All Tai Chi Beginners Do These WRONG

My goal is to let people know that Taiji is an internal martial art and it is so relevant to learn this for your everyday life. You may not think that you need to learn this for any kind of fighting or self-defense, but you are probably experiencing lots of non-physical attacks and stressors throughout your day. So this physical martial art that we learn how to listen to the tensions in our own body, you can totally apply that and it can help you so much. So that's why we coined the term stress bending. These arts can make you a stress bender. Let's warm up a little bit. Stand with your feet shoulder width apart. Let's just center ourselves. Feel your two feet even weighted. If they were on a scale, make them even. Feel the contact that your feet make to the floor, even on both sides. Now feel how that weight's distributing. Do you notice that a lot of times your weight sinks into your heels? Feel the sensation of your feet to the floor and let that be even across. And then feel the sensation from your big toe out to your pinky toe. Spread that evenly across on your right hip versus the left hip. Do you feel more pressure on one side or the other side? See if you can make micro adjustments to even it out. Don't overcompensate. That's such a tendency that we overcompensate. So make micro adjustments until you feel like, yeah, that's like an even flow. And then same with your shoulder. Finally, feel yourself just completely down the center. Shoulders down, elbows down. Be one with gravity. Gravity is your friend. Relax. If you are a parent and you have kids or a friend who got drunk and you have to carry them, just how heavy the body becomes when it's asleep or when it's like totally relaxed. It's like they're a sack of potatoes, like gain 30 pounds, right? And that's just tension in, tension release. So that's what you want. Just let that tension release. So you become the sack of potatoes. Sack of potatoes that has a fishing line that is still pulling the mid central core of your body up. So that's the two opposing forces that are keeping you stable. Energy down everywhere except this point up right in the middle. And maintaining a frame in your arms. So this is a Tai Chi warmup that we do. You bring your hands forward and not lifting from the shoulder. So how do you bring your arms up? You can use your muscles and lift it up, but that's not what I want you to visualize. I want you to visualize you're standing in water and the water actually comes up right to this level. Nice, warm, comfortable water. And your hands just relax down by the side. And imagine there are two balls that appear right at the palm of your hands. And the balls start floating up the water. And as the balls float up the water, the hands follow the ball float up the water. And it just comes along for the ride. No activation in your shoulders, right? So it's not like we're lifting. We're not adding anything to this motion. Visualize the ball floats. Oh, and my hand is just going to follow that floating up. The ball floats up more. My hand is just going to follow until, oh, the ball is now at the surface of the water and my hands resting on it. The arms here, there's a frame here where it's round. We're going to turn the palms to face up. So notice how I'm not turning my elbows in. I'm keeping this curve and I'm maintaining my frame in my arm as I turn the palm up. And when you turn your palm up, the ball hasn't gone away. Remember we're resting on the ball floating on the surface and we just rest on it. The ball hasn't gone away. Now it's just the back of your hand rests on it. Go faster, maintaining that curve frame. And then now we're going to do this out to the side. So now it's like the ball floats up on the side and your hands are resting on the side here. You still maintain that frame. We're not doing this. This appears in lots of Tai Chi movements where our hands open up and we don't want that to come from the elbow. In Tai Chi, you never, ever want your elbow to be in this position. And this is just any martial art. This is what we are all seeking. We're seeking an elbow that we can control like this. We're also seeking an elbow that we can control like this. So don't give that to them. We can do some cloud hands. Rotate like a crank is turning you and you're going from corner to corner like this. If you imagine you have a laser that shoots a straight line out of your belly button. That's one laser. You have another laser that shoots out from your chest. And then you have a laser that shoots out from your nose. These three lasers have to be in the same line. You can just turn your head, right? So turn to the corner and look at your hand. You can just turn your head and you can see the hand in the corner. But if you were to match up those three lasers, the laser coming out of your nose would be out to that corner. The laser coming out of your chest would be coming out straight, and that would be matched with the laser coming out of your belly button. So those three lasers don't match. You can turn from your waist and look at your hand. And then now the laser coming out of your nose and the laser coming out of your chest match, but the laser coming out of your belly button is pointing straight. So those three lasers still don't match. So we need to turn from the hips. So when you turn from the hip, now nose, chest, belly button, the laser stay in line. What does that mean to your chest and your head when you turn from your hips? It needs to just stay still. So you are still when you face forward. No motion. These three lasers stay in line. Well, if you just stay still and let the hips turn around, these three lasers still stay in line and rotate back to the front and rotate to the corner. So Taiji is really training you to keep more still. If you keep still, then everything will go into place. What we're doing with our arms is also that same concept of don't move so much, but your shoulders relax, arm relax. And as you turn to face front, keep your shoulders down. And it's like, you know, if you think about your hands getting lifted up from a cloud. And when the laser pointer shoots straight, the laser pointer that comes out of your chest goes right through your hand. And then as you turn to the corner, the hand comes up, the laser pointer goes out and it hits your hand. Let it turn and then let it relax and drop down. And now the laser that comes out of your belly button, it still goes right through your hand. So the hand is always going to be in the line of the laser. Belly button, chest, hand, relax, shoulders