Illustration excerpt from the 4th Edition of The Complete Idiot's Guide
to T'ai Chi & Qigong, by WTCQD Founder, Bill Douglas.

 

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Dear World Tai Chi & Qigong Day Supporters, 

This week's WorldTaiChiDay.org question:

IS TAI CHI A FORM OF QIGONG?

When I began studying with Master Jennifer Booth, better known today as liminal artist Jais Booth, it was an accepted fact that when we did Tai Chi, we were doing Qigong.

However, over the 15 years of organizing World Tai Chi & Qigong Day, I came to learn that this wasn't necessarily a given truth with all teachers of all styles.

Here I don't presume to answer this question for everyone, but to rather start a discussion of this concept, and provide a link to the Online Community at World Healing Day's www.WorldHealingDay.org site where you can be a part of a larger discussion where all teachers and students of all styles can participate.

First let's consider that the word "Qigong," or "Chi Kung" literally translated from Chinese means "Breathing Exercise," or "Energy Exercise."

Therefore the more precise answer to whether Tai Chi is a form of Qigong, is not that it "is" or "is not," but rather that Tai Chi "could be" a form of Qigong IF breathing is incorporated into the process.

In my training, breath work was an integral part of our Tai Chi forms. However, over my 15 years of traveling the world and meeting Tai Chi teachers and attending Tai Chi schools around the planet, I've seen many approaches to Tai Chi, and not all of them focused on breathing the way my teacher did.

Now, understand, that I'm not saying my training was better or superior, or that theirs was lacking. In fact, I have learned a great deal from every single teacher I have had the pleasure and opportunity to practice with or communicate with.

So, no one should feel that their teaching is wrong if you don't focus as much on breathing, but rather look at this as an opportunity to see yet another angle of Tai Chi and Qigong. I think a bit of humor might set the mood here. Let me start with my favorite Tai Chi joke, followed by my favorite Tai Chi story.

TAI CHI JOKE:

How many Tai Chi teachers does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Only one, but it takes ninety-nine other ones to stand around shaking their heads, as they mumur, "That's not the way WE do it?"

Pretty good joke, heh? Now here's my favorite Tai Chi story.

A practiced student decided to travel to China to study Tai Chi with another master, to expand what his teacher back home had taught him. When the master was teaching him and the other students a form, the experienced student said, "That's not the way we do it?"

The master inquired, "How do you do it?" The student showed the master.

The master replied, "That is very good. But, today, this is the way we are doing it."

Now, let's get back to the question of Tai Chi as a Form of Qigong.

By incorporating breathing into our Tai Chi practice, we can make our Tai Chi a form of Qigong, weaving all the meditative, calming, and healing benefits of Qigong into our Tai Chi forms.

I was trained to breath with the tip of my tongue lightly touching the roof of my mouth. This changes the throat structure, causing the breaths to be become much longer and more gradual than normal open mouth, open throat breathing.

We were taught to think of breathing into the dan tien, thereby filling the lungs from their very bottom and up to the very top, fully filling the torso with air. Then on the exhale, the air naturally empties from the top of the lungs down out of the bottom of the lungs as the abdomen gently draws in on each exhale (see instructional video further down in article).

As we exhaled, we allowed the body to deeply let go to facilitate the flow of energy or Qi. The Qi flowed in two ways: First, down through the Vertical axis (represented in the below image with the line going down through the head and out through the filled foot.) This allows the body to relax onto the Vertical Axis, giving that solid balanced feeling we experience when we "sink" into our forms, allowing all the body tissue to "let go" and relax into the "sinking into the form."

 
Illustration from The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong fourth edition. 

Secondly, the exhale also triggers a letting go, and a breeze blowing through a hollow reed feeling (I expand on this in my 4th editiion The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong in the Unbendable Arm instruction.). This feeling of empty flow pouring through the upper body and out through the shoulders, arms and hands, also facilitates the deep "letting go" that enables the Qi or energy to flow through you and out through the push, punch, or whatever you are doing. The above image excerpt from my new book shows both the flow down through the Vertical Axis rooting us into the earth, and also the Qi flowing through the extending arms in the Push. The "wavy images" represent the Qi or life energy that flows through us.

I find that incorporating the breathing into my Tai Chi forms helps:

1) Enable me to sink deeper into the meditative aspect of Tai Chi
2) Allows me to physically sink deeper into the filled leg

3) Enables me to let go more deeply, to allow the movements to flow through me, almost massaging me as they do

4) Allows that effortless power so effectively illustrated by the Unbendable Arm exercise to flow through my body as I flow through the motions.

