Star wars tai chi video

Star wars... Tai Chi.... and Psy Trance. It doesn't get better than this!

Star Wars Tai Chi from John Leo on Vimeo.

Which wellness activity flowchart

Standing at work experiment

All tai chi practise must incorporate a significant amount of "standing". Essentially this is a core foundation exercise designed to strengthen the legs and knees, but it also helps to develop an awareness of your rooting ability.

Having read this post over at the great Zen habits blog about his "standing experiment" I was convinced to try standing at my computer. I work from home one day a week, so this was the ideal place to try it. I was sceptical, but now I really enjoy it. I hardly even notice the fact that I'm not sitting down, and clearly every bit of standing you can do helps your posture. I recommend everyone to try it!

Now the next level is to try to concentrate on adopting the classic wu-chi stance whilst I'm at my computer :-)

Tai chi science DVD?

Apparently an intriguing new DVD on the science of Tai Chi has just come out. I haven't watched it, but it seems to be recommended by Violet Li at examiner.com and I usually respect what she has to say on her blog (despite the fact that this particular article reads a bit like a "paid for promotional ghost-written blog post" that are becoming a bit insidious). Probably best just to nip over there and read her article yourself. But I might as well include some juicy titbit quotes:

"In the DVD, Rosenfeld first visits Ge Wu, Ph.D. and professor of the Department of Rehabilitation and Movement Science at the University of Vermont.... The research quantifies the muscle movements during Tai Chi practice. Her studies strongly suggest that Tai Chi can strengthen muscles and is good for endurance training as well as motor control training."

"At his next stop, Rosenfeld stops in to see Ruth Taylor-Piliae, Ph.D. and professor of cardio rehab at the University of Arizona.... Dr. Taylor-Pilliae says that in general, they have seen patients with better blood pressure, improved cholesterol values and higher glucose tolerance."

There is also an extract of the video, which although not focusing on the "science" I quite like what he has to say:

Happiness in Practise

Just found something I wrote a few years ago as publicity for a
meditation class I was running at the time. It's all still applicable of
course:

What were your New Year's Resolutions? No doubt their goal was to improve your life in some way, to make you happier. We all want to be happy, not just occasionally, but fundamentally. Trouble is, that's where it normally stops, remaining a hope, a wish, a desire.

So how do you become happy? Everyone knows the answer already; it's common sense. Any self help book boils down to this paradigm. It is not only the strategy to make you happier, but to improve your sporting prowess, to improve your exam results, even the way to drink more beers without falling over. So what is it? One word: Practise.

But how do you practise to be happy? Well start now - just try to be happy! As a beginner though, you will need to start slowly. Try setting aside five minutes each day to practise being happy. Within those five minutes, think positive thoughts, laugh, smile and appreciate all your good qualities. Watching TV doesn't count mind, you need to concentrate without distractions and without a fear of being judged. It's free, safe, requires no special equipment, and you can practise anywhere. Sounds easy huh? Unfortunately most people are simply not dedicated enough to do it. Maybe once, twice, maybe a whole week, but then it lapses. The result is also subtle, indirect and cumulative; there is no high and no adrenalin. The effects creep up on you. It might take six months, before someone comments on how happy you seem. That moment though will be magical. "I am happier" you will think, "It really does work!"

Anyone can teach themselves, but everyone learns faster with a teacher, and perseverance is easier in a group. Classes and teachers of happiness are everywhere, but traditionally go by a different name. So if you want to be happy, put aside the fear of the unknown, and join a Meditation class.

Spelling Tai chi, Tai ji or Tai qi?

Today I discovered the wonderful Google Labs Ngram. This new tool allows you to graph the number of counts of particular keywords in all the books Google has scanned, grouped by the date they were published. What this means is that you can effectively track how much people were writing about particular topics over time, or how phrases come and go from the English language (and others) for example.

So I had a go at using it to back up some of my assumptions about tai chi in a quantitative manner.

First of all, spelling: Tai chi, Tai ji or Tai qi? [No one seems to disagree about the Tai bit].

