Easy Beginning

Never go to a level of pain. You should very gently stretch yourself into the position. After a while, the hatha yoga practice itself can be a type of meditation. You will learn to listen to your body and will be able to hear the story it is telling you about yourself. I need to mention another school of yoga, Kundalini Yoga. It may look gimmicky, but they merge a more advanced yoga practice, pranayama (control of vital energy, or prana, but known commonly as breathing exercises), with the postures. This method has a very long history. Basically, what I would want to know when looking for a yoga class is the lineage. Who is the teacher’s teacher, what how far back does the line go. If the line goes back 40 years instead of 400, I’d also take a pass on this one unless you are just interested in a stretching/exercise class.

When I started studying yoga back in about 1969 in St. Louis, I was lucky enough to take classes at what is now the Solar Yoga Center of St. Louis. I believe it is still a non-profit organization and the people who dedicated their time to teaching were true yogis or aspiring yogis. These are the type of teachers to look for.

Tai Chi (or Taiji)

Tai Chi is a method of exercise that promotes the flow of chi. Chi is equivalent to “prana” briefly mentioned above in the section on Yoga. Chi (and prana) is difficult to define for us. It refers to the life or energy force within us [3]. Even though we relate it the breath, it is not breathing itself. In Chinese medicine, it is thought that imbalances of chi within the body is the cause of disease. Acupuncture, for one, helps mitigate these imbalances. Tai chi chuan, the actual name of the practice with which we are familiar, is actually a martial art [4]. It is one of the major “soft-forms” of the martial arts. You can get a feeling for what this means by simply watching someone play Tai Chi, with its slow, graceful movements and compare it with someone doing Karate or Taekwondo with its powerfully strong and quick kicks and punches.

The reason I like Tai Chi and have introduced it to my Senior Self-Defense class is that it helps us with our balance and stability. It is more difficult to defend ourselves if we have poor balance. I recently saw a posting on Facebook that was tragically comic but very revealing. Two old guys, probably in their 70s or even 80s were in an intense argument. They did all the standard macho posturing and finally one of them swung at the other. All the punches had to be considered light duty since the men knew very little about body dynamics and were, besides, stiff and inflexible. With these light punches one of them would fall – and would very, very slowly get up, using any support that could be found. One particular punch told the story. One punched the other and the light impact and poor posture sent both of them to the ground in opposite directions, one from the punch and the other from the rebound. The tragedy was that these guys had so much anger, especially at this time of life, and this anger can be disastrous to their health. The punches themselves had little effect and the men appeared not to be hurt from the falls they took. So the lesson here is to improve your balance if you don’t want someone to knock you over. In a self-defense situation, the major place we don’t want to be is on the ground.

Following is a very simple movement that opens most Tai Chi forms. It is simply stepping out from having your feet together to having them shoulder width apart. And your arms come up and go down. Simple. But not so fast. You have to totally unweight your left foot to step out. This means putting all your weight on, and balancing on, your right. Your arms move up while being completely relaxed. They move up as if you are a marionette, with strings pulling up your wrists. Your arms move down gracefully as if you are in water with your arms being completely relaxed. Do this slowly. It should take about 20 seconds to complete. If you do it quickly, you will be using your momentum to move to your left and then will have to shift back to center.