Falling Out Of Love
This post is about things, or more specifically activities, not people. We constantly caveat around checking in with your healthcare provider and not relying on a complimentary therapy such as Tai Chi, partly through legal requirement and partly through self awareness. If you’re looking to us for relationship advice then you are most certainly in the wrong place. As this post is drafted in the days following the death of Jerry Springer we are left wondering quite who is now the go to person with your relationship woes.
If you spend long enough around Tai Chi or similar practices, at some point in your journey you are going to wake up and realise that today you are just not that interested. If it is a relatively trivial part of your life then the decision whether to push on (excuse the pun :-)) or walk away isn’t too tricky. If like us you have made Tai Chi and Chi Kung your hobby, main form of exercise, passion, identity and maybe even a career of sorts then you have a problem.
First thing to sort out is where the problem lies, is it with you or with your practice or a bit of both. Perhaps you just need a reboot, a change of perspective or just a good old fashioned motivational speech. We always recommend that everybody read the first chapter of the Scott Meredith book ‘Juice: Radical Taiji Energetics’. That says it all in terms of motivation and might be all you need to get back on track.
It may be however that the issue is with the practice. If you took up Tai Chi with the vision of practicing under a waterfall, harmonising with nature, but have ended up bored in a run down community centre then our view is to choose the waterfall. But what if said individual who’s headed for their Shangri La to do their own thing hasn’t finished learning the whole form or some other significant part of the syllabus? Well the choice is yours, you can hang around and find out exactly why your hand needs to be two inches to the left in whatever posture or you can bliss out and practice alone in your swimwear. Freedom of choice is wonderful thing with all it’s benefits and risks.
Two of the many fantastic features of Tai Chi is it’s softness and it’s adaptability. This means that you can practice anywhere and everywhere from zhan zhuang at the bus stop to developing internal iron palm sat on the sofa using your cushion as a training aid. The corresponding downside of these features is that perhaps it is easy just to do integrated exercise, things like washing the dishes standing in a single leg crane stance. This then allows for the justification of not putting in enough dedicated and intense practice if these dedicated sessions are necessary to reach your goals and have the experience you are looking for from the art.
What saved our respective Tai Chi souls was the discovery of hermetics and it’s combination with Tai Chi and Chi Kung practice. Practically speaking it filled in the metaphysical gaps that resulted from a traditional approach and emotionally speaking it completely re-enchanted our worlds and not only renewed enthusiasm for practice but made life a daily adventure. It was like putting on a Harry Potter movie or whatever franchise gets you feeling magical, to recreate that feeling in a non-passive way is actually not normally easy, so we were blown away when it was. That’s not to say training is all unicorns and rainbows (although to be fair a lot of modern day parables do a good job of depicting the hero’s journey with it’s yang and yin components). If you are going to do a legitimate sorcerer’s apprenticeship it’s going to involve a few away days in the underworld.
For those who think we jumped the shark, well, as they say in the most passive aggressive statement the internet has to offer…..‘good luck with your training’.
It may be that the community you are practicing within isn’t bringing out the best in you. Martial arts classes, especially internal martial arts do tend to attract some…. let’s be polite and say “characters”. And seriously speaking it can also create an unhealthy and toxic environment. See ‘are students required to use honorific titles for their coach as in the traditional martial arts?’ from the FAQs. When we found ourselves in this position we respectively went for a combination of going ronin with starting our own loosely affiliated group of misfits.
So if you find yourself at a relationship crossroads know that Tai Chi Empowerment is there to be your knight in bamboo armour.