Tai chi (I'm using the Wade Giles romanization instead of the Pinyin "taiji" because it's more familiar to most of my readers) is a lot of things to a lot of people, but regardless of the emphasis of their particular school or style, most practitioners would agree that tai chi benefits your energy - your chi - by helping it to flow smoothly without blockages throughout the entire body.
Anyone who has read about the Emotional Freedom Technique popularized by Gary Craig and others knows that EFT also addresses the energy system. EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) is a way you can eliminate disturbances to your energy circulation by a deceptively simple series of meridian tappings, rubbings, hummings and eye_rollings. The idea is that any emotional trauma and associated negative thinking pattern will have a corresponding blockage or reversal of energy flow in the system of energy meridians that permeates your body.
What does this mean in practice? Imagine a small child who is learning to draw. She is playing in the way that children play, happily expanding her awareness of the possibilities that her environment offers her by handling tools, in this case a pencil and paper.
She is happily making marks on the paper in front of her when she has the idea to extend her operations to the nearby wall-paper. Suddenly her experiment is interrupted by a furious parent. The parent proceeds to show the child the 'proper' way to draw and we can imagine how the event might unfold if the parent is particularly stressed on this occasion and out of touch with the needs of the child.
Unfortunately, a simple incident like this can contribute to a lasting blockage around the business of handling pencils, and this in turn can hinder the potential of the individual to develop activities associated with drawing and writing.
The feeling the child experienced when her 'wrong-doing' was discovered corresponds with a disturbance in the flow of chi.
That feeling and it's corresponding disturbance are triggered to produce a built-in reaction to situations involving pencils and paper.
On one occasion when I was teaching a tai chi class in West London, I noticed one of my students, a middle-aged woman, overcome with frustration as she attempted to perform one of the basic tai chi movements. In that instant I saw a sharp division in the woman's personality; She was the scolding parent of her own inner child. She was angry with herself for being stupid and clumsy not being able to do tai chi properly, and she wasn't going to let herself off the hook.
The cruelty with which she was handling herself was tangible in the quiet class and I felt compelled to intervene. I asked her to imagine that she witnessed two people in front of her. One was trying to learn something and the other was mercilessly criticizing and judging in a way which was clearly distressing and counter-productive. I asked her if she would feel moved to intervene and say "Hey, leave her alone! Give her a chance!" She agreed with me. I told her to intervene on her own behalf whenever she felt impatient with herself.
I've no idea if it helped her. The term came to an end and she didn't return. This was a long time ago. Recently I witnessed a young teenage tai chi student of mine being unduly severe with herself and I told her the story. We then ran through the basic EFT sequence together focusing on her perfectionist tendency. I asked her to do this at the beginning of every tai chi practice session. The effect on her energy, and on her sense of the purpose of learning tai chi was immediately evident. I know that her tai chi practice will benefit and that it will in turn be more beneficial for her.
How much more help I could have been to my tai chi students back in the 80's and 90's if I'd only known then what I know now about EFT.
If you're a parent and I've touched a raw nerve about being impatient with young children, don't worry, it's not too late. Damage that can be unwittingly inflicted on vulnerable youngsters can be healed quite quickly by a parent who is committed to the principles of EFT and tai chi, overcoming the hard and the fixed with the soft and the pliable.
You may still have some doubts about whether EFT really works. It's reassuring to know that belief is not an essential component ...
Tai chi, hsing-i and bagua master Hung I Hsiang (1925-93) demonstrating his accupuncture technique and going on to explain something of tai chi principles for a BBC documentary shot in Taiwan in the early 1980s
While I was visiting Beijing in 2002 I studied Chen-style tai chi, which I found very challenging after 20-years of Yang-style practice.
I love this video of a 10-yr old performing Chen-style tai chi in Mainland China.
I gained a great deal of value from my experience with Chen-style tai chi, but as a non-athletic type of person already in my mid-fifties, I have gravitated back to the more modest movements of the form I began to study in 1980. These are the movements which will undoubtedly help me to grow old gracefully, and keep me away from the osteopath's office (as much as I like my wonderful osteopath!).
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