 See Chapter 24 excerpt at bottom -Celebrating World T'ai Chi & Qigong Day |
Teachers/schools of
various styles on: |
The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong
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| ...you make Tai Chi so fun!....so glad you wrote it and saved me the time and trouble...it's just an absolutely beautiful piece of work and a great boon to all students who are lucky enough to pick it up. I send students to Barnes & Noble regularly for it as well as Roger Jahnke's The Healer Within... -- Glenda, T'ai Chi Teacher, Arcata, CA |
Visionary! If you only buy one book on T'ai Chi, then this is the book. . . . I have taught T'ai Chi for several decades myself, yet I have now read Bill's book from cover to cover seven times, and still get something new from it each time. --Dr. Michael Steward Sr., D.MA, Ph.D., MA, Senior Coach for Team USA |
This book takes the best parts of T'ai Chi & makes them understandable [to Westerners] without requiring a grounding in Chinese culture and history. --Sifu Yijiao Hong, Certified Int'l. Coach and Judge, Int'l Wushu Federation. USA All-Tai Chi Grand Champion and USA Team member |
On Checking your School's Listing
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The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong, is a BROCHURE FOR YOUR CLASSES. As it appears in all major bookstores, it serves as a brochure for your local classes, sitting in your local popular bookstores day after day, week after week, month after month. Readers pick it up to learn about T'ai Chi & Qigong, where they find your local contact listing in the back, in Appendix A, leading them directly to you. Ask your local book stores if they carry it.
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Excellent for teachers
and students alike! I have been studying Tai Chi for over 15 years and am the owner of my own Tai Chi school.
I think this book is an excellent supplement to formal instruction in T'ai Chi or for anyone interested in taking up Tai Chi in their studies. Bill Douglas' makes learning and appreciating this internal martial art fun. The book gives good information on the different styles and background. . . . we are so pleased to hear that [The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong] is doing well. Our students - of many ages have commented: "I found the book was pitched just at the right level for me and explained everything about Tai Chi and Qigong very clearly" another one said, " Just reading this book gave me a clear insight of the wonders of Tai Chi" With best wishes, |
I have been overjoyed to learn that this book's T'ai Chi & Qigong Directory has led many new students to the schools and teachers listed in the book. The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong was created for three purposes: #1 to introduce the larger public to the wondrous health benefits of T'ai Chi & Qigong, and through it's T'ai Chi & Qigong Directory, in Appendix A, lead readers to local schools like yours #2 to provide teachers's new students with a T'ai Chi & Qigong primer, that would answer the many questions and challenges that new students face. The goal being to make the T'ai Chi or Qigong teacher's job easier, by for example letting students know that the frustrations they may encounter learning T'ai Chi are not the teachers doing, but they are blocks surfacing that they can now begin to deal with and release. This knowing can make T'ai Chi and Qigong classes more relaxed and enjoyable for both teachers and students. And when insights like the one above come from someone besides the teacher, it resonates with the students without seeming like a criticism of them personally. #3 to provide teachers with a new way of explaining T'ai Chi & Qigong based on modern medical and scientific insights, in order to make these profound health tools more tangible and less misunderstood by the larger public that greatly needs their healing benefits. In the book I explain how "terminology" which has been misrepresented in popular culture can give new students a wrong impression. CIG to T'ai Chi & Qigong works to scientific-ize the explanation of these tools, while retaining the profound woven throughout T'ai Chi & Qigong. Warmest regards to you all, Bill Douglas, World T'ai Chi & Qigong Day Founder
"Bill Douglas has done for Qigong what Apple did for the computer . . . he's brought it to the people."
"Douglas gives the best of Tai Chi, in simple terms using Western culture, requiring no grounding in Chinese culture."
"An excellent introduction to this ancient health art."
"Visionary, all you need to learn to change your life."
"Bill Douglas has written a book about T'ai Chi Ch'uan and Qigong that provides many useful insights for both the beginning student and serious practitioner alike."
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| Excerpts from The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong Welcome Back to the Future What many Western hospitals are now considering as cutting-edge treatments for cancer, for example, can be found in the 800-year-old Taoist Canon. At the Simonton Cancer Center, mental imagery exercises are successfully used to help cancer sufferers live nearly twice as long as their peers who do not use imagery techniques. The Taoist Canon wrote of thousands of visualization techniques meant to heal various conditions. Is Your Mind Half Full or Half Empty? Here in the West, we have no trouble understanding and accepting that our mind can make us sick. We know that worry can cause an ulcer or that chronic anxiety can lead to a heart attack. However, we have a big problem accepting just the opposite, that our mind can also heal us. So the world has come full circle, and what was ancient treatment in China is now the cutting edge of modern healing in the West. Welcome back to the future.
