3 Follow the light up your arms and pouring into your shoulder joints. Move your arms forward and back, up and down, and out to the sides, exploring their mobility. Think about how each limb is connected from shoulder to finger joint.
4 Feel the light flood from your shoulder joint into your shoulder blades and move to your neck. Relaxing your face and jaw, move your neck in every direction. Then follow the light as it moves up into your jaw and skull. Explore the movement of your jawbone.
5 The light slowly descends your spine, filling each vertebra and spreading along each rib. Explore the movement possibilities of your upper body. Follow the light down to the sacrum and coccyx. As it circles the pelvic girdle, your hips join the dance. Let yourself move intuitively and creatively.
6 Let the light pour into your hip joints, directing your attention to them and supporting their movement. Listen to your pelvis and follow the knowledge that resides in it.
7 Follow the light down each thighbone. Your knees fill with light. It pours down your shin bones to your ankles and feet. Your whole frame is alight and alive, a dancing skeleton.
8 Bring your body to rest. You may feel like standing or sitting, crouching, squatting, crawling, or even rolling on the floor. Notice your mobility as you move into these different positions. Finish by resting in any position for at least one minute. Remove your blindfold.
THE QUALITIES OF stability and mobility work with perfect synchronicity in the tai chi postures, which combine correct body shape with freedom of movement. The result is a solid strength and flexibility. Tai chi is a holistic practice, so all parts of the body – hips and heels, pelvis and spine, shoulders and hands – work as one.
THE BASIC STANCE
Although every tai chi posture is carried out while standing, the characteristic stance is rather like standing and sitting at the same time. By techniques such as keeping the feet firmly planted on the ground, keeping the knees flexible and never locking them, and dropping the spine, you sit yourself into a stance, and maintain this basic posture while moving. This illustration analyzes the basic tai chi stance, and the guidelines given apply to all the postures. Practice the stance as a static posture often, until you are confident enough to be able to adopt it without practice.
ALIGNING THE HANDS
The following exercise demonstrates the difference between aligning the hands with the forearms and letting them hang down from the wrists.
1 Stand with your arms lifted to chest level and the palms of your hands facing you with the fingertips spread about 2 inches apart from each other. Let your elbows hang close to your sides and your wrists go limp so that your hands drop. Imagine your arms and hands are enclosing something large and cylindrical against your chest.
2 Now lift your hands until they are in line with your forearms. The cylindrical shape begins to fly off.
3 Lift your elbows up and out to the front to bring the shape back without letting your hands flop forward. This time the shape enclosed by your arms is defined by your elbows, shoulders, and spine and not just your arms and hands, so it is defined more strongly. Letting the hands drop isolates them from the rest of the body.
ALIGNING KNEE AND FOOT
In Lifting Hands the rear knee and foot are in perfect alignment when the weight is back. When the weight is forward, as in Shoulder Stroke or Brush Knee and Push, the bent knee should be no farther forward than the toes.
BY COMPARISON WITH the efficient internal organization of the body, the way most people run their external lives seems chaotic. The perfectly regulated systems that keep the body alive give their unceasing best from the moment of conception to the time of death. Tai chi offers its steady, rhythmic movements as a link between the two. It acknowledges that we are at all times spirit, mind, emotion, and physique. And it reinforces the role of the body’s internal systems by supporting the working of all its organs, from outer skin to heart and brain deep in its interior.
Traditional Chinese medicine recognizes the importance of the kidneys to health, as this illustration of the internal organs shows.
Although the body’s organs function with scarcely an interruption whether the rest of the body is sick or healthy, tense or relaxed, the quality of their functioning fluctuates in ways that often go unnoticed. The health of an organ depends on a network of mental, emotional, and physical conditions. Someone who is feeling good, fulfilled, and wanted by other people will be likely to have well-functioning organs, and, if that person also exercises and follows a healthy diet, excellent health.
Studies show that the body works best when the mind is content, but we have known this instinctively for centuries. Throughout history and across cultural boundaries the liver has been associated with the emotion of anger. Bile, crucial to the breakdown of fats, is abundantly produced by the liver when a person is happy. This sensitive organ reduces its bile production in response to anger.
RELEASE THROUGH TAI CHI
Any tai chi exercise can work toward release of tension, anger, or other pent-up emotions. The third preparatory exercise, the Rainbow Circle, for example, focuses on healing the kidneys. The following exercise is helpful for releasing emotion. It also massages the kidneys and loosens tightness and feelings of rigidity in the spine. Adopt any strong tai chi stance and relax as deeply as you can. Lift your arms as high as you like and turn your body from one side to the other quite vigorously. At the completion of each turn stop suddenly and shout HEY! or SHOO! Feel the release coming through your arms and out of your fingers.
Through regular daily practice and especially through partner practice, tai chi teaches new ways of dealing with anger and other strong emotion. It teaches techniques of self-expression as the best way of achieving this. It is well known that depression can be the result of pent-up anger, and that anger can result from frustration. These emotions must be allowed to flow rather than be blocked. The flow may be generated through speaking, for example, or writing, or painting.
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