than the dish we saw on the menu yesterday in a restaurant across from our hotel, Student Addicted to Bullfrog. I am not sure what that is but we decided to give it a pass.

Today I wanted to share my gratitude for a few things.

We just shipped the last module of the Bagua Mastery Program. I would like to thank all those who purchased the program and support the continuation of this amazing art.  This Bagua Program took over 3+ years to produce and to my knowledge is the most extensive material ever compiled for the art of bagua. The program has over 35 DVDs, 15 Audio CDs, a book that was published through North Atlantic/Random House and four manuals with over 1,200+ pages of detailed text.

I want to send a special thanks to those who helped produce the Bagua Mastery Program including: Bill Walters (for filming and production), Heather Hale (for editing the main text), Bill Ryan (for editing and making sure every detail was correct), Thomas Herington (for design and post-production of the 100+ hours of video), Mountain Livingston (for his diligent efforts in project management and editing), Richard Taubinger (for concept and strategy), the EA film crew Patrick Hewlett, Joe Markendale, Gee Loose and Chris Redmond, and to all the instructors who participated at the bagua events including but not limited to Paul Cavel, Craig Barnes, Jess OBrien, Eric Peters, Isaac Kamins, Jamie Dibden and Lee Burkins and to my wife Caroline for her endless dedication.

I also want to offer deep gratitude to all my students for practicing and especially those who are teaching to make the world a better place. Those who make teaching a full-time or even part-time profession mainly do it because of the joy of helping others. This is a powerful way to live your life.

Lastly, I am forever grateful to all those teachers who shared their knowledge with me especially my last teacher, Taoist Master Liu Hung Chieh.

I want to mention that we have just posted the teaching schedule through July of next year. I will be teaching fewer events but have a Dragon and Tiger Qigong Retreat/Instructor Training in the US-Maui (first time in many years) and am offering a 3-week Taoist Meditation Retreat,  the most extensive training I have ever offered on the topic of meditation in England.

You can view the 2012 events by clicking here.

In gratitude,

Bruce

- Please make a comment to share what you are grateful for today?

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

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

Filmed in Crete, Greece 2010 during the Longevity Breathing Instructor Training.

*To view clip in high quality, start playing the video and then change the 360p setting in the bottom right to 720p*

In July of 2011 I will be holding a Wu Style Tai Chi Short Form Instructor Training in England. I typically hold this course only once every 8-10 years or so. For initial information on this seminal Tai Chi instructor training please more details will be posted on energyarts.com in the coming months.

Hi folks,

We get a lot of comments that come into our office. Many send in their thanks for the work and for our instructors teaching tai chi and qigong. I wanted to share an email we received recently and to again thank my instructors for their commitment to teaching.

I would encourage those thinking about becoming instructors in qigong, tai chi or longevity breathing to go for it. Attending an instructor course can be one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself and to be of service to others. And for those who have certifications but are not yet teaching, just start a small class because even working with a few people can make a huge difference on those peoples lives (plus your own training will improve dramatically when you have to teach others).

Teaching tai chi and other Taoist energy arts provides people with the tools and practices to face the journey of life:

I would like to thank Bruce Frantzis and his senior instructors for dedicating their lives and talents to communities all over the world. I work as a full time volunteer with the Sisters of Charity in the city of Juarez, Mexico, the twin city of El Paso, Texas. Juarez is widely reported to be one of the most dangerous cities in the world due to an escalating drug war, with approximately 3000 people murdered in 2009.

In the wake of such violence schools have been shut down for weeks at a time and businesses have closed creating what many visitors call, “hell on earth”. Overwhelmed as I was with assisting in very basic services to some of the very poorest residents at a community center for families with severely handicapped children, It would have never occurred to me that these people needed a class in Taoist Energy Arts. Food, shelter and medical care seemed to be much more pressing needs. But I’m an outsider and my eyes don’t see the same way as people who live and raise their families in such a place.

One woman, Sofia, a widow and mother of five who lives near the center and does much work for the Sisters, expressed interest in learning Tai Chi to share with the ‘stress poisoned’ women of her community, and to our great good fortune an Energy Arts senior instructor, Steve Barowsky, is the only name I found when I looked up Tai Chi in the yellow pages. Sofia has been taking private classes with Steve for many months now (with me translating) and every week we are amazed at the depth of his knowledge and experience and with his ability to convey complex concepts simply and directly.

Sofia is learning Tai Chi, Qigong (Chi Gung), and many basic techniques for working with families and she is dedicated to helping other women find an interior peace that the outside chaos cannot rob them of (not to mention improving their health and well being). Her dream is to be certified to teach by Energy Arts someday and Steve says that she is an excellent student. It is clear to me that enabling Sofia to study with Steve is the most valuable and lasting service I can provide to this ravaged city, and it is a great pleasure to me to see the women learn ways to help themselves and thereby help their families.

Thank you again for this unfolding opportunity…

Many women as well as men suffer from extreme caustic stress. This would be true of the women in Juarez who are having the horrors of one of the most serious drug (shooting) wars that has ever existed. Just as, at this very moment the people in Haiti are incredibly stressed. Besides the physical needs of the body, when the mind, due to incredible external circumstances becomes mentally overwhelmed, very often the pain of those mental disturbances is worse or at least as bad as the lack of food and water etc.

Women in poorer countries very often do not have access to the type of social services and psychological services that we are fortunate to have in the west. Tai chi is something as was shown in China and was shown in your case in Mexico that can reduce those stresses and give women a new lease on life. Difficult situations have to be endured through, this said, if a person’s nervous system and energy and peace of mind become stronger through something like tai chi, it can make an amazing beneficial difference, and you are quite right, Steve is a wonderful teacher and Energy Arts is proud to have him as a member of the family.

Siba, keep up the good work, people who try to make a difference in this world above and beyond their own profit are prizes to be treasured.

Bruce Frantzis

P.S. At some point it one of my hopes is to start a scholarship program to assist people who may not have the funds but have the commitment to learn and teach energy arts…