It’s an “Is the glass half full or half empty?” kind of thing. So if something as abstract as a week-old memory can wreak havoc on our health, it makes perfect sense that our mind can have a healing effect on itself today. Unlocking its grip on worry and tension, the mind can allow each cell to bathe in the radiant glow of health. Boredom? It’s QiGong Time! If you are wondering when to do QiGong, the short answer is, anytime you need it. In fact, as you practice energy work more and more, you will find that you always do it, in a way. As you open more to the feeling of energy flowing, rather than being squeezed off by stress, you will automatically sit back and breathe yourself open each time stress begins to close off your flow of Qi. I always remind students that after learning QiGong, they need never again be bored. Anytime you catch yourself getting anxious in a line or in a waiting room, you now can just mentally kick back and practice these wonderful exercises instead of stressing out. Although you can practice QiGong with great results at any time of the day, Traditional Chinese Medicine has found that the energy flowing through your body is different at different times of the day. Just as Chap-ter 7, “Plan Ahead: Where and When to Practice T’ai Chi,” explained how T’ai Chi can be performed at different times of the day for different effects, so can other QiGong exercises. Refer to Chapter 7 to see the times and related organ systems. |
Mental Healing and QiGong Challenges QiGong helps heal us mentally, emotionally, and physically, but the beginning of healing entails becoming more aware. This can present challenges for the novice because when we become more aware of our mental, emotional, and physical discomforts, we often think this means T’ai Chi and/or QiGong doesn’t work. Many of us think a mind/body exercise like T’ai Chi means “instant and permanent nirvana,” and when we discover that we have to “feel” discomfort such as tension before we know to let it go, we may mistakenly think the tools “don’t work.” Remember that this new self-awareness is part of a healing process, and you will get enormous benefits from your practice if you stick with it. Bliss vs. Discomfort T’ai Chi, QiGong, and other mind/body fitness exercises are sometimes mistakenly seen as “escapist,” whereby we can use them to run away from our problems. Although T’ai Chi and QiGong can seem like a soothing vacation from our problems sometimes, they also help us heal or release the source of those problems. For example, when doing Sitting QiGong exercises or meditations, you may feel your shoulders getting very tense. Remember the exercise is not making you tense. The exercise of sitting mindfulness is helping you become aware of a pattern or habit you have of holding tension in your shoulders. Now that you are aware of it, you can practice the release and relaxation systems presented in Chapter 11, “Sitting QiGong (Jing Gong),” to begin to let that pattern go. As you practice T’ai Chi and/or QiGong, you may experience tension or even anxiety. Do not let that stop you or make you think you are doing it wrong. The emergence of these feelings is an opportunity to begin releasing them, using your new tools of breath and life energy. Trying Too Hard to See the Light? If your QiGong exercises make you feel intensely anxious or tense, it’s usually because you are trying too hard to make the tools work. Ironically, the harder we try to relax, let go, and make light or life energy flow through us, the more we squeeze it off. Life energy flows effortlessly through us when we let the mind and body let go. This is what QiGong teaches us to do. Furthermore, QiGong practice will teach you how to let your conscious mind work with the effortless power of life energy. This will take practice. You will catch yourself trying too hard to feel life energy or trying too hard to make muscles relax. Always remember that the Qi, or life energy, is completely effortless. Your mind or thoughts can direct your Qi to tense shoulder muscles, but once that thought is directed, you can and must let your mind relax, letting go of the outcome. Know Your Chinese QiGong has had other names in the past, such as tu gu na xin, “expelling the old energy, absorbing the new,” or tao-yin, “leading and guiding the energy.” Actually, the term QiGong is a fairly recent way of saying energy exercise. T'ai Sci Western medical research has discovered that our immune system follows certain rhythms; that it is weakest at about 1 A.M. and strongest at about 7 A.M. This may partially explain why when you are sick, your cold or flu symptoms keep you from sleeping at night, and then suddenly in the morning you are ready to sleep well. Ancient Chinese doctors were not only aware of this general pattern but also began to distinguish similar cycles in specific organs. |
World T'ai Chi & Qigong Day 2005 T-Shirt
orders are now being taken.
