When your heart is at ease, your body is healthy. 

When it comes to your wellness, your heart is at the center of your health and wellbeing. It beats a hundred thousand times a day. It delivers oxygen to your muscles, bones, tissues, nerves, and internal organs. It connects with your nervous system, endocrine system and immune system by delivering chemicals so that they can function properly. When your heart leads, you’re able to practice healthy habits on a daily basis to attain better physical and mental health outcomes. Your heart is not just there to survive. It is there to thrive. 

In this post, I want to talk to you about how Tai Chi can help with your wellness. 

You can’t have this conversation without talking about your heart, because your heart governs your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

If your heart is not at ease, then it can’t support you in those dimensions. For instance, when you’re worried to death, such as when you’re worried about your kid’s education, worried about your job, or you’re worried about what you’re going to do next in your life, this anxiety affects your circulation. It affects your glands. It affects your whole nervous system, and it profoundly affects how your heart operates and functions when your heart is not at ease. 

You may also feel heartbroken when you break up in a relationship, when you have an argument with somebody that doesn’t end well. These are times when you’re heartbroken and unfortunately, these are everyday emotions that you feel. When you feel these things, you can develop unhealthy habits. You can have an unhealthy cardiovascular system and it may lead to illness and disease.

So how can Tai Chi help with your wellness? 

Tai Chi strengthens your heart. It brings a multi-dimensional approach that combines four aspects: 

1. Physical exercise. 
2. Stress reduction.
3. Emotional regulation.
4. Improved breathing efficiency. 

Physical Exercise

Tai Chi is a safe exercise because you’re doing it very slow and softly, gently. It also doesn’t take much space. It’s not an accident-prone exercise either. It’s adaptable to your heart’s capacity. So if you’re of a certain age, then you may want to do Tai Chi slowly and softly. If you’re younger, you’re able to do it faster. With Tai Chi, you can actually modulate the intensity of your workout. 

Stress reduction

Tai Chi reduces your stress. It improves your mood and increases your awareness. When you do Tai Chi, nice, slow, and softly, you’re in the moment and you’re breathing slow and you’re moving slow. You’re just experiencing the wonder of life. 

Emotional regulation

Tai Chi promotes a balanced lifestyle. When you talk about emotions, you’re talking about things of the heart and human behaviors of the heart, such as love, courage, wisdom, honesty. These are all good human behaviors to have to lead a balanced life. The heart is also associated with your memories, believe it or not. When you have emotions, you tend to remember what you felt in those situations.

Improved breathing efficiency

When you do Tai Chi, you do it nice and slow, but your breathing is also slow. This helps you to reduce blood pressure. It helps you to dilate blood vessels and improves your circulation so that it can calm the nervous system. 

These are the four aspects of a multi-component approach that Tai Chi can bring to your wellness. What if Tai Chi gives you the confidence to exercise and seek out other healthy behaviors, such as love, courage, and wisdom? Studies have shown that Tai Chi enhances your belief and conviction that you can successfully engage in exercise because it looks easy – until you come to class. 

Tai Chi is meditative. It has a self-reflective component that is connected to an Eastern philosophy called the Dao. The Dao is this Eastern philosophy that really promotes a balanced lifestyle. When you do Tai Chi, it fosters your awareness of unhealthy behaviors, such as worry, or your heart being broken. It motivates you to make more healthy behavior changes such as love and courage.

What if Tai Chi can help you connect with your heart? And you may be asking yourself, “Well, how can I do that? How does Tai Chi really connect me to my heart?”

There are different postures you can take to help promote your heart strength and they help you to connect with your heart. These postures can include ward off left, which is where your palm is positioned right in front of your chest, right in front of your heart. Now, there’s no coincidence that this position has its place. And then, there is the position of crossing hands, where you’re crossing your hands right in front of your heart. 

With that, I’d like to leave you with these ideas of how Tai Chi can help you to connect with your heart and leave a comment below. I like to continue the conversation if you have ideas or thoughts!