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.

 

Freeing the Skeleton with the Body Markers: Starting From the Ground

Hello mind-body students! We have just completed our series on finding a qualified mind-body teacher, and now we are moving on to a series about freeing the skeleton from being a prisoner of the soft tissue, which will probably carry us through the rest of 2017!

The 12 Body Markers are a system that I have used for years to help teach my students both online and in my classes. They are designed to measure a person's range of motion through all of their joints, using a scale of 1 (least flexible) to 10 (most flexible). In western health an wellness traditions, everyone seems to be able to measure strength, but very few people have a good grasp of flexibility. Even professional athletes often don't know what the proper range of motion for each of their joints are. Many people are even unsure about what their personal level of flexibility is: usually under or over estimating it until they test it out.

To help address these issues, my wife (Ilana Rosenberg) and I are putting a book together that will feature an extensive guide to the 12 Body Markers to help everyone from average Joe to professional athletes avoid injury, recover from injury more effectively, and recuperate from training faster. 

We've covered some of these Body Markers in the past on varies blog posts and our mini Office Exercise series. For this blog series, we will be focusing on the 9 Body Markers that measure a person's flexibility, starting this week from the ground and moving up!

Body Marker #1: Ankles

How to stretch your ankle joint, and what angle your foot should (eventually) achieve:

Body Marker #2: Quads

How to stretch your quads, which I show if two ways. First is the Heron stretch that you do standing up and one leg at a time. Second is 'seiza,' which you do sitting down.

Body Marker #3: Hamstring

How to stretch your hamstrings. Or more specifically, how to do the proper Vitamin H stretch, if that is the one you will be using. 

Remember that the goal here is to free the skeleton from being a prisoner of the soft tissue. Our sedentary lifestyles, western styles of strength training, and the natural process of aging all cause our soft tissues such as muscle, ligaments, and fascia to shrink and tighten over time. This causes extra tension in our joints and restricts our range of motion, which reduces our performance and overall health.

By working on the Body Markers, particularly the 9 flexibility Markers, you can create a balance that will contribute to greater holistic health. When you are both strong and flexible, you become powerful, and that is what the Body Markers, and mind-body health practice, are all about!

Happy stretching, deep breathing, empty your mind, strengthen your energetic system, and evoke your spirit!

Finding the Right Mind-Body, Tai Chi, and Qi Gong Teacher: Complete Series

The year is going by quickly! We are already in November, which means we are just a few weeks away from our usual holiday break. But there is still much to learn this year! To help you all with your mind-body studies and practice, this week we are going to review and consolidate all of the Mind-Body Teacher blogs into a single post.

So here it is! The Complete Guide to Finding the Right Mind-Body Teacher.

In part 1 and part 4, we addressed the following qualities that a mind-body teachers should have, and gave these examples:

"A mind-body teacher will teach you to free your body from being a prisoner of the soft tissue, and at the same time, will help you build strength. This is the most basic form of balance that you will learn in your practice. The body should be both flexible and strong, so that you can effectively direct your strength and will, which makes you powerful. This is a fundamental part of your mind-body journey, both physically and mentally."

 

"A great mind-body teacher will help you isolate your joints with gentle movement, and stimulate your energetic system. You can think of your joints like the doorways that energy must move through in your body. When these portals are stiff and closed up, your limbs and organs can suffer. Opening these joints allows blood, oxygen, and energy to flow to every part of your body. This is important for healing, performance, and overall health."

 

"You need to learn correct alignment when standing, sitting, walking, and moving slowly. Alignment is crucial for avoiding injuries and maintaining health. The older you get, the more important this is. Balance is largely based on correct alignment, and preventing dangerous falls is all about having good balance. Alignment is also key to preventing injury during athletic performance."

In part 2 and part 5, the following qualities were reviewed:

"Every mind-body teacher will show you how to do deep breathing, and a great mind-body teacher will show you how to do many different kinds of deep breathing, and how to practice them during your mind-body prescriptions. How you should breathe while doing each stretch or tai chi form is of key importance to the practice of those techniques. Deep breathing correctly will allow you to relax your muscles more effectively, which will improve your progress on everything we discussed last week. Increasing oxygen intake is also one of the most powerful things you can do to improve your health."

 

"A great mind-body teacher will instruct you in sitting, standing, and moving meditations. There are teachers out there who know sitting meditations only, or moving meditations only, but a truly wise teacher will have lots of experience with all forms of meditation. With a great teacher, you will learn how to focus your mind and breathe in the way that best accommodates your current form of meditation. A great practitioner knows that each form of meditation is good for different goals, and will help you develop all of them so that you have a well-rounded mind-body experience."

In part 3 and part 6, we added the internal qualities that a teacher should have:

"A truly great mind-body practitioner is equally trained in both the external arts and the internal arts. Most of the time, this means that the teacher studied with a renowned master (or masters) for at least 10 to 20 years. Having both kinds of training means your teacher will be able to help you by using a wide array of mind-body tools, and can tackle your particular issues or weaknesses from the best angle."

