Relieve pain with subtle shifts in tai chi movement

If you experience recurring pain while practicing, a slight shift in your tai chi practice method may be all you need to affect a big change. For example, a closer alignment to the center may be all you need to relieve, or dissolve, pain.

Many have knee pain, which is often a sign of incorrect posture or incorrect usage. Chronic or acute, it doesn’t matter. Either we seem unable to track the hurt back to its origin (chronic), or it is (relatively) recent injury (acute).

Sometimes it is caused by practice itself. We don’t realize we are kinking the knee too far out (bow-legged), or too far in (knock-kneed). The arches may be too flat or too stretched up, as well; which suggests uneven foot pressure toward one side or another. These positions cause alignment to go out and often result in pain during and after practice.

Sometimes we just work too hard. In aerobic or resistance training, people often push themselves. While this has its value, doing tai chi that way may aggravate chronic issues that you want to alleviate.

Master Ching Manching
standing in Wuji

The issue might be merely postural in origin, whether it be in muscle, tendon, ligament, or joint. If your structure is off just a little, you could over work and over strain that area.

Working to improve skills at detecting subtle postural changes while in motion—something more difficult to do in fast movements—could really help to discover new training possibilities. Sometimes you need to go easy on yourself to give yourself a chance to detect subtle changes. You may have to move more slowly and pay closer attention to finer degrees of movement.

Moving while being mindful of central equilibrium, or zhong ding, can highlight where your structure is out of balance. The solution could simply be a mere shifting one way or another. While practicing, you can ask yourself where you tend to pivot from—perhaps, feet, knee, thigh, hip—and see what subtle changes you can affect.

Picture a fulcrum at the core of your balance and movement. Dr. Susan Matthews has referred to this as a teeter-totter, or see-saw, idea; whereby a part of the body lies at the center point of a motion. You essentially move from or through that point, and return to it. Then to get a sense of alignment, or equilibrium, picture a line of such points moving in relation to each other.

This kind of attention to alignment may be just what you need to help find and fix those little spots that catch and hurt.

You can find lots of info on alignment in general on the Web from other disciplines and authors. I would just add the idea that many practitioners are unaware of how a greater depth of awareness and a simple, subtle shift in alignment can lead to relief from common hindrances in training like pain.

For other aspects of this subject, see the following posts.

—“Zhong Ding”
—“Standing in Wu Ji“
—“Zhong Ding: A Fundamental Part of Tai Chi Practice”

Also, view a video demonstration by Wu Tai Ji Grandmaster Wang Hao Da. His zhong ding training is superb.

For more in-depth training, you might be interested in visiting Susan Matthews’ Spiral Anatomy™ Training Course (Module #2).

Hold that (tai chi) thought

Tai chi teachers hold a place for other learners who are unable to put in the time to maintain a regular practice. They hold the thought for when they return to practice and pick up where they left off.

Hold Up Sky

Speaking of holding the thought, to build awareness in the practice of tai chi, look for something to work on or improve every time you do form. Remember to be aware of this each time you stand in wuji. Example: watch for a particular tension in body that you carry with you through the form. It may be a discomfort or even pain – in the knee, for example. Or maybe it’s a tension in the nape of the neck from leaning too far forward.

The next time you do form pay more attention to that issue and try to alleviate it. You could straighten the angle of the leg or raise the shen by elongating the spine and opening the solar plexus a little more than usual.

This is a zhong ding concept. Internal practice requires focus on the center line (zhong ding). Getting essential and beneficial alignment is key to free movement in the structure of the body. Proprioception will improve gradually, then exponentially.

Movement begins with mental focus. Place attention upon the space of interest and connect the dots.

Knees bend softly, never locked, flexible, changeable, not torqued, not tensed, not stressed or weighted upon. You must watch for these things, these states of being in motion and in stillness.

Sounds complex? Maybe it is, but with immersion it becomes less so. I am always amazed at how much awareness I can muster and how many activities of which I can stay cognizant while in motion.

At first, it is only one thing at a time. Beginners will focus on that. Then it is an ease of shifting focus from one thing, or even two things, at a time and maintain that focus. Maybe intermediate practitioners can do this fairly well.

Then, in advanced stages your view broadens and a whole symphonic movement evolves in unison, almost as if you are a spectator and conductor simultaneously.

