Song: The Hidden Power Behind Tai Chi and Daily Resilience

I was recently reading about different coping strategies, and this was a non-Tai Chi source, and it was surprising to me that this individual mentioned going inside the body, and shifting your awareness to inside your body. And how that immediately brings you out of, I'm totally paraphrasing here, out of the fight or flight, or the more fear-based sensations, responses, and to a calmer standpoint. And this author is stating that you can make better choices from that standpoint. The author is Eckhart Tolle and The Power of Now. And so that bringing your mind into your body, and just sensing your body, the tool, if you will, is that we can start to do that more and more throughout our day. Well I think we're super equipped to do that because of the work we do through Qigong and Tai Chi practice. Like if you said this to someone who doesn't do these practices, it might be more of a reach for them. And so don't forget the tools that we have from this practice, yeah. And yes, it's very similar to meditating, but it's, as Joe Dispenza says, it's like meditating with your eyes open. So then taking this tool, rather than having it in a compartmentalized practice of, okay I'm going to go meditate, now we're putting it inside our day, and our movements throughout the day. And so just like when we do Qigong, and I tell you that when you weight shift, that weight shift is your cue to say, oh I've got to become, have an upward hydraulic feeling or buoyancy. So weight is heaviness. So anytime you have heaviness in your day, by a stress or a challenge, that's your cue. Just like the weight is the cue with the weight shift. That's your cue to go inside the body. And it's not like I'm going inside the body and now I'm closed out. To me that's more meditation. This is, you go inside the body, and then you operate from that standpoint, from that place. And when you operate then from that place, you might have more time and space to give more calculated or thought out or appropriate response, rather than a knee jerk response to the situation. So just food for thought on that. When I go inside my body, I immediately feel the tingling and the warmth. And while that is pleasant, you don't want to place your focus on that and say, oh yeah now I feel the Qi. But I do think that we as our Qigong practice has guided us towards the ability to then go into song and expand the body. Now that we can do with intention. We can have that intention of song as an added layer of when you go in the body. If you try to intend for Qi, then Qi is kind of elusive. It's like the more you want it, the more you try to get it, the harder it is to capture. And so just let that go. If you feel tingling, warmth, great. If you feel the blood pulsating through, whatever it is, the sensation is right then, don't focus on that. But rather, you can create that intention of song by imagining space creating between your joints. So as you're sitting there, go inside your body and then song your joints, creating a little bit of space between your joints. Now how do you do that? Well I'm going to show you, we're going to song the hands and you'll see, it'll give you a tangible to say, oh this stuff really is real. The first thing you're going to do is look, we're going to do a before and after measurement. So I want you to get this really clear landmark to have a consistent before and after land measurement. So at the base of your wrist, this one's better on me. You have a crease or a line and on both, it doesn't matter if one is more clear than the other. I just want you to line up the two lines so that you have a real accurate standpoint and then you put your hands together into prayer hands and typically one finger will be longer than the other. We're looking at the middle finger. I mean it may be just a few millimeters, so line up your lines and one middle finger will be a little bit longer than the other. If they happen to be perfectly balanced, congratulations. Just pick one hand, it doesn't matter which one, okay, if you're perfectly aligned. But in this instance, what I want, if you have a one that's longer, I want you to put it down and keep the shorter hand up. If both are equal, then just put one down. There you go. All right, now I'm going to take you through a little visualization journey. It'll be about two or three minutes. You can do this with your eyes closed if you want. And this is only a mental exercise. This is not a physical exercise, so you're not going to do anything with your hand physically, just taking you through this visual, except that you do need to keep your hand up. All right, I tend to close my eyes, it helps me visualize. Now for communication purpose, these are your knuckle joints, this is how I refer to them. These are your middle joints. And then these are your end joints, that's how I'll refer to them. So the first thing I want you to do is to just visualize the bones in your hand as though you could see the skeleton of your hand, skeleton bones in your hand. And then I want you to visualize the knuckle joints. And you can see how the long bones are resting on each other in those joints. And then what I would like for you to do is visualize a space gathering between each knuckle joint. And at first it's just a little millimeter of space, one bone lifting off of the other. And then it's two millimeters of space, and then three millimeters of space, so that you could see daylight in between those joints. And then we'll go to the middle joints, and you can see that those bones are touching. And we'll do the same thing here. You'll visualize some space accumulating in between each one of those middle joints, creating a crevice of daylight. And then as the bones lift off of each other, a little more daylight. And then three millimeters of space in your middle joints. You can go back to your knuckle joints and just see the space there as well. And then we'll go to the end joints and start to create a millimeter of space between each one of those joints until you can see the daylight through each joint of the hand. And then imagine the bones of your hands growing longer. Your fingers