 

"A great mind-body teacher will know how important it is to work with your energetic system. An expert should know qigong massage because that means they have lots of hands-on experience. It’s traditional for students of energetic massage to have thousands of hours of massage practice, and your teacher shouldn’t be any different."

 

"In addition to knowing the energetic system, a mind-body teacher should lead you in evoking the spirit and harmonizing the three forces; heaven human and earth. This requires an understanding in the important parts of the human spirit. A sense of humor, experience with loss and death, open-mindedness, and being lifelong learner are all signs that your teacher will be able to instruct you in your spiritual development."

 

"A qualified teacher will have experience working with different challenging health issues such as: injuries, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, lower back and neck issues, joint problems like rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, cancer and all its side effects and symptoms from treatments or the cancer itself, and many more conditions and health issues."

And that's the series!

Happy stretching, deep breathing, empty your mind, strengthen your energetic system, and evoke your spirit!

Finding the Right Mind-Body, Tai Chi, and Qi Gong Teacher, Part 6

You can find the previous installments in this series at Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. 

This week is our final week of examples for the series on finding the right mind-body teacher. You can find the previous installments in the series at the links above. Next week we will round out the series with a single post summarizing all of the qualities that a mind body teacher should have and collecting links to each other installment.

Now, on to the examples for internal techniques and knowledge a mind-body teacher should have.

"A truly great mind-body practitioner is equally trained in both the external arts and the internal arts." This means knowing how the ancient martial training that forms the basis for all of Tai Chi is not just about combat, but about mastering the body and it's many aspects. Each piece of eastern health philosophy is about maximizing the functions of the body, which makes one a better martial artists, but also makes one healthier and improves their quality of life. The control of your body, and of the energy in your body, can be used by wise teachers to heal you.

"A great mind-body teacher will know how important it is to work with your energetic system." In eastern philosophy, the energetic system is the foundation for the body's healing and life force. Knowing how to teach the regulation and utilization of the energetic system is of key importance in any and all mind-body schools of thought. 

"In addition to knowing the energetic system, a mind-body teacher should lead you in evoking the spirit and harmonizing the three forces; heaven human and earth." Each mind-body technique you practice is more than a body movement. They are meant to include all five building blocks of our being. One of those building blocks is the spirit, and evoking the spirit is often forgotten when we are searching for the health benefits of mind-body exercises. This is often the final piece of any technique that you may learn, but you can also choose to focus on evoking the spirit as the main part of a technique, such as when walking like a warrior.

"A qualified teacher will have experience working with different challenging health issues."  Science has only recently begun doing research into the positive impacts that a mind-body regimen can have for chronic and even some life-threatening health issues. If your mind-body teacher waited for the science to be out before they taught you something, you would be waiting a long time. Instead, a teacher should know, deeply, how each technique they have in their repertoire can help someone with a health condition, whether it is for cancer, chronic pain such as fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, or something else. 

Next week we consolidate all of these posts into one useful guide!

Happy stretching, deep breathing, empty your mind, strengthen your energetic system, and evoke your spirit!

Finding the Right Mind-Body, Tai Chi, and Qi Gong Teacher, Part 5

You can find the previous installments in this series at Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

This week, we continue to cover examples of the qualities that a truly great mind-body teacher will posses, and the techniques that you might learn from them. Today, we go over the two attributes we discussed in part 2 of the series. Let's get right into it!

"Every mind-body teacher will show you how to do deep breathing, and a great mind-body teacher will show you how to do many different kinds of deep breathing, and how to practice them during your mind-body prescriptions." There are too many breathing techniques to learn in one lifetime, it seems. But each time you learn a new meditation, or movement, or relaxation, a great mind-body teacher will remind you how you should be breathing during the entire exercise. Take these three breathing techniques, for example:

In the first example, I show you an exercise that is specifically for developing your breathing capacity. The breathing is the whole point of the exercise. This is important for developing higher levels of oxygen in the body. The second example (water breath) is a breathing technique that you can use in a simple sitting meditation. It is difficult to do because the monkey mind likes to go wild when you are breathing quietly, but the progress you make focusing on the water breath is well worth it. Lastly, we have the hamstring stretch (Vitamin H) combined with the water breath, the way that a qualified mind-body teacher should always show you how to do it.

"A great mind-body teacher will instruct you in sitting, standing, and moving meditations." We have done many many meditations on the blog over the last four years! Just like with breathing techniques, there are more meditation techniques out there than you could ever master. But a master of mind-body techniques should know all of the major practices (and a lot of the less common ones as well). At the very least, your mind-body teacher must instruct you in meditations that involve sitting, standing, and moving. For example:

These videos we did are great examples of meditations that a mind-body teacher would show you if you asked about a particular problem you have. In the first video, we use a sitting meditation to address the issue of getting sick after finishing a long-term project or commitment that has caused you significant stress. The second example is for a basic standing meditation technique that allows you to more effectively feel your body and energy flow during tai chi and qi gong motions. This would be an exercise your teacher would start you on if you were interested in standing and moving meditations. And last, the third technique is a moving meditation that might be a mind-body prescription for someone who has stability and balance issues.

