Craigs Blog

So – Yoga, T’ai chi and Chi gung and all that.

My thinking around yoga was that there’s a class near work, I could attend regularly and that learning from a teacher is better than not. Sadly despite the regular lunch time and evening classes I just haven’t made time for it. This is likely related to me preferring the philosophy and history behing chi gung too.

I’m currently reading the way of energy and actually finding it very reminiscent of Ralph’s experiences in Taiwan learning T’ai chi . I had been reading this book ba duan jin .

Prefer the first book but very surprised that the 8 most common chi gung exercises seems to have so much controversy and variation about them – thought there’d be a standard set.

This post: Craigs Blog - Opening my head has had two comments recently, despite being from October 2003. The whole chi gung and exploring chi and such-like kind of went on a back burner when I got into the wudang tai chi which broadly ignores this side of the tradition. It went further onto the back burner with the advent of me playing WoW and such like.

It's something I've spent some time thinking about lately based on looking at yoga and the apparent absence of chi-gung teachers in my home town. So couple of things - reading this again made me dig the book out and also I'm surprised folks found the reference if i'm honest - linked here so you can have a look.
Seems like if you search for "nei kung blog" you get a link to the above blog entry - seems folks don't blog on it much.

Powered by ScribeFire.

It was interesting. Certainly the body awareness learning various forms of t’ai chi certainly helped along with the balance. Felt better than your average beginner I think. Commands like “relax your shoulders” and “lift your head” all fell quite naturally in to place for me.

The movements are odd, some more different from t’ai chi than others. Definately something of interest though. I do believe that someone who know’s yoga would find it interesting to move on to t’ai chi. Hopefully heading down there again tomorrow.

Figuring on taking a different course with my hobbies and trying to find some classes in meditation. Figuring the buddhist centre in croydon would be a good bet. It seems they separate the meditation and yoga classes though. Figuring yoga first a little - i'll go along tomorrow and ask I think.

Over the past few years my jobs gone in cycles. Big projects come, lots of work involved and I stop doing some life stuff to accomodate it and then things settle back down again. This year seems to have been a little different – I’ve rolled from one big project into another and it’s starting to have something of an impact. What brought it home for me was this time last week. This time last week I was still at work. I’d had a call from my wife sammy saying that misty wasn’t well and she was taking her to the vets. I knew sammy was worried but left it till about seven to go join her, knowing I still had things to do and planning to head back to the office. I saw misty and she seemed fine even though the vets wanted to keep her in. I wished her good night and left sammy with friends at the pub and trotted back to work. I got home about 9pm, 9.30 or so. The call came in at 10 that this wee thing whose home I cleaned out once or twice a week for the past five years, who I’d seen to it she was fed, paid for her vet bills and such, that she had gotten worse and died. Just like that. It struck me a little while later what would it have been like if I’d not been there for sammy, shortly after I wondered what it would’ve felt like to not have taken the time to see her before she passed.

So works not looking like it’s changing and right now my priorities are messed up. I was running around trying to do stuff for work, make time for sammy, apologise to guildies in wow for not turning up on organised events, occasionally talk to my family and check the menagerie was ok. I have/had no time to take time to change things so I would have time – if that makes sense. There’s a thing in t’ai chi that seems to fit. There’s this idea of being locked up, or pinned, when you can no longer move your limbs because of the other players actions. The way to free yourself is to yield, open up some space by sacrificing a little ground. So, this is what I have done. I have taken myself off my guilds raid roster to find a little space to sort stuff out. In truth the options were my job (pays the bills), my career development (ensures more expensive bills in future will be paid), WoW time or my marriage (not an option ;o) ). So no real choice. I’ve all but sacrificed time I used to play with t’ai chi.

Stepping back I see that I’ve packed on some more weight this year – travelling all over and slowly taking away any sort of exercise from my routine has affected my health in truth. So now I just gotta use the time, work out how to change things. I’m already yielding some of my workload to colleagues whom I likely ought to have handed over to months ago.

So whilst I’ve not quit wow and sharded all my goods and stuff I am toning it down. I hope to use the time to hone some of the skills I’ve picked up in recent training. This should in time allow me to produce more, get more done in less time – perhaps I can get back to it all.

Oddly tough decision though – seems like I went through / am going through the phases of accepting change (shock, denial, anger, bargaining, etc.).

Still, already knocked some stuff off my todo list that had been there too long.

I am still planning to play this weekend – want to finish my leatherworking and make me some windhawk armor :D

Something I hadn’t really thought about before was the propensity for T’ai chi and chi gung folks to have a T’ai chi belly. This could be attributed to the breathing techniques and the development of chi, however other esoteric arts such as Yoga that have the breathing and the Prana development don’t seem to result in a physique that looks like one has had too much beer…

This post on on his recent experiences with Wang Shujin in Taichung, Taiwan prompted these thoughts