The graph above shows the incidence of the three main spellings (Tai chi, Tai ji and Tai qi), along with various contractions and extensions, in the published books going back to the 1950s. What this shows is that prior to the 1960s it was spelt almost exclusively without space with both Taichi and Taiji being roughly equally prevalent. Around the 1970s Tai chi (with a space) started to enter lexicon and this continued up until the late 1980s with roughly half of the  publications using Taiji, and the other half used Taichi or Tai chi.

For some reason in the early 1990s there was an explosion of interest (see below) and Taichi and Tai chi became the dominant form of expression. The incidence of Taiji spelling therefore fell (as a percentage of total usage). The most recent 2008 data indicate that Tai chi (with or without a space) is now the most normal spelling in about 85% of the cases. As the English language (and spelling) is a fluid concept that continually evolves as usage patterns change, we must therefore say that Tai chi is the "correct" form of spelling. I predict therefore that over the next 50 years time the Taiji usages will drop away, to be consigned to history.


Second: Public awareness

This graph clearly backs up my experiences of explaining tai chi to people. It's easiest to say "it's a bit like yoga" to get them into the right frame of reference, and then "it's a martial art" which also helps them narrow it down. What's interesting from this graph however is that yoga has been written about for a much longer time in western books than I imagined. Most likely this is because of the colonisation of India by the British exposed Westerners to it. There has clearly been a surge in popularity of Chinese martial arts and Tai chi in the last couple of decades however, which again backs up my own experiences.

Third: Which style?

Pretty much a no-brainer this one. Yang style dominates with the other styles not making so much as a blip. What fantastic marketing by the Yang style guys. Most likely however this is due to the fact that some of the Yang style teachers were the first to takes the brave step of trying to teach their art in the West, for which no amount of credit and gratitude can be too much. Given this graph however, it is little wonder that most Westerners don't realise there are multiple styles and just believe that Tai chi is Yang style. Those of us practising other styles need to work that little bit harder!

Elven Tai Chi?

Today I have been thinking a lot about elves (as in the Lord of the Rings sense). Elves always seemed to me (and deliberately intended to be so by Tolkien) to be the most graceful and beautiful of the races of Middle Earth.

As most people know, the undertaking of three Lord of the Rings films was a phenomenal effort, with attention paid to every detail, to create a world that was totally immersive and self consistent. As there was a lot of fighting in the books/films, care was taken to ensure that all of the different characters and races had "accurate" fighting styles to match their physiques, temperament and cultural sensibilities of their respective races. So I started to wonder what are the martial arts techniques that the elves use?

I found this great interview with Tony Wolf who was the Fighting Styles Designer for the Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy. Toni Wolf (TW) was talking to Sword Forum International (SWI), and I've extracted part of the transcript below:

SFI: What martial arts styles did you draw from in developing the fighting arts of the Elves? And are there other examples we see in LOTR?  

TW: The design process was not really a matter of borrowing techniques from real-world fighting styles. Having determined a series of very specific "key points" about a given character type's posture, weapons, armour, tactics and so-on, the techniques essentially created themselves.  

SFI: What key points did you define for the Elves, and what other examples of techniques arose from those points?  

TW: It's great that martial arts-oriented viewers seem to latch on to the Elves. Basically, the Elves were beautiful. Every aspect of their culture reflected a refined sense of aesthetic beauty and wonderment. They were completely attuned to their environments. It followed that, as warriors, they would be superbly balanced — grounded from the waist down, light and free from the waist up. Although they were capable of linear movement, their style was based on a spiraling action — circular, gliding footwork patterns, deflections rather than blocks, slices rather than thrusts or strikes. Also, because they are immortal, they've spent decades or even centuries perfecting their martial arts — they can do things that human swordmasters could only dream of.

What does that remind you of? Pretty clearly tai chi (and chinese martial arts) to my mind as that description ("grounded from the waist down, light and free from the waist up....based on a spiraling action") is almost the exact definition of the tai chi principles. To paraphrase the rest of the interview, the humans had styles derived from Western mediaeval techniques. Dwarfs were almost sumo like and all about power, whilst the orcs were corrupted, angular and out of balance versions of all three.

Clearly then, if you want to emulate the gracefulness of an elf from Lord of the Rings, best start practising tai chi.