Next week we finish us our examples of the mind-body lessons you should be looking out for from a great teacher. Then we'll consolidate all these points into a complete series blog post. After that, it's new stuff!

Happy stretching, deep breathing, empty your mind, strength your energetic system, and evoke your spirit!

Finding the Right Mind-Body, Tai Chi, and Qi Gong Teacher, Part 4

Another week come and gone! Welcome back to the blog mind-body students. We continue the Mind-Body teacher series this week with examples of the techniques that a qualified instructor will teach you under each category we've covered in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

"A mind-body teacher will teach you to free your body from being a prisoner of the soft tissue, and at the same time, will help you build strength." My work on the "12 Body Markers" is an entire system to accomplish this goal of releasing your body from soft tissue tension. Any mind-body teacher you study under should have a similar system that hits every area of your body. Techniques like this should be on the to-do list.

After this series on mind-body teachers, I will do a series on the flexibility side of the 12 Body Markers where we will cover a bunch of techniques for releasing the skeleton.

"A great mind-body teacher will help you isolate your joints with gentle movement, and stimulate your energetic system." There are specific moves that you can use to remove stress from each of your joints, one-by-one. By going joint-by-joint, you can see what joints (of yours) get more tense during the day. We'll have more videos about isolating joints coming up on the blog. This is one of the joint isolations we've done on the blog before that can help you gently move your ankles and knees when you do it slowly:

"You need to learn correct alignment when standing, sitting, walking, and moving slowly." Good alignment is key to preventing injury. There are enough ways to practice good alignment to fill a whole lifetime. We will add many more videos and image blogs about correct alignment in the future, but for now, you can go back to my Embrace the Tree blog we did recently to see the kind of standing and sitting alignment practice that a great mind-body teacher will show you.

Next week we'll give you guys even more examples of the other mind-body teacher qualifications! 

Happy stretching, deep breathing, empty your mind, strength your energetic system, and evoke your spirit!

Finding the Right Mind-Body, Tai Chi and Qi Gong Teacher, Part 3

Hello Mind-Body students! This week we are continuing the series on finding the right mind-body teacher, which you can catch on at these links: part 1, and part 2.

So far, we’ve covered the external arts that any mind-body teacher should be well-versed in. However, that is only half of the battle! What is the other key aspect of a great mind-body teacher that you should be looking for?

A truly great mind-body practitioner is equally trained in both the external arts and the internal arts. Most of the time, this means that the teacher studied with a renowned master (or masters) for at least 10 to 20 years. Having both kinds of training means your teacher will be able to help you by using a wide array of mind-body tools, and can tackle your particular issues or weaknesses from the best angle.

A great mind-body teacher will know how important it is to work with your energetic system. An expert should know qigong massage because that means they have lots of hands-on experience. It’s traditional for students of energetic massage to have thousands of hours of massage practice, and your teacher shouldn’t be any different.

In addition to knowing the energetic system, a mind-body teacher should lead you in evoking the spirit and harmonizing the three forces; heaven human and earth. This requires an understanding in the important parts of the human spirit. A sense of humor, experience with loss and death, open-mindedness, and being lifelong learner are all signs that your teacher will be able to instruct you in your spiritual development. Finally emphasizing the 5 building blocks of our being: Body, Breath, Mind, Energy, and Spirit.

A qualified teacher will have experience working with different challenging health issues such as: injuries, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, lower back and neck issues, joint problems like rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, cancer and all its side effects and symptoms from treatments or the cancer itself, and many more conditions and health issues. 

Character is also important in a great mind-body teacher. Compassion, being able to listen, some wisdom, intelligence, diagnostic knowledge, and the ability to make each lesson fresh and new even after 10 or 15 years with them. To find all of these qualities is a single person is rare indeed (almost impossible!), but finding several of them is good.

Next week I will start giving examples of the techniques and teachings that you would expect to get in each of these categories so you can tell whether a mind-body teacher is a good fit for you.

If you are struggling to find sources of mind-body knowledge where you live, you can always start by using my books and DVDs. Nothing is as good as a one-to-one lesson from a trained mind-body teacher, but the more you know from sources like my books, the easier it will be to know when you’ve found the right teacher.

Remember, when trying to understand and learn a philosophy like Tai Chi, Qi Gong, or Yoga through a book, you retain about 40% of the information. Adding a DVD or videos you will be able to learn 50% to 60%. Even with a great teacher, you'll get 70% to 80% of the information. The remaining 20% to 30% is your personal practice and experience.

Happy stretching, deep breathing, empty your mind, strength your energetic system, and evoke your spirit!