Below is a video instructional on Qigong Breathing and how Tai Chi can be a Qigong Breathing Exercise, you may enjoy, an excerpt of one of the nearly 150 Web-Video-Support videos from the new 4th edition of The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong.

Breathing Tutorial: One of the nearly 150 Web-Video-Support Videos provided in the new 4th Edition of The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong, by WTCQD Founder, Bill Douglas. If you are a Tai Chi or Qigong teacher, Bill's new book refers readers to the Events/Classes Directory at www.WorldTaiChiDay.org so be sure to list your classes there.

AGAIN, I WANT TO RE-EMPHASIZE THAT IF YOU ARE IN A CLASS THAT DOES NOT FOCUS ON BREATHING - THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT THERE IS ANYTHING WRONG WITH YOUR CLASS!

After 20 years of teaching, I've seen many students look at me accusingly if they learned something new from some other teacher, as if I had not taught them properly.

If you are new to T'ai Chi, please read this part VERY carefully. No one teacher can possibly know or focus on every aspect of Tai Chi. Its just like no Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator expert can know every single trick in those vast programs. The programs are too huge and vast for any one person to know everything about it. But, that doesn't mean that your teacher doesn't have a great deal to teach you that I or any other teacher may not know about.

I have yet to meet a bad Tai Chi teacher in all my travels around the world, and I am sure that if you are with a teacher and have enjoyed his or her classes that you have a wonderful teacher. This discussion is an opportunity for all of us to learn more from one another, not to dictate THE CORRECT way to do things.

If you or your teacher would like to be part of this worldwide discussion on the concept of Is Tai Chi a Form of Qigong? you can, at World Healing Day's Online Community Forum link below:

http://community.worldhealingday.org/community/Go-to-profile/

IF YOU DON'T HAVE AN ACCOUNT THERE, ITS FREE, AND YOU'LL SEE AN OPTION AT THE ABOVE LINK.

Yours in Qi,

Bill Douglas and Angela Wong-Douglas

Founders of World Tai Chi & Qigong Day

p.s. If you teach Tai Chi but haven't incorporated Qigong breathing, the general principle, in case you'd like to incorporate it, is to inhale when arms and legs are moving in preperation, and then exhale as you "sink" into the leg you are filling.

 
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Some psychologists have noted that Tai Chi is a model for our larger lives. For example if we feel self-conscious about our grace or balance those issues will rise to a roiling boil in our mind and heart when we start Tai Chi. Or if we grip tightly in our lives we will feel that tension and constriction when we start Tai Chi. This is what often makes it hard for people who are very uncoordinated and tight to stay with Tai Chi or Qigong because the first stage of learning is awareness. I know, because I was one of them :-)
 

Then after we become aware of how tight we are, then we can use the breathing, loosening, and flowing techniques of Tai Chi and Qigong to begin to loosen our grip on ourselves. In the golf movie, The Legend of Bagger Vance, the character played by Will Smith, told the struggling golfer, "The way you hold your club is the way you hold your life." The same is true of Tai Chi. The way we flow through, or grip tightly, around our Tai Chi forms is the way we live our life.

We, the global Tai Chi and Qigong family are part of a long lineage of many generations of Tai Chi and Qigong players and creators. Some think that the level of Tai Chi and Qigong practiced today is a mere shadow of what the original creators did. However, it has actually been a long exploratory and evolutionary process contributed to by every single Tai Chi and Qigong player in this long line of these arts ... and that includes you ... you are evolving these arts, and those in the future will feel an imprint of you in their art.

What a beautiful vision we are part of. So many generations pouring their hearts and minds and good Qi into these arts, that now flow like a river of goodwill through us each time we practice. 

We are all part of the river of life, benefitting all those around and who will come after us. Tai Chi and Qigong and the Internal Arts are the highest arts, nurturing everything and everyone they touch.

In the same way that Tai Chi is a perfect model of how someone lives, or "holds their life," the global Tai Chi and Qigong family provides a model of global cooperation, each of us part of a flow of evolutionary health and healing images that will become part of the fabric of the future of humanity.

The True Person does not have an individual heart
but uses the heart of the people.
 - Lao Tzu, The Tao te Ching


 

The best of man is like water.

Water is good: it benefits all things and does not compete with them.

-- Lao Tzu. The Tao te Ching