Today’s lesson is about teaching you how to feel Tai Chi.

As you learn the Tai Chi form, you start off by following your instructor.  Doing this for the first few times, the movements feel awkward and they come out rigid.  You wonder where your hands should be in any given posture. 

If you just go through the motions without feeling your hands, then Tai Chi would not be beneficial to you.

It’s more important to learn to feel than it is to learn where your hands go.

And to do that, you must learn to let go.

When you let go, you begin to un-learn what you’ve learned since the day you were born.

You see, you’ve been programmed.  This program tells you to do.  It does not tell you to feel.

You wake up, go to work, come back home to sleep.  This is one program you follow every day.

Yes, you are running a program inside you – a program that’s been running your entire life.  In the program, you’re like the hamster on the wheel.

It’s the program that has taught you to do things right now, to meet your deadlines without exception, to jump from one task to the next, and be stressed out.  When you do this every day, stress takes over your life.

Stress infiltrates your body and becomes part of its muscle memory.

This is where the program is loaded.  It’s wired and attached inside you.

When it says dance, you dance.

And each day in your program, you operate in a limited range of thought and behavior.  Your body’s movements become machine-like as every action is mechanical in its reaction to your routine.

Tai Chi teaches you to re-program the way you operate by expanding and stretching out your body first.  It starts with going from one end of the spectrum to the other end.  It goes from nothing to something.

In your life, you hardly get a chance to do that.  You operate somewhere in the middle range, afraid to be nothing… and doubtful you could ever be something.

So you operate in your own container.  That container is your body.

Tai Chi teaches to change the physical body first.  Expand the container that is your body.  Take the time to empty it out first.  You do this by letting go.  After letting go, take the time to fill your body full of good things.

Once you let go, your body becomes elastic and stretched, it has the capacity to do more good things. 

You start by filling the body with more oxygen.  Empty out your lungs entirely of carbon dioxide to introduce more air into the body.

Then expand your container and make room for more blood.  The bone marrow responds by producing more stem cells.  They are the building blocks the body uses to make different blood cells.  Expanding your body in this way means increasing your body’s capacity to make more blood.

Expanding your container also means increasing your body’s bioelectric field.  As living organisms, you and I have electric currents occurring within us.  And we are all effected by its vibration.  It pulls us.  It gives us sensations so we can feel and act.

Your body has a particular frequency.  Be in touch with that frequency.

Become conscious of your thoughts.  Learn to handle pain.  That can be done by sending vibrational waves into your body through the practice of Tai Chi.

Expand your container so that you can breathe more air into your body.

Expand your container so your body can produce more blood.

Expand your body’s bioelectric field so you can be in tune with what’s happening inside of you and respond accordingly.

Take the time to exhale longer and breathe deeply and gently.  There are foods you can eat to increase your red blood cell count.  There are foods you can eat to increase your bioelectricity.

Tai Chi exercise can give you all three simultaneously.  It is full nourishment for your body.

Think of your body as a container that can be expanded in any and all directions.

Increase your immune response.  Strengthen your body.  Relieve pain.  Become a cause for relaxation and …

Start feeling.

Then treat your body as an instrument for good.