Questions about relaxation/motivation...

[caesar]

Hello everybody.

Are all kinds of feelings of pain/stiffness normal in the beginning? I've been training for a year Long Form of Yang. Sometimes I feel very relaxed, happy and energic after doing the form, other times very stiff and unhappy. Sometimes even so dissapointed that I wonder if I should stop training.

It feels conflicting...for the past year some stomach problems for example have dissappeared almost entirely. I believe my back is more straight and I notice more often tensions in my body. I think my focus has improved and patience.

Motivation problems still occur very often. For example, I'm at school right now, we had a lunch brake of one hour. I wasn't hungry so I went to do the form to a forest nearby. I guess I'm more relaxed now...but still it's a little difficult to concentrate on the lesson because I feel the tension around my head so strong, that I wonder, If I don't soon learn to do the form correctly, will I turn up having some brain injury...these kind of feelings sometimes make me question whether or not there's any sense of me doing Tai Chi almost every morning. I only have a blind thought and hope that "some day, I will see the benefits of my effort"

Or is it just that Tai Chi makes me more sensitive, and before the lunch brake I just couldn't feel the tension, which was in fact already there? So this is a good thing? I could go on with this subject and questions for longer but perhaps you got the idea.

I was dissapointed for a long time, but for the past week I felt like I had improved and more relaxed after doing the form. Today was a setback feeling and I decided to ask about this here.

Thanks.

[brer_momonga]

I find that I occasionally get headaches and stiffness during and/or after Tai Chi practice if I'm not breathing. If I don't think about breathing, I'll often hold my breath without realizing it.
Also, if I'm stressed or worried about something (or worse - angry), I find that I blindly do the movements rather than consciously moving/circulating chi.

Do you loosen your joints or warm up before practicing the form? I understand that on the go we may just start the form in the interest of saving time, assuming that we are sufficientlystretched and warmed up from the day's prior activities. If you have a limited amount of practice
time available, I would suggest doing a few ankle, knee, waist, shoulder, wrist and neck rolls and at least one or two short reps of your regular stretching routine. Do you try to feel your whole body relaxed before practicing the sequence - making sure you are not carrying tension through the form particularly in the facial muscles, hands, and shoulders?

Does your instructor teach a specific breathing method and meditation pathway to practice during the sequence? Perhaps you should mention your headaches and stiffness to him/her.

I, for one, find that I need reminders (constantly it sometimes seems) to keep my head up, relax my shoulders, and practice abdominal/belly breathing.

That's great news about your back pain and stomach condition. I've heard that the body will cycle itself (recondition) with each 90 days of any regular exercise, diet, behavior, etc in addition to natural seasonal/moon cycles.

Stick with it, caeser. Yang is a beautiful form.

Say I practice the form 3 times in an independent session, I inevitably do some sloppy spin or mess up some movement or another the third time or find I've lost breathing/meditation after only a few postures into the form. It frustrates me, but is a reminder that I need to practice again and again.

[caesar]

Hi brer_momonga and thank you for the tips!

Mentioning about the breathing was good because I definetly often forget about it and I'm sure it has a lot to do with the pains afterwords. Today I also noticed how my focus was distracted at many points. And usually at the same time I was: at a bad position, holding my breath, and last but not least: letting my sight wonder and not keeping it straight. At these moments also I was too much into my mind, meaning thinking something "lallallaa" which had nothing to do with the moment and practising tai chi. I think already these things have a huge impact on the practise and stiffness etc.

To your question...I usually do different sorts of Qi Gong before the form or then rolling the joints. We are also instructed to do standing meditation before the form to calm the mind. I admit that sometimes for saving time I skip all of them and go straight to the form. i don't know is that terribly wrong...but if I do so, I tend to try to do the form very lightly at start. Perhaps some of the stiffness and pains have come from not doing it lightly enough, with or without warmup.

Our instructor does not teach a specific breathing method yet...says that he doesn't want to make it too exact in the beginning...I've seen the students who've been training longer practising more detailed breathing. I have only been told to not to force the breathing and do it throw nose, if possible...breath slow and feel the flow.

I asked my teacher yesterday about my pains and he was wondering...said that he thinks I'm practising the right way at least when I'm in the class. He also promised to check my form more closely next time. And also mentioned, that doing Tai Chi might get us more aware of tensions, meaning that while we learn to be more relaxed, we might sometimes feel more tense.

It was weird, yesterday again, after the training, I felt same time very straight and loose, but also stiff, especially around head are. Emotionally I was feeling calm...later on that day, perhaps hour or two also the stiffness and pain around the head area was gone and all that was left was relaxed feeling.

[brer_momonga]

No problem, caeser! Increased self-awareness is one of the many fruits of practicing Tai Chi regularly. Right now I'm working on being more grounded in my stepping and stances. Lately I've felt I could be more stable in postures like the High Pat on Horse right after Single Whip. I think I rely too much on muscular strength and overuse my lower back rather than properly shifting my weight in many of the postures. Also, I was recently told my bow stance is too narrow. Always returning to the fundamentals!

