HEALING AND MARTIAL ARTS BLOG

There is a point in every practice where the benefit you receive exceeds the effort you put in. At the beginning there is a lot of effort as you learn the principles and condition the mind and body. But then the creative energy of the mind and body begins to take off on its own and lead you. At that point you need to yield to your own creativity.

You can feel this principle with the compression and expansion of the body. As you breathe out in your exercises, your body sinks and compresses into the legs and into the ground (the root). As you breathe in, the body expands and the energy is propelled into the environment. There is an in-between point where this expansive energy (Yang) surges and begins to “leap” out of you. At that point you allow each muscle and joint of the body, as well as the connective tissue, to be pulled by that expansion and stretch. Just when the Yang energy is released out of the body, you begin to breathe out and the muscles, joints and connective tissue begin to relax. This cycle brings flexibility to the body and serves as an “energy pump”.

Our everyday lives can wear us out and the last thing we feel we need is another activity that requires effort. But Zookinesis and Tai-chi can serve as energy pumps. At the beginning you certainly gain flexibility, relaxation, emotional calm and other aspects of physical and mental health. Yet you have to put a lot of practice into it. But soon the benefits you gain each week far outweigh the effort.

An important key principle of the energy pump is that the critical momentum, the point at which you yield to the expanding energy, takes place constantly in your life. It does not just happen at one moment in your life. There is positive energy all around you that can pull you out of lethargy. Some of that energy is natural and some is the creativity, the art of we humans.

If you can be on the lookout for that expanding Yang energy, you will find it everywhere. You will know how to yield to it because you have practiced this kind of yielding in your exercises. You will also recognize what is positive and what is negative energy because of how it feels when you yield to it. Does it lead to more relaxation, health and creativity or less? Does it make you more energized or just more crazy and frantic? You will gain skill at what to yield to and what to walk away from.

One of the great benefits of a practice such as Zookinesis and Tai-chi is that you can take an incident in life and analyze it in your practice. If your interaction with another person went bad, you have the sensitivity to know the dynamics of how it made you feel. You can then practice those dynamics in your exercises to develop greater skills and greater understanding of yourself. You have a framework that can be used to understand your life. You will understand how the positive, creative energy you developed through your practice, can be connected to similar energy in your environment.

This will pull your life in a positive direction, calling on the positive qualities within you. It will allow you to be more “open” because you are clear about when to be open and with whom. When the energy or the people around you are not good for you, you don’t need to close up and tense up. You are so familiar with the principles of connecting that you can avoid connecting with bad influences without completely closing up.

This brings more lightness to your life without making you vulnerable. You will learn that other people can “pull” on that energy and that is not a good thing. If they pull your Yang energy out of you, it depletes you. If your Yang energy emerges out of you of its own volition, that energizes you. Your practice teaches you to discern the difference between the two and to protect yourself from being depleted.

So a simple practice like compressing the body on the outbreath and expanding on the inbreath, can permeate your life, giving you new insights about how to live more powerfully.

My books, Movements of Magic and Movements of Power are mostly about how to take your practices and use them in your daily life. Tai-chi is not just about memorizing a series of movements; it is about creating a critical momentum of positive energy that can transform your life.

 We quickly get caught up in the everyday “struggle” of life and try to organize our lives into routines. These routines allow us to function automatically to get our daily tasks done efficiently. Yet the routines also make our lives robotic and drain us of the adventurous spirit that we may have had at a younger age. That spirit gave us energy and vitality.

How can we re-capture that spirit while our lives are filled with many routines? Learning a practice like Tai-chi, Zookinesis or any other subject can provide us with a life-time of discovery. My mother went back to college when she was 65 years old. Many people asked her why she needed to go to college at that age. She explained that she needed her mind to be challenged in order to feel alive. My father used to say that when you stop learning, you die.

Do you feel that you have learned as much as you need to, in order to live the rest of your life repeating cycles of routines? For many people life is a dulling process. Your spirit becomes duller each year until you die. Yet you can add an adventurous practice to your life at any time. Even if you spend just a few minutes a few times a week at your study or physical practice, it will add the spirit of adventure to your life. You don’t even have to excel at your practice. Simply being involved in it can change the “flavor” of your life.

At many points in our lives, we often say, “I should have” learned this or that. Remember that today is a point in your life. Imagine what you would like to do. Think of what skills and other tools (such as knowledge) you would need to accomplish your goal. Then patiently acquire those skills and tools. Your life will begin to organize itself around your dreams instead of around your routines. This is the key to maintaining your vitality.

Most of my students come to the school to learn a Tai-chi form or to reduce stress. They have a limited goal in mind. As they set about to accomplish this goal they discover the great depth of these training systems. They find that these studies are a path to self-discovery and a way to revitalize their bodies and minds. As their skills deepen, their goals deepen. The surprising thing to many students is how much self-discovery there is in every class. Breakthroughs in skills and understanding become so regular that they feel they are on a speeding train of self-discovery. And this is true no matter how many years they have been coming to class.

There is simply a great distance for all of us to go to really develop our potential. It is the thrill of wondering what discovery awaits around the next corner that keeps them coming to class. Life becomes thrilling even in the midst of your everyday routines, which of course, you still have to do.

One of the most important roles of culture in tribal societies was to unite the “sacred and profane worlds”. This means that in the midst of the everyday chores of life (the profane), our connection to nature (the sacred) had to still be the focus of our attention. Many ceremonies were carried out at regular times throughout the year to commemorate our connection to nature. These ceremonies were “routines” but ones that changed peoples’ focus from everyday problems to thankfulness to nature. We were reminded that the miracle of being alive overpowers any aggravations and sadness we may have.

The dullness that has overtaken many of us is so profound that we are not aware of how much feeling we have lost. After I give a Tai-chi massage, the person usually says, “I feel like I’m really alive!” If I had asked them before if they felt alive they would have surely said yes. But after the massage they realize how much feeling they gained. Every little part of the body wakes up and is eager to participate in life. It is the difference between not wanting to get up in the morning and wanting to jump out of bed to start the day.

The Zookinesis exercises are specifically designed to develop feeling and skill in each joint and muscle of the body. They are imitations of animal movements. Connecting your mind to your body is another way of making your life “sacred”. Many peoples’ minds spin all day. This uses up a lot of energy and doesn’t accomplish anything. Connecting mind to body ends this useless spinning, which is just mental routines that have gotten stuck.

When the mind functions in endless, repeating routines, our lives duplicate the patterns of the mind. By connecting mind to body, we become more creative and our lives more exciting. Many people feel that their lives are exciting because their routines exhaust them. They feel that if they are tired at the end of each day, that’s all the excitement they can take. Yes, routines can be exhausting but they are depleting to the spirit as well.

Somehow the excitement of learning new things doesn’t deplete you. You may be so worn out after Tai-chi sparring practice, for example, that you fall down to catch your breath, but within a minute you are ready to get up for more sparring. I often used to be tired when I began to teach sparring but after two hours of sparring, I was invigorated. It is an illusion that you are too tired for your practice.

Practicing Tai-chi, Zookinesis, Pilates or any other such activity refreshes you. Whatever time and energy you put into it is more than re-paid by the energy you get out of it. I have often thought that living a life of routines is like spiraling down a funnel into death. Life can be a spiral upward towards more vitality, skills and knowledge. It doesn’t even take much time each day. Starting a practice or study can change the entire nature of your life.