How and Why to Do Tai Chi for Health.

How you use your body affects your health. Pause for a minute and think about this. It’s easy to skip over the importance of the idea that your actions affect your health. It’s seems obvious. However, how often do you embrace the power this gives you and take actions that improve your state of being? Now, we’ll go further and say that getting by isn’t good enough. Just surviving the day is a miserable way to live. It does not need to be that way. We can learn to prioritize our well being again while still doing the work that needs to be done. Tai chi is a practice of upgrading the quality of our movement, our breath, and where we focus our minds. These are the three keys to controlling our health and well-being: movement, breath and the focus of our thoughts. Look at the ideal we are training toward in tai chi with these three in mind. That ideal is that our movement is supple and powerful at every point in our range of motion. The breath is very deep and full even when working hard. The mind is clear, undistracted and focused on the ideal outcome of whatever we are doing in this moment.

The ideal of tai chi seems amazing!

Amazing as in, who wouldn’t want to feel like that all day. But also in that way that doesn’t really seem attainable. Especially if our current state of being is physically diminished, stressed, or otherwise unwell. Bear with me though and you’ll see the challenge in a different way. Tai Chi Ch’uan is not something we accomplish. It is not something we complete. Tai Chi is a different way of living. You see, the point of the training is to learn how to become more aware of our current way of living/moving and tune ourselves up toward that ideal. Every challenge can be overcome with this approach. We put in a little positive energy and effort each day. That way of life, doing everything I am capable of today to move toward my ideal, is what restored me fully after a broken hip and a torn rotator cuff. Both of these injuries required months of effort. It has also carried me through years of broken sleep with newborns, moving our family, financial strains and so on. Every year I feel stronger. Large challenges like recovering from a major injury, getting free of stressed or depressed states of mind, or building a business can become overwhelming when starting out. That is why from day one in Tai Chi we learn to relax as much as possible even as we are under pressure. Every time the mind becomes distracted by thinking about how far we have to go we breathe, relax, and focus the mind on taking this action, right now to the best of our ability. Don’t sweat that you have a have a mountain to climb, just take one really good step.