The Tai Chi Mind: Two Keys to Transform Your Practice and Life

Thanks for helping. So the fun question is what is the optimal mindset for tai chi? That's a good thing to explore because the optimal mindset with tai chi is good for a lot of things beyond tai chi too. So it's easy if you look at what are the things that makes people's tai chi struggle. So I see when I see the question from students either on YouTube or on our discussion boards there's there are some common trends of what holds people back. One is being stuck in thought. So you want to be you want to be perceptive and when you're perceptive that means your awareness is expansive and outwards and when you're stuck in thought that means your awareness is hyper focused on just what your thought is. So in that case I'll be like oh in this movement I want you to relax and feel where the pressure is when your partner pushes on you. And then you'll get a question that's like oh does that mean their center is doing this and your root is doing that and I didn't necessarily say anything like that but they're thinking about those things. They may be right they may be wrong but to the extent that they fixate on these additional thoughts it makes it harder to notice what your partner's interaction with you is. So the key to the key to resolving that to not be stuck in your thoughts is well now let me ask you for what purpose do people overthink? They're trying to grasp at something grasp something yeah trying to make sense or meaning and or control a specific outcome. And for what purpose do they grasp a meaning and control the outcome? The latter part is a clue. They want to control the outcome because they don't want to they want to win they want to win yeah they want to win they don't want to lose they don't want to fail right so the fear of losing fear of failing is the reason by which people overthink over prepare and over invest in those kind of processes. We all know people who who just go and do things recklessly and and fail and sometimes they succeed or sometimes eventually they succeed but but they don't overthink because they don't have a fear of failure. And what's a better teacher success or failure? Always failure yeah always and so when you're avoiding failing how much learning are you getting done? Not much. Not as much is it? Some people say it's a curse to to be successful the first go-round. Yeah um well when I went to the university I had some professors that were like world-famous geniuses that were really good really successful and I understood nothing from their lecture because it's all easy and and and success to them and me I have to struggle and memorize and learn their stuff so so um so their success did not translate to to them being great teachers for for me and then my struggle through it made me eventually understand it in a way that I could help my classmates and stuff like that. So when we don't fear failure and we we let ourself go into it and there's a there's some process that they call today call like fail faster right so as a way to help you accelerate your learning. So when you're willing to fail faster to extend you can afford the failure then you can learn faster learn more deeply because each failure teaches you more about the the process right and then the more you fail the more you know where the limitations and the boundaries of this this problem or situation is. So if you embrace failure then you don't need to overthink you won't be lost in thought and you'll be able to really experience and learn and explore right. The second obstacle to people successfully learning Tai Chi with a good mindset is too much negativity. Could be good reason bad reason any kind of reason could be that uh that you know today you've got a flat tire a big repair bill and you're in a bad right so you can't stop thinking about it or you think oh life is so unfair why do I bother relaxing I'm going to need to tense up anyways these kind of negative thoughts can get in the way right. And what are these things really what is negativity that persists and affects you? It's a like a fixation on something that you have no control over if you do yeah it might be very little control. Yeah so a fixation yeah and oftentimes something you have little control over so what's the only control you have over the things that you don't have control over? How you respond. How you respond to it right yeah so there's a fixation which tends to limit how you respond to it and so these fixations make your energy stuck a certain way it makes your awareness stuck on a certain topic so that you cannot experience and it's like wishing how things should be not as if they are yeah and allowing it to enter is almost like a dm coming to you yeah either you you know it sounds like okay there's many ways to to you know it's gonna come yeah the dm no matter what life is one one dm or many dms right so I think that it's like to allow it in and then to to not fixate on it not fix it on it exactly just like practice yeah so so you're talking about in e-mastery we we take the the focal focal point of what where things are happening and where they wanted to happen and allow it and then take control of it right because if you resist it then you're you're you're trying to wish it to be a certain way but it's outside your control so you're constantly wishing for something that cannot happen it's fighting the the very structure of universe itself yeah and you'll lose yeah you're just shaking you can do that for a long time the clouds won't respond so so for negativity the way to do is to to to release it right to permit it to release it and then to find something else aside from it to move away from it instead of hyper fixating on it and that's where the tai chi practices of song is very helpful so we take tension and we release it until we yeah until we expand and we have song again and we do our chi gong we take our chi it can be yang it could be yin however way it is we can release that as well too so it could be free so these kind of things these same concepts can be applied to the negativity in your emotions because negative emotions are an energy of sorts that you can release so it's true you have a flat tire it's true you owe a couple hundred dollars but you'll deal with that when the bill has to be paid and for now you can do tai chi or you can do whatever it isn't that can benefit from your attention now so so as you practice your tai chi and you learn to release in song and song is not about releasing tension the word song means to release and throughout your tai chi growth you learn to release different things release tension release chi release thoughts release your awareness let it expand out and all these kind of things those are all different types of song but you're sewing different kinds of things you know as you master those things then you'll be free from these negative mindsets and the overthinking as you embrace failure and then when you do that then you have in the mindset that you could easily learn feel good and and get the most out of your experiences i can feel that this is an extension of the sum total of everything in my life yeah and how i deal with it yeah so the more i fight the more i hurt myself and others yeah um so but when i song it just you you know you you receive it the way it is and then you can find a way to softly gently let it go yeah not fight it head-on stubbornly expecting your own thoughts like it's just you know like being inflexible yeah becoming rigid so yeah it's it's uh really fascinating it's to see the changes when when you see the dns treat it as a dn yeah that's the hardest part can't help but getting upset right like oh someone cut me off i flipped them off and now we're like okay just okay shoot whoops my bad gotta let it go yeah so yeah something as simple as as fun as that simple and funny but yeah it's a great example of how this is more than just movements and techniques it's something that is that is a microcosm of your life a microcosm of the macrocosm of the universe how everything works and how you can be happy and fulfilled yeah it's a fractal and a fractal you can't change anything but you can like you said you can change how how you feel about it yeah that's the only thing that once you change everything else changes and how do you feel after that you feel free feel free that's nice to feel free right so thank you for helping me with this discussion thank you thanks for listening see you next time