This week's Tai Chi Tuesday is for the martial arts practitioners out there who want to learn how to increase their reaction speed, particularly in their arms. The exercise I show you in the video below is a great technique to practice with a partner for developing better reaction speed and accuracy. Good luck!
Rami's Blog
Like the Yin-Yang, Eastern Martial Arts and Western medicine are two halves of a whole. My mission is to preserve the ancient mind-body tools and pass them on to you.
Sitting is Hurting your Hips
I saw a great article from www.artofmanliness.com posted on Twitter today (by @ImproveMove) that showed some great stretches for correcting the damage that sitting for long periods of time can do to your hips. I highly recommend giving the page a visit and incorporating those stretches into your routine.
I have touched on the issue of our sedentary lifestyle before, specifically, how it can affect our spine and back health. Obviously, a stiff or painful back will put anyone out of commission for a while, and that's why I spoke about it first. However, tight and painful hips will also do a number on our overall health. They can affect our digestive and reproductive health, and if you are an athlete, I'd argue that your hips are the most important part of your body.
Like I said in my vlog on Tuesday, the difference between a white belt and a black belt in martial arts is where the power of their attacks originates. In the case of the white belt, they are punching and kicking with only their limbs. In the case of the black belt, they are striking with their whole body, and the force of the ground pushing up against them, and turning that all into much more powerful attack.
There are two reasons as to why the hips are so important to athletic movement. The first, is that our hips are our biggest joint, and also the center of gravity in our body. But in the eastern tradition, just above the hips (two inches below the navel) is our bodies greatest energy reservoir, the Lower Energy Center. When we move energy from within our body outward, such as when we are playing sports, that is where it comes from.If you have tight hips, your energy in not going to flow as well as it should.
So stretch those hips! On my site, you can find numerous stretches for your hips labeled under Hips, and the Legs and Abdomen tags (because all those muscles connect to the hips, so any stretch for them is also a hip stretch).
Happy stretching!
Meditation the Taoist Way
This Tai Chi Tuesday, Rami shows you how to meditate while focusing on the Lower Energy Center reservoir of our Energetic System. There are many benefits to this visualization, and practicing it on a daily basis does wonders for relieving stress.
Cooling the Energetic Baton
To round out our series on the Energetic Baton, we're going to talk about how to cool it.
Energy naturally moves up the baton, to the head, as our brains are over stimulated during the day. This upsets the energetic balance, and to regain an energetic balance, you need to cool the Upper Energy Center.
To do this, put your mind in the Upper Energy Center, and slowly move it downward to the Lower Energy Center. This moving of your internal visualization will draw the energy down with it, cooling the Upper Energy Center.
The best way to do this is by facing the setting sun, and allowing the powerful downward energy to pull the heat from your head and chest areas to your lower abdomen.
Later, you can visualize the pull of the energy down in a spiral, rather than a straight line. And once you have enough experience, you can actually reside in the Lower Energy Center first, and pull the energy down from the Upper Energy Center in the same way. This will help you avoid being drawn back up into the Upper Energy Center and away from the meditation.
Strength Training without Weights
This week's Tai Chi Tuesday shows you a way to increase your strength without using weights, or body-weight exercises. Instead of adding weights, monks would practice increasing their neuromuscular connection, giving them the ability to activate more muscle fibers on command than the average person. This requires a lot of focus, and can be done as a form of meditation. I call this technique "Squeeze the Orange."
This exercise can also do wonders for the elderly, who are at risk of losing muscle mass and developing sarcopenia, a condition which is described by Dr. Irwin Rosenberg who coined the term here.
Why Visualize the Upper Energy Center?
Next week, we will discuss cooling the Upper Energy Center by moving energy through the Energetic Baton. This week, we need to learn what happens when we have an imbalance of energy between the two ends of the baton.
The Upper Energy Center is the source of our creative and excited energy. This can be very good, but also very stressful! When we are doing artwork, or being creative, our energy moves up to the Upper Energy Center. But the energy also moves up through the baton when we are anxious or worried, and keeps us in that worried state longer. It makes us feel imbalanced, almost like we might get blown head-over-heels if we don't hold onto something!
The Lower Energy Center is the source of our grounding energy. Visualizing it keeps us low to the ground and closer to our natural center of gravity. An abundance of energy in our Lower Energy Center keeps us calm and allows us to let go of stressful situations. It is also important for martial arts: for maintaining our balance and driving power up from the ground into our attacks.
No one can reside in the Lower Energy Center all the time. Life is both exciting and happy, and also stressful and worrisome. Each of these situations cause our energy to rise, making an imbalance that drives Yi, brain energy, and boosts the spirit, Shen. These can be useful in short bursts, but a constant amount of these "fire" energies will cause you to burn out from the stress.
That is why cooling the baton is a very important skill. It keeps us level headed, and maintains a balance of energy in our bodies, when life would normally create an imbalance in favor of the Upper Energy Center.