Thursday 9 October 2014

Benefits of Tai Chi and Chi Kung in a Busy, Fast-Paced World

Many of us live what we consider to be ‘normal’ lives. Which is to say that we live in a similar way to that of our friends, and perhaps also in a way that TV and the media, and the omnipresent advertising industry, tell us is how we should be living. But is this ‘normal’ the kind of life that thousands of years of evolution have fitted us to live? In particular, is the pace of what we consider a normal life not really rather excessive, and becoming increasingly excessive with every passing year?

Of course it is too easy to romanticise the past. If you lived in Lincoln 1000 years ago, you might have had to move pretty fast to escape from marauding Vikings, but one suspects that the average pace of life would on the whole have been a lot slower. One of the benefits of travel, of course, is that it introduces us to different cultures and helps us gain a valuable perspective on our own and to realise that what we consider to be a normal pace might look pretty rapid to people from other places. Indeed, you don’t have to go very far to see that – try the west coast of Scotland for instance.

Is a fast paced life a bad thing? Perhaps we should make a distinction between speed and haste. If we are not careful, our fast paced life means that we are always in a hurry. Sometimes we are even in a hurry when we are at leisure – we might be hurrying to the cinema to get there in time for the film, hurrying to cram a visit to the gym into our schedule, so much used to haste that we don’t even notice its presence. And it becomes not so easy to slow down even should we want to. We might take up meditation, only to find that our mind is racing from one idea to another like a demented monkey. Alternatively we may find that we swing wildly between running just to stand still and crashing out on the sofa in a sort of slothful haze.

Hurrying and haste perhaps imply an excessive orientation to the future, to the next thing. Life becomes valuable only in terms of what it promises for the future, not in terms of what it is actually like now. ‘Life is what happens whilst you are busy making other plans’, as John Lennon said. There is something unsatisfying about such a life, and it might not be really rather ineffective as well. More haste, less speed. Too much focus on the future means mistakes in the present.

Another aspect of this unseemly haste is that our body gets left behind; our body is our anchor to the present moment, so that an excessive orientation to the future comes with a loss of contact with our body, even an alienation from it. It’s not hard to get a sense of how this is not great for our health; the less aware of and in tune with our body we are, the less capable we are of looking after it.

One of the benefits of Tai Chi and Chi Kung is that they introduce us to a different relationship with time, and with our body, allowing us to fully inhabit our body once more, and so re-anchor ourselves in the present moment. We come to fully experience the simple wonder of our bodies and their ability to move. In a word, we rediscover harmony.
When we do a Tai Chi form, we learn to move harmoniously. The various parts of our body move in harmony with each other, we move in harmony with our environment, and as our practice deepens we develop a degree of harmony between mind and body that we may not have thought possible. Of course a regular practice of Tai Chi or Chi Kung can provide us with an island of calm amidst the frantic pace of life, but more than that it can help us begin to bring some of that harmony to bear on our everyday life.

Perhaps surprisingly, this does not mean that we will necessarily slow down; but it does mean that we will stop hurrying. It means letting go of our anxiety about the future. In classical Chinese terms one might talk about this change in terms of something called the Tao, often translated as the ‘Way’. To live in accord with the Tao is to live in accord with our true nature and in harmony with the world around us. It is to stop trying to force the world into the shape we want it to be, and to work creatively with the world as it actually is. Think of how a bird of prey rides the thermals and air currents, effortlessly attuned to the subtle movements in the air in which it lives. It can move fast when it needs to, but smoothly and without haste.
This is not a matter of ‘going with the flow’ in a vague, unfocused kind of way. Tai Chi, after all, is a martial art. It is a matter of learning how to live and move gracefully and dynamically, maximising our potential and avoiding haste, clumsiness and inefficiency.

For more information about how you can use Tai Chi or Chi Kung practice to help help you live well in this fast-paced world, please visit our website at www.lifestyles-hma.co.uk.

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