Tai Chi Life Lessons

Q: Three birds on a tree. One decides to fly. How many birds are left?

A: Three.

Q: How come?

A: Because decisions are not enough for something to happen. The bird has to take “action” after taking a decision.

A few weeks ago I decided to learn Tai Chi and I took action. I attended a few lessons and I’ll continue doing it enshallah (God Willing) not only because of its health benefits, but also, because doing it, for a relatively very short time, taught me great lessons in life.

Here are the lessons…

Breathe

In Tai Chi we learn to take deep breaths. We deeply inhale letting air fill our lungs and slowly exhale releasing the stress.

Sometimes, during training, I would get excessively focused on getting the moves right and I forget to breathe correctly. This usually leads to, me losing my breath and becoming exhausted.

There are many times in my life when I focus on something and I forget to breathe. I want everything to be perfect. So, I overwork and overload myself. Then eventually I break down.

We all need to breathe… balance our lives… Inhale then exhale or we will start Choking.

Relax. Take it easy, and move slowly

Slow moves are the core of Tai Chi. It takes really strong and steady muscles in addition to great physical balance to be able to move slowly. This doesn’t come easily it takes some time, and lots of practice and exercise.

To be honest I'm still struggling to slow down my moves, and my mentor tells me “Relax. Take it easy and move slowly”, but hopefully with continuous practice and muscle stretching exercises I’ll be able to do it.

Most of my life I've been “The Crisis Management Guy”. At work and in my family life when there is something urgent and important that needed to be done, they’d come to me. I think and act fast and, in most cases, things work out ok, but other times it becomes a disaster.

Being always in a rush and doing things while not well prepared causes a lot of stress.

I believe if we took enough time to prepare and moved things slowly and steadily our lives would be a whole lot better. This doesn't come easily, and needs practice.

Always face forward

In Tai Chi, like any other sport, we need to face forward. We need to see where we are going, not look below or behind. If we don’t look where we are going, we lose balance and accidents happen.

Sometimes, I looked at my legs to see if I'm doing the moves right. Other times I was thinking of the past moves I did, and ask myself “Did I do it right?”.

My mentor taught me to visualize my moves, in my mind, and always face forward.

In life we do the same mistake. We look below and loose balance. We think about the past too much and let it ruin our future.

Focus… Don’t think… Free your mind

How many times to we keep thinking and can’t stop our mind from running a whole movie of events?! How many times have we lost our sleep, because of all that?

I guess most of us have been through this many times.

In Tai Chi coordinating your hand, legs, breathe, and posture, needs your whole brain focused. We need to let go of any movie running in our minds. We need to focus on the slow Zen-like music, or think about nature.

Let our body flow slowly like an air breeze carrying a young green leaf, moving it high to the sky, swirling it slowly and landing it peacefully to the ground.

Free our minds from worries, and distractions. Don’t worry about making mistakes. Don’t think about our life challenges. Just let our bodies move naturally and let go of tension and stress.

Practice Makes Perfect

This takes a lot of practice. After a while your body develops its own memory and does everything by itself. These moves are stored in your nerves and muscle memories. It becomes natural, like when you learned to drive your bicycle or your car, you do it without thinking.

In life everything needs practice and patience. We need to work hard, repeat, hold –on, don’t give up, and eventually things work out… Then you become a master a teacher.


At the end remember:

“When you are a teacher, never stop learning. Be a student. "

By Alaa El-deen E. Fahmy