To Make a Projected Order, Email us at: wtcqd2000@aol.com / Angela, here at WTCQD, will telephone in January to confirm orders with a credit card payment.
Paste the below form completed with your projected order information:
Subj: t-shirts
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YOUR EMAIL: ___________
YOUR SCHOOL NAME: _________________________
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QUANTITY OF T-SHIRTS: XL_______ L _______ M ________ S _______
To Make a Projected Order, Email us at: wtcqd2000@aol.com with the above form completed.
ALSO, we now have an attractive World T'ai Chi & Qigong Day Logo
you can place on your website as a link to www.worldtaichiday.org
|
“Why are you organizing this World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day?” Excerpt from The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong |
The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong - Chapter 24
Celebrate World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day
In This Chapter
--Unleashing the power to change the world
--Getting involved in T’ai Chi and QiGong day
If we want to make something truly spectacular of our world,
there is nothing whatsoever that can stop us.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Too often in our lives we underestimate and undervalue our power as human beings. T’ai Chi and QiGong practice are designed to unblock the rigid limitations we hold so that the greatest potential within us can flow up and out through our relaxed mind and body. This may sound like a grandiose ideal, until you realize that it is very true, and the first edition of this book proved it to the world!
In this chapter, I’ll explain why it’s actually very unhealthy for human beings to settle for less than their greatest potential, for repression of enthusiasm and hope can diminish our health. Studies reveal that when people give of themselves to make the world a better place it improves their physical and mental health personally. Kind of an “Instant Karma” if you will (kudos to John Lennon). And T’ai Chi and QiGong help energize and motivate us for “right action,” as T’ai Chi philosophy extols us to aspire to. I’ll close with ways you can expand your T’ai Chi and QiGong journey to include joining with tens of thousands worldwide each year to be part of a fun and beneficial global health and healing event, known as World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day. And this chapter will explain how your community activism may improve your health as well.
Unleash the World-Altering Power Within You!
Not only are you truly profound and unique, but you are holding a truly profound and unique book. Because the first edition of this book actually launched a world event, changing the world in a healing way. For World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day has educated millions about T’ai Chi and QiGong. Therefore, this book doesn’t just “talk the talk”—it walks the walk of T’ai Chi’s expansive personal power.
Ouch!
When you catch your mind revolving around the negatives of “I can’t do this,” or “I can’t change that,” practice the QiGong breathing/energy exercise taught in Part 3, “Starting Down the QiGong Path to T’ai Chi.” Let your mind and body let go of everything. Releasing negatives will fill you with hope as you fill with light.”
T'ai Sci
Bill Joy, Chief Scientist for Sun Microsystems (a backbone of the Internet), explained that “the speed of technological change is doubling exponentially every few months.” Psychological studies show modern change is stressful. By learning to breathe and relax through T’ai Chi’s changing postures, we learn to relax into the changes of the stampeding future.
As we practice T’ai Chi, we realize it changes our lives, by showing us that most of what holds us back is not “out there” in the world, as much as it is in our own mental and emotional limitations, in the form of rigidity we’ve constrained ourselves with unconsciously. As earlier chapters explained, this mental constraint actually constrains circulation and health functions over time. But, it also holds back our lives. My T’ai Chi and QiGong practice enabled me to open to large expansive ideas like, for example, creating World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day, first by announcing it in this book’s first edition. Then, these powerful tools gave me the stress-management techniques needed to endure the stress of actually fulfilling that dream.
This ability to open to new possibilities and manage the stress of seeing them to fruition, is increasingly needed by all of us in these modern times. This is because we all have much greater potential and also more stress due to the emerging information age. We are in an age where ideas are communicated globally in nanoseconds, meaning our thoughts and dreams can become not only personal realities, but global realities very quickly.
And the speed of change is about to go into hyper-speed, as we are on the verge of the creation of tiny computers only 10 atoms across that will compute in hours what today’s computers might take centuries to compute. When ideas become reality at this speed, we are literally on the threshold of living the lives of our dreams. So T’ai Chi and QiGong’s ability to help us clear our thought processes, relax into change by handling stress better, and find more inspiration and hope, changes the world. The end result is we will find ourselves getting healthier by feeling more empowered and less victimized by a rapidly changing world that often seems out of control, surfing the waves of change rather than being beaten down by them.
