Tai Chi Journal

More on Tai Chi as Viagra

Yesterday I made this post suggesting that, at least for this 57-year-old man, certain aspects of Tai Chi practice have the same effect as Viagra (which, be it noted, I haven't had occasion to try). They give me a "bóqĭ," which in Chinese literally means a sudden (or spontaneous?) rising or standing up. It's pronounced "BO-CHEE."

I am posting about this subject not to appeal to anyone's prurient interests. Rather, I am passing along my experience to those other men who might be interested in an exercise regimen that can "stand in" for Viagra or Cialis.

I find that experiencing a spontaneous boqi (I'll now drop the diacritical accents) has to do with elements of posture I'm incorporating into my life from my Tai Chi practice, and particularly with what I have learned from the Wu Chi position.

Specifically, in Wu Chi posture you imagine there is a "golden thread" tugging the crown of your head skyward. When I visualize that happening, I notice that the place where the back of my noggin joins the top of my neck and spine seems to pull itself backward and upward, elongating and stretching my neck in that direction.

When I do that particular posture alteration to what seems to me a maximal extent — along with other aspects of Wu Chi, that is — I find I can get a spontaneous boqi!

I just found that out in the bathroom as I was preparing for and taking a shower. In addition to practicing some of the other Wu Chi "tricks," such as rotating my pelvis slightly backward — yes, backward, in a way that may be idiosyncratic to me — I stretched "the back of my neck" backward and upward, which pointed my eyes and nose a little bit downward ... and I realized that it was not only my upper body which was standing up tall and straight.

This welcome effect persisted during my whole shower ... and I guarantee I was not thinking sexy thoughts. It just happened.

(Incidentally, I also noticed that adopting the same posture improved my singing in the shower radically. It seemed to get my breath control and the tension on my vocal cords just right. That's good, too. Pavarotti, look out!)


At this point, some more about the Chinese expression boqi. As I discuss it, I am also expermienting with ways to render the Chinese characters for boqi in the text of my post. 勃起 is the way it is written in traditional Chinese. How I managed to find and enter those characters (and I hope they show up as correctly in your browser as in mine) is instructive.

I happen to have a Macintosh computer, and it has built-in software that displays a character palette in any of several selectable views. Normally I use the Roman view, since we Westerners typically employ a Roman alphabet. But the palette also offers a Traditional Chinese view.

When that is selected, the palette can be manipulated to show what may well be, for all I know, any character in Traditional Chinese. (Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Japanese views are also available.) Say I want to enter the character for "bo2," the pronunciation of bo I'm dealing with here. To find it in the palette, I have to look up and select its radical in the upper-left panel of the palette.

The radical is that portion of a character that gives the character its meaning. Not all characters have radicals, but the vast majority do. It so happens that the radical used in 勃 is 力, "li4," pronounced "LEE," meaning "strength, power." It forms the right-hand portion of 勃. Despite appearances, it's drawn with two strokes. So I scroll down in the radicals panel until I start to see the two-stroke radicals, and then I continue scrolling until I find 力.

The next step is to find the actual character I want in the adjacent panel in the palette. To do this, I first must recognize the fact that the rest of the character — the part other than the radical, called the "phonetic" since it specifies the sound of the word — is drawn with seven strokes, for a total of nine. I scroll to the part of the characters panel that shows seven-stroke phonetics, and voilà. One of them is the "bo2" character I seek.

Then I just double-click on it, and it gets inserted in the text I am entering in the Blogger Edit Posts window. How this actually works, I have no idea. But I do note that I enclose the Chinese character in HTML that increases its "font size" by +4 for legibility.

What about "qi3"? The radical is 走, "zou3," pronounced "ZOH" to rhyme with "dough," with meaning "walk," "go," "move," etc. It has seven strokes, leaving a three-stroke phonetic in the ten-stroke 起. The palette gives only three three-stroke phonetics for this radical, and one of them is the right one! (Notice that this time the radical appears on the left-hand side of the actual character.)

posted by eric @ 11:44 AM