Your body is powerful. It records everything good and bad in your life.

Your body records all your traumas, big or small, every stress and strain of your life. It records your illnesses, injuries, and your emotional attitudes. It also records the choices you make in life and the habits or the routines of behavior you repeat regularly.

These records form the foundation for your life experience. In time, the wounds of life recorded could accumulate and compromise your creativity, joy for living, and even your longevity.  Traumas can shorten your life.

What do you do?

Tai Chi brings an awareness to your hidden body of compromised structure and movement, enabling you to turn back the clock to how you functioned as a young person. It could even return you to the integral functioning you were born with as a baby.

Tai Chi is not about fixing what you have. Instead, it restores your wholeness, and infinite potentials as a human being.

It brings together your mind, body and your Chi structures. There’s a synergy when you do Tai Chi.  When one part of your body, the physical part, is restored to full vitality, then the other parts, your mind and your chi structures, tend to fall in alignment.

You can reverse the sudden and unpredictable impact of a traumatic event.  And feel in control of your life again.

How do you bring about this awareness and have a sense that the world is safe again?

There are three tips I would like to share with you to uncover the silent operating system running in the background so you can catch up to your awareness.

The first tip is to breathe. The breath is the primary movement you return to when you notice you’re lost. Think of a time when you stepped back, you stopped your work and you took a deep breath, and afterwards you felt fine. You realized that you found the solution to your problem.

Tai Chi begins with breathing.

When you reorganize the structure of your life, breathing is at the heart of it all. It’s at the heart of any meditation you use for centering.  By breathing, you can respond to the terrible events, instead of emotionally reacting to them.

The second tip is to make time for Tai Chi.  Making time allows you to work on your will to set your intention. You must set your intention for well-being and for enhancing the quality of your life by placing your body as a stake in the ground. 

When you put your stake on the ground (your body), you will energize the field around you and around the intention you set.  The intention is to become grounded. Rather than chasing down the things you have to get done throughout the day, you clear your intention with Tai Chi and you become an antenna receiving signals from the universe.  Take back control and the day will follow your lead.

You are the antenna around which all your actions and all your relationships come into coherence.

The third tip is to practice.

You don’t need to have a long drawn out practice of Tai Chi to gain benefit. You can do Tai Chi for as little as a few minutes at a time. If you have 20 minutes, that would be ideal and more than sufficient to recover and grow.

But here’s the thing: Even one breath of awareness can relax your tension or enhance your enjoyment.

By practicing Tai Chi, you can renew yourself when you feel depleted. 

With these three tips, Tai Chi prepares you to cleanse your body of clogged energy inside of it. Place your mind in your body, and make your mind and your body physically move together. Then, you can have an awareness of what is happening inside, and around you.

When you learn Tai Chi, you’re having the whole body, whole mind, Chi, and emotional structures functioning as one complete and integrated unit.

To transform traumas, some of us do physical exercise to help us feel better.  Yet physical exercise only helps the body.  You need to tend to your thoughts, emotions and energetic field. Fortunately for us, Tai Chi is a multi-level practice.

There are 4 comprehensive levels of Tai Chi practice:

1. The first level is physical.  You engage your body in movement. It is a simple physical exercise.

2. The second level is mental. You have to bring your mind and your breath together to relax your body.

3. The third is the energetic level – the level of Chi.  At this level, you are moving the energy flow throughout your body at will. That’s when you get in the flow of the moment with everything around you.

4. Finally, the next conceivable level of Tai Chi is emotional. At this level of Tai Chi, you begin to use the energy to get in the flow.  When you are in the flow. you dissolve the emotional blockages inside your body.

There’s another level beyond this, but we’ll discuss that for another day…

Tai Chi is a great physical exercise combining the mental, energetic and emotional practice to help you respond to your traumas.

Let’s start with the physical movement and follow along in the video.

In the beginning, stand with your feet, shoulder width apart. Your feet are parallel on the ground, on the same plane. Relax the pelvis and sink the pelvis into your tailbone. Your tailbone is pointing downward.