Embracing an Idea That Changes the World
The way T’ai Chi’s personal empowerment changes the world is rooted in the T’ai Chi philosophy that each of us contains aspects of the entire world. Therefore, by becoming more attuned to our own health and life patterns we tap into the entire world’s rhythms and patterns as well. Our example of personal growth and health heals the world the way cleaning drops of water eventually cleans an entire pool.
The physical benefits of T’ai Chi and QiGong actually change the world around us, as they teach you to breathe and relax through challenges and fears. This helps us discover the courage and power to change things in our lives and the world that don’t work as well as they could, rather than just tightening up and complaining about what we don’t like. From the quiet place in our backyard (and mind), when we do our T’ai Chi, great things can emerge through our loosening mind and body to permeate all aspects of our lives and world with calm and clarity. Enabling us to see life’s “big picture.”
World T’ai Chi Day, inspired by the first edition of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to T’ai Chi and QiGong, was reported in The New York Times, The South China Morning Post, FOX National News, CNN Headline News, and hundreds of media worldwide.
Sage Sifu Says
Chinese philosophy explains how all the universe exists in each of us. So by learning how to heal ourselves and our community, we heal the world.
When we are flowing in the Tao, using our lives to nurture and heal life, Taoist philosophy tells us that we have great unseen support for everything we do.
Learning the Essence of QiGong
When I first began organizing World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day, I was invited by the National QiGong Association to come and speak to their annual forum. While there, I met an extraordinary man named Master Li. He’d been perhaps the best Kung Fu coach in China’s long martial arts history, but gave it all up to begin teaching QiGong for health. He stopped me in the hall one day and asked this, “Why are you organizing this World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day?” “Are you doing it for love?” he asked.
This caught me off guard, because I’d been doing it simply because it was proven to help people’s health. But, Master Li insisted that it must be much more. He said the world’s Qi, or life energy, was depleted of love in this age of hustle and bustle, no one taking the time to enjoy life or one another. This great QiGong master, and one of the world’s greatest martial artists, gave me the quintessential QiGong lesson when he said, “Love is the essence of QiGong.” I realized over time that he was right. Not just about World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day, or QiGong, but about everything we do in our lives. If we don’t do it for love, it is meaningless, and will not last, or have any real consequence in the grander scheme of life. Even when battles must be fought, if we do it with the intention of our love of peace, we find greater victory. This seems to be what T’ai Chi philosophy has always been trying to suggest in extolling us to employ “right thinking” and “right action” as we flow through our lives, to be “nurturing to all things” as Taoist philosophy writes. As always, QiGong practice goes to the center of life, whether it be health issues, or ways of behaving.
A T'ai Chi Punch Line
Some may begin using T’ai Chi or QiGong to get “special powers” to dominate others with. However, from my experience that doesn’t work. To truly experience the deep benefits of T’ai Chi and QiGong, we have to let go of such trivial behaviors and desires. T’ai Chi and QiGong make us more caring, loving people. As Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “the highest way is not to fight and win in every battle; the highest way is to win in every battle without fighting.”
Allowing Our Greatest Potential to Emerge
When we hold on to fears, angers, or trivial obsessions, our mind tightens down, our health is diminished, and our vision squeezes to a tunnel vision, cut off from the flow of life. That’s how we “hold on” to things physically, physical things like forks, spoons, or baseballs, and so on, by squeezing them. And this is also how we hold on to thoughts and emotions—by tightening our consciousness around them. This in turn tightens our physical atoms of our body and being, which can translate into “pinched” nerves and high blood “pressure” as the mind tightens down the body. When we hold onto old stagnant images of ourselves, others, or the world, there is no room for new inspired images of reality to flow through us. Even though there is always a new, better reality wanting to emerge through our minds into the world all the time, this gripping of old reality keeps us tight. T’ai Chi and QiGong are designed to teach us to breathe…and to let go…of everything our mind and heart hold on to, so fresh creative and inspired thoughts can continually flow through us. Just as that same loosening unlocks physical power.
T'ai Sci
The “spir” in “inspired” means to breathe, as in breathing new life into reality. When we squeeze onto old realities in our heart and mind, we suppress our inspiration, and this damages our health. Doctor Andrew Weil, the great author and Harvard educated physician, explains that many of our health problems are rooted in poor breathing habits. It may be that our “life” problems are rooted there, too.