Curated Article: Tai Chi for Seniors by William C. C. Chen

This is a good read written by William C. C Chen, who is 86 years old now. Entitled “Tai Chi Exercise for Seniors,” I thought I would pass it on to readers of this blog. http://www.williamccchen.com/Seniors.htm

Thursday, July 12, 2018

“The ancient Chinese martial art of Tai Chi Chuan is the perfect callisthenic for today’s seniors. The relaxed and unhurried movements help alleviate nervous and muscular tension. Tai Chi Chuan lubricates joints and promotes automatic body alignment for better control of balance, helping to prevent the instability that can lead to falls.”

Just what are you moving when you do tai chi?

One thing I like about learning and doing tai chi is that it is something that we haven’t done before. At least what we don’t recognize as something we’ve done before. Maybe we have, but don’t realize it as something familiar, … maybe we do.

Nevertheless, whatever way you may see it, tai chi is taking new pathways into the mind and body and discovering new ways of thinking and being. In fact, learning tai chi is more like discovering. You discover a process of movement that produces new perceptions about what you’re doing which, in the case of tai chi, has movement at its core.

The question I have asked myself in the past is: “What is it that you’re moving when you’re “doing tai chi”? The most obvious answer is moving the body, of course; but is that all there is that is actually moving? What about the mind? Is not the mind moving as well? Are we not shifting our attention, our perception to become aware of something about movement that we didn’t notice before?

Next time you “do” tai chi, maybe you will enjoy thinking about this little aspect of movement than may not have occurred to you before.

Turning attention inward—and outward—in tai chi practice

Taiji is a meditative practice. We often think that means turning the attention inward. True. It could be a focus on breathing, or silencing the mind of thoughts. You can do that in taiji, but as a moving meditation you also have a task of focusing on the outside of the self. Or more accurately, focusing the self on what is happening outside; for example, to ground one’s self. This is a process of finding a surer footing; to sink in gravity, yet float on water. To move in various directions, shapes and patterns with greater ease and balance.

It’s also a process of sensing your surroundings and how your body is situated in space. You could say that grounding yourself is more than feeling the soles of your feet on the Earth and sensing movement through them. It’s also sensing movement in the near environment. The far environment, too—the sky, the distant view. Yin and yang can expand and fill in the space while also condensing and rooting in earth and sky.

That’s the focus. So how do you do it? Certainly by feeling with the body. Also by listening to the body with the mind—with inherent powers of observation and honing one’s awareness on the inner and outer workings of the whole being. How is a move done? What makes the move occur in the first place? Bones, joints, ligaments, tendons, muscles, even organs. How does the body change directions? How much force is generated or is any generated at all? What’s moving, what is not? Tension is released in degrees, so what does that feel like? Can you describe it? Give it language?

Parts of us are asleep—mind and body. Inertia is at work. Tai chi helps to wake them up. But what do you wake up first? How do you wake? To wake the body, move in ways different from your usual way. Wake the mind by looking at the world in different ways, from different angles and with different perspectives. Moving and seeing differently creates new opportunities for discovery and understanding. The whole of doing tai chi is a question of how to move in general, and how to move each part of the body, specifically.

About loosening in tai chi

I don’t really know about what other tai chi teachers do, but I show learners loosening exercises that they can do to achieve a number of results. One result is to improve concentration on repetitive, rhythmic motion for building skill in biomechanical efficiency, balance and even power. Usually, I encompass these kinds of exercises in “single-basic” exercises. On-going students are familiar with these, but beginners stumble over various aspects of practicing them. One of them is speed.

Speed is not always good in loosening exercise. Slowing down allows you to get connected more readily. Staying connected while moving is easier to accomplish if you stop assuming—moving faster while cycling through them more rapidly—is better. Like it’s aerobics or some cardio exercise.

This tai chi is not, and it may be foolish to compare one to the other. They’re different approaches to movement. Do cardio if you want, but don’t think something is missing in tai chi because it’s not going fast enough or hard enough. You won’t get what tai chi has to offer that is as valuable as anything you can get from some kind of aerobic tai chi.

One of those things you get from tai chi is powerful whole-body connectivity. The mental concentration it takes to achieve it leads to a boon in better mind-body connection and better health and longevity