Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Stress, Change, Tai Chi, and Meditation

Our lives are incredibly fast paced today. Everything changes at a far more rapid rate than anyone previously imagined. I recently joined Twitter, the enormously popular web site that lets you fire off a mini blurb informing my friends of my every single move if I so choose. Friends of mine are using this site as a wonderful tool to find jobs and make connections for work. This is great, it's well and good and it's also another rapidly changing environment to keep up with.

This is where Tai Chi and Chi Kung find a special place in a modern person's life. Last time we talked about the components of Tai Chi training and how you are taught to relax in progressively faster changing activities from moving forms of meditation, to gently trying to keep your balance while unbalancing a partner, to full speed fighting. All of these activities are increasingly stressful and the focus in Tai Chi is to relax through the stress, to maintain an organic efficiency that allows you to respond quickly and effectively with a minimum of effort. One might say that in Tai Chi the effort is not expended so much in the actions themselves but in the process of relaxing during those actions.

As a martial art Tai Chi is incredibly effective and produces a superior form of self-defense if practiced diligently. But unless you happen to be getting into bar fights or taking on challengers in a no holds barred competition the self-defense aspect is not all that important. But the training to become an efficient fighter is invaluable. Imagine you get called into your boss's office and he or she begins to take you to task over some situation or another and you have no idea what he or she is talking about. Without training you become nervous, stammer and stutter, and then offer some apology often being left bewildered. Unless you happen to be one of those disgustingly calm and together people who can face any situation with equanimity, in that case disregard this whole thing and go about your life. For the rest of us we get a little flustered to say the least.

Once you have trained in Tai Chi you can have several subtle techniques to calm you down and help you to deal with the situation in a more effective way than the standard: "Uhm... Sorry. I'm very sorry."

You take a deep breath, calm yourself, and focus on the situation at hand. This sounds like wonderful advice and it's very simple. Unfortunately, as I tell my students, simple and easy are not the same thing. Studying Tai Chi is an exercise in meditation and awareness.

Meditation is nothing mystical, it's simply the act of paying attention to something.
Awareness is learning how to pay attention to what is going on at this very moment.

In Tai Chi we work with these faculties everyday. Like muscles, the more they are exercised the stronger they become and well the stronger they are the more genuine peace and calm we can enjoy in this fast paced world of constant rapid fire change.

You can follow my rapid fire updates under jhtaichi on Twitter.

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