Tai Chi, Awareness, and Healing

Tai Chi is a fantastic way to start your morning. It makes you breathe deeply, move slowly with awareness and causes you to wake up and become more accustomed to the activity of the day. It's fun and the intensity can range from a gentle flow to a hard core workout with your leg muscles screaming from keeping a deep stance. Even if you don't feel like practicing a whole form take one move and practice it over and over investing your awareness into the exercise.

Awareness is so important. I used to relax and focus. I then learned to think of and feel energy moving. Now I use the more direct and useful method of shifting my awareness from place to place. In qigong circles there is the saying that where the mind goes energy follows. I have come to feel that mind isn't the best way to state this. Awareness is better. You can be aware of your mind, or your hand, or a tree in the distance. Imagining something happening, say a stream of light or some other image creates an expectation and that expectation creates unnecessary anxiety in many folks (myself included).

Awareness has a profound effect on healing. When I had a headache I used to try to imagine healing energy going there. Sometimes it would help but most of the time my head just kept hurting. Then I discovered that if I simply became aware of my head, really felt the headache and paid attention to it without judging or taking action then the headache simply went away. There was no need to try to make something happen. Just breathe and observe. In Chinese medical terms my energy followed my awareness and healed the problem that was causing the headache. This was really a fantastic breakthrough for me.

In martial arts when I want to hit something I put my awareness through it or inside of it. In qigong I move my awareness through my body and it experiences healing and comfort. In relationships there is peace to the level that I am aware of the other person. The mind is constantly moving. It is never silent until of course you move your awareness away from it. Then it can keep on blabbering but your awareness, that essential you that observes, has moved on to another thing. This observer viewpoint is incredibly powerful and is a wonderful thing to explore. Your ticket to controlling consciousness is not so much beating it into shape but controlling where you put your awareness without judgement.