Newsletter #109 - September 2010

 

 

Thank you for your feedback on the monthly newsletter. Many of you enjoyed the videos I posted in the last newsletter, especially those who were inspired by Dixie Kindred’s persistence with tai chi despite her medical condition. When she demonstrated "Wheeled Chair 24 Forms" at the USA June workshop, there was an instant standing ovation from all present. This month we have another YouTube video talk from Caroline Demoise, on the Internal Art of Tai Chi. Thank you Meg Hutton for bringing to our attention the copyright issue of playing certain tai chi music in class. I see many of you have taken advantage of the free right to use my music CD.

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Lam, MD

 

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The Yin and Yang of Learning and Teaching Tai Chi
Caroline Demoise, Master Trainer, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

 

Learning and teaching are a circular process and it is hard to identify where one begins and the other ends. When you are a student you are also a teacher. As you learn, you are teaching yourself through repetition. Regular practice at home develops your natural talent because you are the one who applies the information presented in class to make it your own. Under the guidance of your teacher, you teach yourself through repetition, awareness and a willingness to be imperfect yet strive for perfection. A humble acceptance of feedback to improve, without judging yourself as wrong, is your best attitude. The teacher within you is looking for the opportunity to grow. In a nourishing environment, this inner teacher will blossom into natural expression.

 

Teachers have an outlet for their creativity when they have students to teach. Students actualize their potential more quickly when they have a good teacher. Teachers and students complement each other like the Chinese concept of yin and yang. During instruction a teacher demonstrates and describes movements as students listen and absorb. In this relationship the teacher is yang and the students are yin. When students practice a movement with their teacher watching and encouraging, students are the yang expression and the teacher is more yin.

Having a skilled teacher give you feedback on your progress accelerates the process of developing good tai chi. A gifted teacher sees your ultimate potential in tai chi much better than you can assess it yourself. I found this to be true when Dr. Lam became my teacher. A teacher benefits you tremendously when he/she holds a space for you to grow into through practice. When your teacher holds the vision of you as a skilled practitioner, that energy unites with your intention giving you powerful support.

 

Teaching tai chi is coaching and encouraging the best expression in each student whose life you touch. An effective teacher needs much more than physical skill in performing tai chi movements. Artful and effective communication builds on your foundation of skill and creates a bond between you and your students. The deeper your relationship is with the essential underlying tai chi principles, the better you will be able to transmit your understanding of concepts that are difficult to communicate with words.

 

The relationship between teachers and students flows between yin and yang in mutual perfection. Students need a good teacher to develop tai chi skill just as much as teachers need students to develop into a master teacher. Students and teachers give and receive in a flow of mutual exchange.

 

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A Conversation with Myself on Yin and Yang
Patricia Webber, Master Trainer, Narwee, NSW Australia

 

Me: I am an instructor. I decide what the class will learn because I know it all! Everybody does what I say. I’m really the boss! Definitely Yang. I’ve always liked the idea of Yang - strong and in control.

 

Myself: With all respect, I seem to remember times when you couldn’t answer questions. You were quite uncomfortable and you certainly didn’t look in control then.

 

Me: Well that can happen to anybody. I just push questions aside if I don’t have a good answer. Because I’m Yang. I’m the boss. Remember?

 

Myself: I think you need to get in touch with your Yin side!

 

Me: No way! I told you. I’ve always liked Yang. Anyway, you’re so smart. Tell me how you would have dealt with that student in the TCA class last week. He told everyone that he felt that extending his arms as he performed step to parry and punch in fact enabled him to have his blocking arm in a good position as he executed the punch. It was my class. He should have let me speak. Anyhow, I told him off and he said he won’t be coming back. Good thing. There can only be one boss. Me!

 

Myself: His explanation sounds good.

 

Me: Yes, but I didn’t say it, so I couldn’t let it seem that somebody else had some worthwhile ideas, could I? That would look weak. Yin.

