Dragon and Tiger Qigong is a 1500-year-old self-healing medical qigong system based on the principles of acupuncture. It can be practiced by virtually anyone regardless of age or health and is one of the most beneficial sets ever developed. Over this two-week course you'll have the opportunity to go for instructor certification. Join us in Hawaii!
Dissolving the physical body and relaxing it is not the same thing. Often to explain this, I use the image of going from ice to water.
Relaxation in the West is mostly understood as a mental or an emotional mood change. When we’re going from ice to water in Taoist dissolving practices, we’re talking about the body physically softening as well as your mood softening.
Of course, there is a general emotional sense of relaxation, but more specifically, the tissues of the body are physically relaxing and becoming softer. The blood in the body begins flowing better, which comes from blood vessels being less constricted. Read More
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.Read More
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?
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. Read More
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. Read More
Artist Photo of Soft Gamma Repeater (SGR) by NASA Goddard Photo and Video
The word Tao has many meanings. First, there is the Tao of doing anything, which is the same as the ideal way of doing something. You must travel on a particular path in order to wind up where that path leads. Going a little deeper, the word Tao considers the question: What connects everything and yet has no specific quality of its own? That’s the center of the I Ching. It has no quality and yet everything is connected to it, everything comes out of it, everything flows through it.
The word Ziran embodies a very important concept in Taoism and has a number of large meanings. If we go from the deepest to the most superficial meaning, it essentially has the same meaning as Tao. The Chinese actually call it Tao Ziran, which means “the great natural.” Read More
It is common these days to see people who have what I call ‘chicken neck’ or what some others affectionately call ‘geek neck’. Make no mistake though, chicken neck is no laughing matter.
Many people are often in front of computer screens for 6-10 hours at a time with poor posture, and a problem can develop with the chin consistently jutting forward. Bill Gates when he was young, for example, had a very prominent geek neck. Read More
Long-Lived Tortoise – Photo by by Schristia For most people, cultivating sexual chi is a lifetime progression because it has the potential for completely engaging and connecting the body, mind and spirit. In youth, the sexual practices help fully release the body’s chi while engaging the elements of mind and spirit, which helps the process. ... Read More
The Taoist sexual practices are categorized in two segments: Sexual qigong—techniques that increase the sensitivity and awareness of chi flows within yourself and your partner, including techniques that help you achieve many of the healing benefits of any chi practice. Sexual meditation—methods that lead to profound religious experience often called the divine, enlightenment, emptiness and ... Read More
Photo of Iceberg By natalielucier
‘Chicken Neck’ Photo by