Tai Chi Journal

Zest for Life, Tai Chi Walking & Yin and Yang

I've been Tai Chi'ing for 12 days now, and I can report this initial finding: it has radically boosted my zest for life! Yes, already!

Call it alertness, call it a sense of well-being, call it just being fully alive — it was not my strong suit before. On my best days, life seemed something of a chore. On my worst — and there were at least a couple per week — life seemed a well-nigh-impossible burden. I called those days my "low-rez" days: "low-resolution," as in fuzzy and out-of-focus.

I haven't had a low-rez day since I started Tai Chi. What's more, I've been unusually busy, expending lots of energy. Before, one or two exhausting days would put my into low-rez mode on the following day for sure. But Tai Chi seems to have unlocked or unblocked my energy river. Now I wake up refreshed every day.

That has been so even though there were a couple of nights in a row when I got too little sleep. Possibly the river was running a bit too exuberantly. But on the day after the second semi-sleep-deprived night I definitely felt sleep-deprived ... but I didn't feel dead. (Since then I've been sleeping just fine.)

Mindyou, almost all the Tai Chi I've been doing has been the set of 18 fundamental exercises in Step-by-Step Tai Chi, by Master Lam Kam Chuen. I haven't been practicing form movements because I found after last Thursday's session I had done a memory wipe on most of them, and I've as yet found no book to act as a "cheat sheet."

I have been doing some Tai Chi Walking. That's an exercise in walking forward, in which you advance a foot, touch its heel to the ground without putting any weight on it, hold your balance, and then come smoothly forward, bending the knee, until your weight is fully and squarely on that foot. Then you do the whole thing again with your other foot ... and so on, and so on, and so on.

It develops the balance as it increases the strength, endurance, and proprioception of the lower extremities. And it teaches you one of the fundamental lessons of Tai Chi: visualization. In order to do Tai Chi's physical moves, first you have to visualize the successful move in your head. That visualization process helps you plan out the moves and keep them under control. It also makes sure of your mindfulness: the "realtime" connection between the body and the mind.

So I've been doing some Tai Chi Walking, and getting better at it. One trick I've picked up is to stiffen the ankle of the forward foot as it is put forth, heel-to-ground, and to point the toe firmly upward. That seems to take my mind off what I'm doing with the balance foot, letting it relax and do its thing without a lot of tipsy heebie-jeebies.

Here's a guess about that. T'ai Chi for Dummies is telling me all kinds of stuff about yin and yang. Yin and yang are the two quintessential opposites. Every pair of opposites — black and white, cold and hot, down and up. feminine and masculine, etc. — combines yin and yang.

Yin are yang are symbolized by a circle divided symmetrically in half by a flowing line. The black half is yin, the white, yang. The complemetary small circles in each half symbolize that the seed of yin is in yang and the seed of yang is in yin.

What does this have to do with Tai Chi? The "Dummies" book says that when it comes to using energy to move the body, soft, diffuse, "emotional" energy is yin, while hard, creative, "muscular" energy is yang. Moreover:

No movement is actually purely one or the other, yin or yang, because one part manifests yang as another part manifests yin. You are constantly shifting and moving between the two.

So I figure that when I stiffen my forward, non-weight-bearing ankle, it's manifesting yang, while my balance foot is softening and manifesting yin!

posted by eric @ 9:23 AM