are lengthening up towards the ceiling, and they continue to grow and elongate. And the tips of your fingers now can feel the texture of your ceiling. The ceiling melts away as your fingers grow longer, and now your fingers are up into the attic, and you can feel the warm air, the warm stagnant air of your attic. The whole hand growing longer and longer goes out through the roof line and into the air outside. You feel its temperature. And depending on your weather, the warmth of the sun or the rain, and your hands and fingers continue to grow longer and longer. And now your fingers are up touching the clouds, and you feel the moisture of the clouds. And your fingers grow longer, and they exit our atmosphere and out into space. You feel the vacuum and the coldness of that space. And your fingers continue to grow longer and longer, and they brush past the moon, and you can feel the texture of the moon. And then they go even longer, further away, longer into space, beyond our galaxy, growing so long into infinity. Okay, now you can open your eyes, and you're going to line up your lines and check your fingers. How about that? Yeah. So what happened for most of you, if not all of you, is that now the shorter hand has become the longer hand. So we made a physiological difference in our hand just with a visualization. And so I love this exercise because you are songing the hand when you do that. You are creating space between your joints. And it's no longer some ethereal idea, because even though it's through intention in our mind, you have a physiological change in your hand. And this will hold for a while. Feel free to check it in 30 minutes or an hour or so. It's real, this song. So if we can do, and oftentimes too, when people do the songing of the hands, if they have any kind of joint pain or arthritis, it helps to reduce that pain in the hand. Or you might get some tingling and warmth as you're doing the songing of the hand. And so we're not limited to just songing the hand. We can song our whole body. So as we are sitting or we're dealing with a challenging situation, going inside the body and then imagine songing your joints. As you're sitting there, you can see the daylight creating between each vertebrae. And then eventually you'll be able to take it a step further, so that it's not just a linear songing. That you'll start to feel it's like a combination of a melting, dissipating and expanding in all directions. And that's a real state of song. And then at that time, it's like my whole body feels like a tuning fork and it's just... If you don't have that sensation, it's okay. But you will eventually get that sensation of going in the body and then it just starts to open up. So that they become one step rather than three or four steps and more immediate. So it's just, this is a Qigong practice. To practice throughout your day without having to compartmentalize it or have movements to go with it. So I invite you to just try it and practice it in situations that are not challenging first. Just if you have a few seconds or a moment to... During standing meditation is a great place to practice it. But just a few moments of going inside the body. And then remember that you have that tool and start using it in more of your challenging situations. So that the challenge becomes the cue and then you... Oh yeah, that's a heavy situation. That's my cue. I'm going to go into song. You still can attend to the situation. But you're coming from a different place. So I hope you enjoyed that. Just as when we learn Tai Chi, we tend to be external. And then the more advanced we become, the more internal this art or this experience becomes. The same is true with song. At first we're thinking, okay, vertically. And we're creating space between the joints. So to me, that's kind of analogous to external. The more you practice it, then the more global and internal it becomes. So yes, you can song your organs and your cells even. But it becomes just an all-in-one. It becomes an overall internal state rather than a mental exercise of, okay, now I've got my joints open. Now I'm songing my liver, my kidneys. I mean, this is a good starting place. But eventually, it's just a sensation and you can just have the intent. And poof, it happens as one whole thing. So I guess that would be the true internal expression of song. And then what I'm finding now from my own personal experience is when I'm moving through my day or someone touches me like in Tai Chi class, I'm in the state of song and I don't even realize it to some degree. It's always evolving, always getting more. Because I feel like I still have these awful places of tension. But then when someone touches me and tries to move me, they can't. And I don't even think I'm prepared yet. Which says I'm in the state of, to some degree, I'm always in the state of song. And that's what you eventually want to reach. And I don't even need that feedback loop. It just is. Wouldn't that be wonderful for all of us? So yeah, great. All right, so then as we go through our Qigong today, our Wuji Qigong, then periodically check in and go inside the body and just try to create that state of song in your body. Sometimes when we're doing a more complicated movement, we may lose it to some degree. And a long time ago, someone shared with me that if you just pick one easy form that you do often to practice, to really place your intent, then what ends up happening is then it eventually starts to infiltrate into your form in general. So if you feel like you have to think song, song, song, song, song all the time throughout this, that's a little bit overwhelming. So just practice it when we do our gathering Qi every time, the place that we recalibrate and then maybe on the easier forms. All right, so let's begin then by just standing all the way up. Knees not locked, but released. Releasing your muscles down, pouring the weight into a bowl underneath the earth. And then let the hydraulic feeling come up and support you so that you can allow the earth to hold you. And then go inside your body and feel an opening of the joints and the opening of the interior structures of your body. And then you begin turning the