Scientific studies show that 90% of happiness does not depend on your external circumstances, but on the way that your brain processes and thinks about them. 

That’s why more and more people take to meditation to help them train the mind so that they can feel happier. Happiness is not the only reason to meditate. You can train the mind to do many things. You can train the mind to feel less stressed and calmer. You can train the mind to continually reset your focus throughout the day. You can also train the mind to improve your relationships before you meditate. 

You must have a clear motivation about it. With a clear motivation, you can train your awareness, and this gives you the potential to fundamentally transform your perspective on life. 

What’s your perspective on life right now? Do you feel that life isn’t easy? Do you feel that it’s a struggle and do you feel that there’s a lot of weight on your shoulders?  Are you top-heavy and off-balance?

Your entire existence is experienced through your mind. So you can be playing one track in your mind and that track can end up being your entire life. You have limited ways of choosing how you relate, react, and view your circumstances. This can lead to many things like depression, a weak immune system, even pain, and maybe down the line, some sort of addiction. 

Meditation offers you time for calm, amid all this outer chaos that’s around us. It helps you to grow your sense of awareness and understand that you can change the way you feel about yourself and others and your circumstances.

Meditation is a skill.  It’s a skill that provides you with a stable platform to live and also transform your life. Now, how does Tai Chi come into play in all of this? Well, Tai Chi is a form of meditation.

Tai Chi meditation requires you to learn two skills.
Tai Chi is about mindfulness meditation.  It’s also about movement meditation. Mindfulness is about being present. It’s about resting in the here and now, and being fully engaged, paying attention, and focusing. 

When you do Tai Chi, when you go within and begin your journey to experience your body, you can learn to accept how things are with your body. You can practice being non-reactive, non-judgmental to it, and more acknowledging of who you are. This is your body, and there is a lot of potential in your body. 

Then, you learn the movement meditation aspect of Tai Chi.  You learn to go with the flow.  You learn to move your internal energy. 

Your energy is focused on monitoring the body’s movement, and you are scanning for such things as tension and tightness in your body.

When you meditate, you acknowledge your feelings. You learn to loosen in your practice. Right now, you can do a simple body scan here.

Follow along in the video:

• Do a body scan by raising your fingers above your head.  Then slowly move your hands down.  Pass your head, your neck, your chest, and your abdomen.  Go all the way down to your belly. Then finally down to your pelvic floor.
  
• Let’s do that again. Energize and raise your hands up. From the top, you can scan your body. Relax your face. Relax your neck. Relax your shoulders. Relax your chest. Relax your abdomen and your belly. 

With Tai Chi, you learn to move your energy in your body. 
This helps you to change. If you want another way to help you to lighten your load or not to feel so top-heavy, imagine that there is a light bulb above your head, or something special like a nice glowing ball, that’s just right above your head.

With this light above your head, you don’t feel so top-heavy anymore. Another way to feel very light is to imagine that there’s a string that’s connected from the crown of your head to the ceiling that is holding you up. This body of yours is being suspended from the ceiling. You’re just hanging out there, feeling loose and feeling light. 

Tai Chi is very good for meditation.  There are actually two benefits of Tai Chi meditation. 

One is that you can’t fall asleep while you meditate with Tai Chi. Some people are disappointed by their meditation practice because they often fall asleep.  And your guide would say that it’s still good to fall asleep while you meditate.  But, you personally feel you can’t reach your potential having fallen asleep.

The other benefit of Tai Chi meditation is that you don’t have to sit still. I know that many of you are restless especially when you’re already sitting for more than eight hours a day, living a sedentary lifestyle. Tai Chi is not only a mindfulness practice, but it’s a moving meditation. 

As you move from one posture to the next, you can use scanning and listening to keep your attention within. Your breathing is also going to help you to focus and move the body. So listening and visualizing are two very important aspects of Tai Chi. 

Remember, you can just quickly do this simple exercise to scan your body from top to bottom.  Remove any heaviness that you find as you work your way down to the pelvic floor. You may feel unpleasant experiences from time to time. That’s okay because the point of doing meditation is to just observe and then later cope with what you find.  Then begin the change, a process by letting go. 

What if you could have a happier life, by removing your craving, your grasping, and your wanting, so that you can be more stable and not so top-heavy?

How can you truly let go of things that get in the way of your biology? I cover tips like this in future episodes. So stay tuned in the meantime, check out my YouTube channel and I’ll see you in the next episode.