 

Myself: Yin doesn’t mean weak! In this instance it would have meant that you have an interest in other people’s thoughts and are willing to listen to them and consider them. This is an attitude of strength. By brushing him off you showed a lack of confidence in yourself. I don’t imagine the rest of the class felt comfortable!

 

Me: Really? To tell you the truth, I’ve lost a lot of students. A few have left when I’ve insisted that they perform a move exactly as I say. Another few left because I told them they weren’t serious enough. And a few more said that I just wanted to show off and they didn’t feel I was interested in their needs. But this is the Yang way!

 

Myself: Whatever happened to balance? By the way, your remaining few students have found another instructor.

 

Me: Maybe you should explain this Yin thing to me a bit more.

 

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The Extremes of Yin and Yang
Rev. Dr. Bruce M. Young, Senior Trainer, Bangor, ME, USA

 

In so much of our lives we operate at the extremes. We are up; we are down. We are high; we are low. We are happy or sad; we are sick or well. We dwell in the past: reliving all our mistakes or the glory of our accomplishments; or in the future: worrying about what could happen to us and our stuff, or making plans for the way we will spend our time and money. And while we are going from one extreme to the other, we waste the time we have been given. We waste our time to live. We waste the present.

 

As Tai Chi for Health instructors we meet folks who are living at these extremes all the time. They come into our classes looking for an escape from the harried way they are living their lives. They come hoping that in tai chi they may find a way to relax and to be at peace in the present moment; and perhaps to find, in the process of learning something new, a better and healthier way to live their lives.

 

The symbol above is the trade mark my wife and I have chosen for our tai chi school. It signifies the light and dark, the highs and lows, and the ups and downs of human existence. In the light area, at the top, is found the Chinese symbol for heaven. At the bottom, in the dark area, is the Chinese symbol for earth and in the middle, extending into both areas, is the symbol for human beings. There we see the human, with its feet on the earth, reaching for heaven. There we see the human stretched between heaven and earth, striving to be better, to become more than they presently are.

 

It is in this striving that we live. It is not in the plans we make or in the lives we have lead, but in the how we seek to live and change and grow, now. It is from this perspective that we must meet and teach the folks who come to receive instruction in the Tai Chi for Health programs we offer.

 

We must understand the extremes of yin and yang with which they deal each day, and provide an opportunity for them to settle themselves and live in the present. We must understand how they are being stretched and pulled by the world in which they exist. We must relate to their stressors and find ways to help them through the practice of tai chi to compensate for the extremes at which they live each day.

 

I have often told the church congregations which I have served that when they fill their lives with thoughts of what may happen in the future or what has happened in the past, they miss the opportunity to live healthy, happy, meaningful lives in the present.

 

We as Tai Chi for Health instructors must trust what we know and understand, and learn to live in the present as well, so that we may better instruct others to avoid living at the extremes and find true peace in their lives.

 

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Tai Chi is an Internal Art
Caroline Demoise, Master Trainer, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

 

Tai Chi is considered an “internal martial art”, but what exactly does that mean? When you think of tai chi, you think of the movements that characterize Sun, Yang or Chen style. When you see single whip or snake creeps down, you identify that as tai chi. But when you see someone swinging a golf club or hitting a tennis ball, that movement doesn’t register as tai chi, but it has an internal component, just like tai chi does. What you put into an external movement to make it effective and powerful comes from the internal.

 

Tai chi is an external art when all you focus on is choreography. Where I put my arm, when to step and remembering what movement comes next, now that’s external. Bringing depth into the choreography involves making friends with your energy body, feeling your alignment and coordinating arms, legs and torso during movement. In depth you coordinate breathing and internal relaxation with external movement. You are going internal when you allow your arms to follow the energy set in motion by your intention so that “wave hands like clouds” becomes a fluid, coordinated expression of mind/body. You are stalking depth in tai chi when your mind is still and you live deeply in your body with awareness.