Sage Sifu Says
Feelings are important. When we feel irritation or upset, that is information that our lives, or our world, are in need of change. This is the purpose of feelings, to communicate a need for change. T’ai Chi and QiGong enable us to breathe into those feelings, hearing their purpose without being overwhelmed by them. In this way we become very adaptive to challenges.
Fear is often what keeps us locked down and rigid. This is because breaking out of old patterns can make us feel unusual and lonely, and this is “frightening.” The fear of that alienation causes us to freeze up, squeeze down, and suffer increased stress damage, as well as denying the world our precious inspired thoughts and feelings. So you see fear often causes us to limit ourselves, rather than expanding outward and upward toward limitless visions of possibility. Both T’ai Chi and QiGong offer great therapies to work through fear, and in a way, make the energy behind fears our ally. Not running from fear, but being with it.
Making the feeling of fear an ally can help us deal with problems rather than running from them. Each of us in our own way often expends huge resources running away from fear rather than feeling it. My dad suffered from delayed stress syndrome from World War II, and when his mind would begin to fill with fear, he always wanted to drive, as if he could drive away from who he was and what he was feeling. He wasn’t alone, as much of the world thinks it can “drive away” from problems. We burn more and more CO2-producing fossil fuels even as scientists warn that we may be dangerously elevating the global temperatures by creating “green house gasses.” Yet we still drive and drive away from our fears. By being with our fear, and doing our T’ai Chi everyday, we may save much more than our health.
In summary, T’ai Chi and QiGong can …
-- Help us get healthier, which means we think more clearly.
-- Help us learn to be with our fears, so that we don’t have to run from them.
-- Help us use the energy of fear as a catalyst to help us take on the tasks of change that evolving modern life throws at us.
-- Provide that “wakeful rest” state that can allow the truly “great ideas” that exist within all of us to come out. Great ideas like World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day.
Becoming Involved in World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day
World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day begins on the "last" Saturday of April each year at 10 A.M. local time, worldwide. Visit www.worldtaichiday.org for exact dates each year. It begins at the earliest time zones with mass events in New Zealand and then Australia, where New Zealanders and Australians come out in public and do T’ai Chi and QiGong together. Then as the Earth turns, T’ai Chi and QiGong players in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas join in and eventually this healing global T’ai Chi movement ends with the final events in Hawaii. We even had an event on the North Pole one year!
T'ai Sci
Research shows that when we “care” about others in the world, it actually makes us healthier. Getting involved in a healing event like World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day, to help others learn how to get healthier, may actually make us healthier.
Lili Feng, Associate Professor at Baylor College of Medicine is working to prove how truthfulness, tolerance, and compassion may directly affect the physical function of the immune system.
As an individual, you can get involved and hopefully get healthier by helping with this global healing event. Teachers and schools can get involved as well and meet new students, grow their class size, and expand public health. Visit www.worldtaichiday.org and find events in your area, or list your event if you’re a teacher or school, and print out Free Organizing Kits.
If you do T’ai Chi and QiGong, publish articles or letters to the editor about how you’ve benefited from it in your life. Encourage local hospitals, bookstores, and media to do educational specials around T’ai Chi and QiGong and other natural health modalities, like airing QiGong: Ancient Chinese Healing for the 21st Century. Encourage your workplace wellness director to have a T’ai Chi, QiGong, or other stress-management program (see Chapter 21, “‘Tie’-Chi: Corporate T’ai Chi”).
Go to the Internet and contact every T’ai Chi and QiGong group and refer them to www.worldtaichiday.org.
We are entering an extraordinary time in human history with access to modern and ancient wonders to make life better and better. We are learning that by healing ourselves we heal the world, and vice versa. And today we have access to the best of both modern and ancient sciences. By marrying the dynamic power of our modern Western technological world’s information age with the inner peace and clarity that ancient Eastern wisdom has cultivated and refined for us over the last 2,000 years, we may be at the beginning of a wondrous human renaissance where health and clarity merge with limitless potential to create the world of our dreams.
The Least You Need to Know
-- You have the seeds for wondrous change in you.
-- Fear limits our ability to expand our mind and world to open to hopeful visions.
-- T’ai Chi and QiGong can help you breathe, and relax open to limitless possibility.
-- Joining in World T’ai Chi and QiGong Day can help change the world.
-- Your world and our world become limitless as we practice life tools enabling us to relax into the future.