floor with your feet and we'll just be as loose as we can. And allow your arms to float out and away from your body. Can you song your hands as you're doing this? Feeling the blood flow down to your hands. Imagine the stress being little beads of mercury on your skin and they're just rolling off of you and they're flinging off your fingertips. Just flinging them out and away from you. Then we'll slowly oscillate and come back to the front. Putting that rope with the weight at the sacrum all the way down to the ground. And let that weight sort of pull you down towards the earth. Float and open the spine and float your arms. Release the elbows and hang two little ropes from your collarbone with a weight all the way down to the ground. Yeah. Now your mind is in the space between your hands and you're playing with that space. Now you move your mind into the space inside your body. You can play with that space. So the inside arm has a heaviness in that space and the outside arm or half of the body has a floating. The inside is of the turn is heavier and the outside is floating. All the while still keep your hands connected. Now in this next one we'll go right into our brush knee or our helotaxy. Remember to release and follow the weight down as the outside floats. Release. Pour your weight into the release. As you pour your weight into the release, feel the hydraulic filling and opening of the joints. And now we'll do it with our feet. So setting up in your narrow stance, releasing into the supporting leg, push down and then a hydraulic opening up. Rotate to the back corner first. Release the arm and that's your pendulum of momentum. Just follow that. Then release into the other leg. Remember the weight shift, the weight is your cue or an upward expression to balance the weight. And then when you're ready, we'll come back. I'm going to change the order just a little bit today. Now we're going to go ahead and do our wide open windmill. So really be expansive. Now feel inside your body and imagine that your body is just as expansive as this space between your hands. And then maintain this big bubble turning. We release the back arm and the front elbow and that's the weight that begins the pendulum turning. And then float, float, float, float, float. So it's a weight dropping down and then you're the buoy on top of the water. The buoy has a weight that drops down like an anchor, but the buoy floats on top of the water. Take the anchor all the way down to the ocean's bottom and a long rope is your spine. And then space between your hands and your whole body is the buoy floating on top of the water. Yeah, beautiful. We'll do one more. Release the anchor, the rope extends, and you float. Now we'll come back to our center. And this is your time to go inside. Now we'll do open and close. So as the space opens visibly on the outside, imagine that you're siphoning and drawing in the energy to the center of your bones, drawing it in. And then as you reverse the hands and there's that counter resistance between the hands, it's like you're expressing yourself a little bit outward past your skin, your energy. Back to the space and draw in through the middle fingers into the bones, drawing from this infinite energy all around you. And then here, feel this counter magnetic force between your hands and just go into your body and song your body outward. And then just go to that peaceful place inside the body and release inside your body. Song. Open the joints, soften the interior. Now hold your bowl and allow the weight of the bowl to take your upper body down towards the earth. Just follow the weight, hinging at the claw. And then feel how your bones grow longer. Well, as they grow longer, create more space in between all of your joints. And then song in one whole expression of expansion. Dip your bowl. And as you come up, imagine the weight pouring down through your legs, which creates a nice upward expression. Release the weights at the ends of your elbows and the sacrum, opening the spine, then swallow. The energy now that's between your hands, move it inside the center of your body. As you do, open the body to receive this energy. One more. Feel the bowl in your hands and the weight of it. Just follow the weight of it. And your bones lengthen and your joints open, and you expand out into your skin from the inside out like a balloon. Then hinging at the hips, dip into the water. Pour the weight from the lower legs down through the feet, the upper legs down through the feet, the claw, the sacrum, the spine. Release your elbows, your collarbones. Float the bowl. Swallow. Now keep your awareness between the hands. Float the ball. Your ball is now medium in size. This is your place to go inside the body. We're going to do waving hands next, so keep that connection between your hands. Float, float, float. You're the buoy. Release all the way down to the ocean's bottom and float on top of the water. And when you're ready, we'll come back inside your body. Just sense the inside of your body. If your body sways a little bit, that's perfectly fine. Allow it. Don't fight it. If your joints want to shift and move, allow it. And now visualize your ankles and create space. See the daylight between your ankles. And now your knees. Imagine that the upper knee is lifting lightly off the lower bone and your claw. The hip bone is lightening. It's becoming light and lifting out of the socket just a bit. Going all the way up your spine like an accordion opening go all the way out about two or three inches above your head. And then your shoulders open on a horizontal line. And then on a angled vertical line through the shaft of the bone of your upper arm. And then your elbows open and your wrists. And then back as we began the class with the fingers opening the finger joints. Now soften your body. Releasing. And we'll now open up and receive this high-frequency energy all around you. Remain in this soft, present state inside your body. And imagine every cell being able to receive this energy unimpeded, unrestricted. Trust that the energy will go where it needs to go. All the way down to the bottom of your feet. As though your whole body is illuminated.