 

During my first session with a new student who has expertise in neuro-linguistic programming, she commented that when she watched me move through the TCA choreography, she saw me accessing the kinaesthetic and auditory areas of my brain. That was a fascinating observation that I found very compatible with how I experience moving from internal awareness. My focus is inward to feel. Feeling your body is kinaesthetic. My body was listening to my intention and following cues to monitor alignment and maintain the quality of song as I moved.

 

After being in Dr. Lam’s Depth of Tai Chi for Arthritis workshop, a student commented to me, “I have been practicing this form for several years and I feel like a fraud”. “I thought I knew this form”. But what had really happened was that this student had moved beyond the choreography into the internal realm, where each movement suddenly felt different and unfamiliar. He had opened the door to the internal and that is progress.

 

The curriculum of depth involves practicing the underlying principles with enough repetition to create visible internal expression through external movements. Just watch Dr. Lam do tai chi and you will see what I mean! Think of cultivating the internal and expressing it through tai chi movement as being similar to carving a sculpture from a block of stone. This takes time. The intention is in the artists mind. Each chiselling movement shapes the final creation. The internal art of tai chi is shaped in the same way. You are the block of stone. Practicing the form is the carving tool.

 

Repetition and moving slowly help you digest the fine points within each movement. Fluidity and agility emerge slowly over time. Creating “song” in your body takes awareness, perseverance and focus. Expressing depth is supported by a long term relationship with your teacher. The Chinese masters invested a lifetime in perfecting the internal in their art. Each year that you invest a week in revisiting your favourite form, you embrace more of the internal. Give yourself this luxury to grow with your form. Listen with your body and feel what practicing the principles has to teach you.

 

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Teaching – A Two Way Process
Cynthia Fels, Senior Trainer, Pacific Grove, CA, USA

 

Teaching is a two way process. If the teacher takes the time to listen, one will learn just as much from their students and at times even more than what the teacher has put forth in their lesson. As I was setting up my teaching space for the first time at an assisted living centre for Alzheimer patients I heard one of the students say “Is that scrawny little thing going to be our tai chi teacher!” That set the stage and I knew I was in for a ride. These students always spoke their minds and weren’t afraid to tell you what they were thinking.

 

My students all arrived with various levels of mental and physical disabilities and with that openness and spunk to learn. Most were in wheelchairs or using walkers, and I taught them seated tai chi and found that I had to adapt my lessons even further. Some came with hands extremely twisted and deformed, some would constantly ask me where their dinner was going to be held, one would sometimes doze off and then resume her tai chi, and some could barely move. But they all eagerly showed up, tried their best, and couldn’t wait for me to return. There was a cat, he belonged to one of my students, who would wonder in and join us for class too, and sometimes we had a few resident dogs that came to class as well. After class they always clapped, thanked me over and over for coming, and two would always stop to hug me and hold on to me for the longest time.

 

Every week we shared stories, laughed together, and played tai chi, and every week I learned so much from these my students. I saw how they pushed through pain and disability; I heard their open and honest feelings and opinions. I felt their love and was hugged for just being a teacher. I learned how to constantly adapt my tai chi and my teaching so that we could all keep on learning. And ultimately, I fell in love with each and every one of them and hoped that I would be able to purport to have such dignity as they had shown me when I travelled along my own path in life.

 

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Humour, Laughter and Radiant Health
Dr Bob McBrien, Master Trainer, Salisbury, MD, USA

Improving your Healthy Humour Quotient (HHQ) will occur through daily exposure to healthy forms of humour and it seems that enjoying a good laugh is welcomed in all cultures.

One way to nurture your own HHQ is to tell others a joke or story. Sharing a good laugh seems to double the potency of a good laugh. But, how often do you hear someone say, "I just can't tell a joke?" Or, "I would like to share a good story with my friends, but I always forget the punch line."