Straighten your back and your neck. Slightly lift up your head as if you’re being suspended from the top.  The crown of your head is attached to the ceiling, sky or the heaven.

Do not lean in any one particular direction. Allow your shoulders to become heavy. Sink downward to your hips, then release your hips. When you do that, your armpits slowly open up.  Opening the armpits helps you to avoid blocking the energy flow in your body. 

Place your mind on relaxing your whole body.  Relax your shoulders, elbows, wrists, and your hands. Encourage your mind to travel inside your body.

Raise your wrists by activating your fingers. Your weight shifts forward, to the balls of your feet.

Relax, exhale, and shift your weight back to the center of your feet. Pull back slowly your hands and your elbows towards your shoulders.

Energize and activate the fingers. Raise your fingers up, raise your hands up.

Then relax back down, dropping your arms and your hands.

Repeat the steps slowly:

1. Activate the fingers and wrists up to shoulder height.

2. Let go of your elbows and your wrists.

3. Activate the fingers, raise your hands up.

4. Relax back down and let your arms drop to your sides.

Repeat these four movements often. Find the right speed at which you can best be continuously aware of your body.  Keep your body alignments and movements together without spacing out or losing the flow of your awareness.

Initially, Tai Chi can be very mechanical. You’re just moving your body. 

Then you can move on to the next level of Tai Chi – the mental level.  At this level, you’re going to use the breath to inhale and exhale while repeating these steps…

How does your body feel while you pay attention to your breath during these movements?

Are you tense or tight? Pay attention to your neck, shoulders and belly. Relax deep inside your muscles.  Stretch them out and continue to relax your muscles toward your bones. 

Keep your spine straight as you do these movements. Keep your eyes looking straight ahead without tilting your head in any one direction.

Gradually release all your strength from your upper body and allow it to fall down to your feet. Keep your attention continuously on your mind and on your body…

The next level of Tai Chi is using energy flow.  At this level. you’re going to learn how to move the energy inside your body.

Energize and de-energize your body right now.  Energize the fingers up. De-energize and relax back down. Energize the fingers and relax back down into your feet. Consciously move your energy within your body. 

Pull the energy from below your feet, up through your body, to above your head and then work your way back down.

One more time – pull the energy from below your feet, all the way up your spine in the back to above your head, and then relax back down the front to your feet. Then energize the fingers up and exhale back down. 

When you extend your fingers, project the energy out into space, then, relax, dissolve the fingers and bring the energy back in towards the body, down to your feet. Energize, extend your fingers and project the energy out into space.

At a higher level, you’re going to let your emotions dissolve by running the energy flow in your body…

But first, put your mind in your lower dantian and think from there.  Don’t think from your head.

Make a lifestyle change to help relieve your trauma symptoms.

Get rid of all of your emotions making you top-heavy in your body and bring them down… all the way down to your belly, to your gut and to your belly.

Your gut provides you with the intelligence to go about your physical movements.  Then you can mentally and emotionally dissolve all the negativity inside your body, which makes you feel stuck and makes you feel stagnant.

Let that all go.  And be aware of the internal energies spreading from your lower dantien outward to even larger circles than you’re making with your belly movements.

Imagine that.  So energize the fingers up. Then exhale, relax, drop the elbows, drop your shoulders. Then come back up, energize, raise your hands and relax back down, exhale all the way. Let go.

This is the beginning movement of Tai Chi.

Now that you have gained some control of your body, mind, your Chi and emotional structure, what can you do next to transform the pain that you may be feeling or transform any stress that is in your body? Or even transform aging itself?

Your whole body can breathe and move as one cell.

What if everything – your muscles, ligaments, joints, tendons, internal organs, energetic centers, and the fluid of the spinal cord are under your direct influence.

Stay tuned and sign up for my blog updates here on this page.  

Because paying attention to your inner wisdom and the movements of your body is going to teach you how to move to a greater state of absolute wholeness and aliveness.