[Dvivid]

Very good question.

A few things. Yes, breathing needs to become the focus of your practice for a while until you are breathing deeply all the time, not just during your Tai Chi form. Remember, Tai Chi is a form of qigong, unless you are practicing it with speed and power for martial arts application. So, you must allow time for your experience to move through the Five Regulatings.

First, regulating the body. You loosen the joints and muscles, get stronger where needed, stand up straight, perform the movements correctly, etc. Subtle adjustments until you have good habits.

Then, regulating the breath. Be a little obsessed for a while with observing your breath, relaxing more, and taking in more air (and energy). With every breath you are inhaling ions. Energy (qi).

Third, regulating the mind. Through the process of observing the breath, you begin to capture the mind, and focus it. Every time your mind wanders off, just observe the breath. This process takes the longest. Over time, you can harmonize your body, breathing, and mind into a single point of focused awareness. For many people, this is enough. When you can reach this state, your body's health will improive quickly, and you will feel much better on a daily basis. This stage is required in order to move onto the next.

Regulating the Qi. You being to lead your body's energy with the mind.

And, the fifth is regulating the spirit. Spirit, or 'shen', relates to your morale. The intensity of your focused awareness. A very long process for us all.

Also, be aware that we store emotional experience within our tissues, and when you beging to move during the taijiquan form often, you release tension that may have been stored a very long time, which results in negative feelings. Assume that you are making progress and releasing toxins when you illicit those uncomfortable feelings during practice.

AND, I highly recommend the Taiji Qigong set. It is a great practice on its own that can resolve a lot of issues physically and energetically, and prepares you for taijiquan practice:
http://ymaa.com/publishing/tai_chi_DVD/ ... qigong_DVD



Thanks for posting, take care
David Silver

[caesar]

Hi David!

Thank you for your post, it was very useful! I'm glad I asked about this matter in this forum. I immediately got kind tips from you people. At the same time something has happened with my practise which has made my life much lighter.

Ever since the first post I started paying a lot of attention to the breathing. One day I did the form in the morning after waking up. I felt pretty energic after it but something still felt very wrong. I had the thought all the time on my mind that I'm forcing the form too much. I did the form many times the same day, sometimes felt a little relaxed, but often really stressed and tence afterwords. I started cleaning up my whole appartment with great anger and frustration.

After many hours of cleaning and swearing, I suddently felt like doing the form just one more time. Something had happened. The first time, I didn't only pay attention to the breathing "I was the breathing." Ok, that sounds clichee. What I mean is, I had a natural feeling of when to move to the next posture according to breathing in or breathing out.

The first time ever, the form felt light, exciting, smooth and so soft...but I was still very concentrated and kept attention to doing the form as correct as I could. I felt huge satisfaction of all the effort, for not giving up, and for asking the question here in this forum. Later that evening I could sense my body doing the breathing fluidly and effortles, with me being the observer, not having to do anything else except watch how it happens. I was kinda like meditating the whole evening till I got asleep.

The next days I did the form with the same principles, following my breath and doing the movements in sync with it...I was asking a question sometimes that have I really discovered anything essential? Will the teacher tell me that I'm too "spaghetti" next time he sees me? Should I forget about what I had experienced and focus more on building the postures correct relying on more that the muscles would get stronger? Why did I even discover this thing "just like that", should I be starting to feel when to move in sync with the breath slowly, step by step?

Well nobody said anything to me about anything and I didn't ask anyone...but I stopped questioning my feelings and went on doing it as it felt good. Later that week I went to an "extra" lesson where there were mostly advanced students. We all started doing the form but the advanced students would say "Ying" in movements needing to breath in, and "Yang" in movements needing to breath out...I was happy to notice, that since the cleaning night, I had the same sync of when to breath in and out in each movement, as the students "with advanced breathing" . Before that, I had been having thoughts that , could it be that I'm breathing in wrong sync anyway, which would lead to damaging the body...since I've read and heard that Qi Gong is very detailed...

Ever since that day tai chi has finally truly been a way for me to relax and meditate many times a day, I no longer have stress before starting to do the form or Qi Gong exercises. Sometimes I wonder, why didn't any of the teachers be more clear about the breathing before...would I have suffered less in the past year? Then again, I think it all had a big impact of me starting to take also zen meditation classes where we only sit and count our breath. Perhaps it also had an influence on me starting to get a better grip of the breathing...and perhaps the past year has just simply been the path on doing it wrong by learning to listen to myself and being brave enough to ask the question in a forum finally.

And perhaps the past year has been something what David said about the first of the five regulatings:

First, regulating the body. You loosen the joints and muscles, get stronger where needed, stand up straight, perform the movements correctly, etc. Subtle adjustments until you have good habits.

Thank you.