relax. It's really an exercise of preventing you from trying to do too much. It's like really just try to make yourself be as still as possible. When you try to force things to happen, you wind up getting in your own way. You think you're doing something, but what you're actually doing is you're overshooting. Your body can get there. Your body doesn't need your mind to control it. This is the biggest revelation for Tai Chi practice. Yeah. It's the hardest part for everyone to just relax. That's because your body just doesn't know how to do it. Stress sets in and all of these things have made us forget how to relax. Everybody exists in this one in 20 kind of world where we get stressed out to the extreme and then we can't take it anymore. And then you got to run away. We're going to go and decompress. We're going to do something to just let all that stress out. So it's like build up that pressure. Can't take it anymore. About to explode. And then I could go and completely decompress and then it goes back. It's like you have to leave that stressful environment and escape to relax. It's not like you go and you relax and the stressful situation goes away. So you step right back into it. And it's like this vicious cycle. When we practice Tai Chi, we are preventing it actually from getting to this kind of extreme. We're never here. We're not limp. So it's like a balloon inflates and we fill up and we relax and like this is still quite powerful filled with internal energy. So this is what we're trying to achieve where it's relaxed but inflated and full. Being able to be in that stressful situation and still stay relaxed because that's how we can just do what we need to do. We don't need to escape from it. We just be in whatever is that environment and we learn how to relax into it. So if we can do this physically, then you can do it in every single situation. Shoulders relax. The shoulder is one with gravity. Put your hand under your elbow and feel weight into it. If all that tension is in your own arm and you put your hand under your elbow, you won't feel any weight. If you're resting that arm down, you'll feel the weight. Let that tension go. Rest that elbow down. This feeling in your shoulders and arms, it stays. We're going to turn to the corner and remember we're turning from the hip because we want to keep these three lasers in line. The laser shooting out of your nose shoots a hole into your hand. Gravity pulls your shoulder down. Let that palm turn down and then just let it relax. Just let it go. Just let it go. Let it go. But we're going to keep space and keep a curve and then as we turn and now we're facing the corner, the laser out of your belly button shoots a hole out of your hand. Shoulders relax out into your hand, into your hand, into your hand. Notice the hands just stay within the center line of the body. Other hand. Shoulders relax. When you face forward, nose, chest, belly button all forward. Corner. Nose, chest, belly button all to the corner. Turn, drop. Gravity, your friend. If you rest your hand underneath your elbow, you should feel weight not just all here in your own body but down where you can feel the weight into your other hand. Relax. The most important first step is noticing when the tension is setting in. So many people don't even reach that first step and you can't relax what you don't feel is tense. Yeah, it's like a pendulum in slow motion. Exactly. Your body is going through this pendulum motion and you're letting it go in that motion. Those balls that all kind of go swinging just kind of stay all in their same line, all going together, right? But it's like if you move one of them, then it goes off kilter. So that's what happens is if you're trying to control your arm, then you've actually went and like threw one of those balls off the motion. Just want everything to go with that pendulum flow and your body just kind of goes with it and don't add to it. When we go one arm at a time, it's easy to feel that. Now, when we bring two together, because it's now two hands, your brain is giving off a signal. Two hands is complicated. I've got to really pay attention and I've got to figure this out. And then everything that you did that was so relaxed and fluid goes out the window just because your brain is trying to take over figuring out how do I do one hand's doing what the other hand's doing what? How do I coordinate the two? And then it becomes this different experience than the experience that we just had. So we're just going to test this out. Laser out your belly button, shoots into the bottom hand. Laser out of your nose, shoots into the top hand, facing the corner. Turn to face forward. Laser out of your chest, shoots into your hand. Turn to face the other corner. Laser out of your nose, shoots out of the top. Laser out of the belly button, shoots out of the bottom. The side you are facing, that's the hand that's up. So if you're facing the right corner, your right hand is up. If you're facing the left corner, your left hand is up. Gravity is still your best friend. Keeping your shoulders relaxed. So it's so, so common for our bodies to tense up once we're trying to bring two hands together. So my suggestion is completely focus your mind on one hand and just forget the other even exists. So if you want to focus, focus on the hand that's coming up. Just find the pendulum swing in the hand that's coming up. Find the pendulum swing in the hand that's coming up. Forget the other one is even there. You don't need to control every motion of both hands. Shoulders stay down. Arms relax. Body is actually trying to be as still as it can be. And now we're going to shift our weight. So this is now the walking part. We're going to shift as we turn. And then we're going to bring the foot in, shift. And then we're going to bring the foot out, come to the middle, all the way. Bring the foot in, come to the middle. Middle means both feet flat to the floor. Go all the way. Shift to the middle. Go all the way. Change direction. Step back out. Come to the middle. Shoulders relaxed. Shift all the way. Middle. Middle. Two more steps. So hopefully you're feeling like there's just one energy that takes you over to one side and everything just follows there. And then we go to the other side and it's one energy that takes you there. Everything follows there. Weight shifts there. Body turns there. Arms go up there. All right. How did that go? Those stepping made it way harder. Yeah. Every day is a leg day with Tai Chi. It's true. If you are a tree, the legs are like a trunk. Give strong, strong legs.