Tai Chi's Supreme Balancing Act
By Erle Montaigue
December 14, 2003
If you want to balance the body, nothing beats Tai Chi Ch'uan, in fact, no other so called internal healing system even comes close to tai chi for its ability to put the body and mind back into balance. And even after some 25 years of practice, I am always amazed at what it can do, especially in the mind balancing department. And when your mind is in balance, so too is your body because the two can never be separated as far as health is concerned.
If your body is out of balance, then so too is your mind and if your mind is out of balance, so too is your body. So when you re-balance either, both are re-balanced. This has been shown to me time and time again with my own mind and body during experiments that I have carried out. For instance many of you will know that my family and I have undertaken a monumental task of moving house, business, children and dogs to the UK recently and this in itself will obviously cause some imbalance in mind and body. Moving into the completely opposite time zone over a period of 24 hours is not the best thing one can do for one's body! Especially when you have the added tension of getting the business up and running, dealing with inept Government departments and just generally trying to get used to the extreme change in climate.
So it was interesting to me to see how I would go, not having practiced my Tai Chi or Bagua for a few weeks during the time when we were just so busy getting things up and running again. And it creeps up on you doesn't it; you don't realize how your body and mind are becoming out of balance more in keeping with someone of my age, well, what is conceived to be 'normal' for someone of my age.
Having many medical monitors due to my contained medical conditions, I am able to test my own physiology before and after training. And not having trained to three weeks after having arrived in the UK was the ideal time to do this. And I received quite a shock when I tested myself again as my BP was back up to what is conceived to be normal for someone of my age at around 130/71! My BGL had slowly crept up and I was feeling a bit on edge and out of balance to say the least. So it was time to balance the body.
The very minute after finishing my first training session of Old Yang Style Waving Form, my BP was back to MY normal reading of 117/64 and my BGL was also back to my normal of an average of 6.5. And I spent the next two hours playing guitar and enjoying it again; my body and mind was back into a state of balance only after having practiced waving form for one hour! Even my wife commented when she came down in the morning as to how relaxed and balanced the house now was.
Such is the power that Old Style Waving form has to balance the body and mind. It completely re-balances in a number of minutes no matter how slowly or quickly you perform the movements. Whether you perform the Tai Chi Qigong Waving method or the normal Waving Form, it all has the same effect. In fact, you will discover that you will, during the normal course of training, perform all seven ways to practice this form during the hour long training period or the 15 minute training period, depending upon how quickly or slowly you prefer to do it. You might begin very slowly as in Tai Chi Qigong, but then you might do a section of the form at the form at the very quick pace at waving method depending upon which part of the body you need to heal.
Both Forms Have Their Place to Balance the Body
Whether you perform the Tai Chi Qigong method of Waving form or the normal Waving Form, depends upon what parts of your body are more out of balance, or whether you need to do BOTH ways during the one session. Some organs need to be 'opened' while others need to be 'closed' and others need to be 'locked' in order to re-balance the whole body. So you will find that you will naturally go into whatever form you need at that time automatically and when you arrive at the set of movements conducive to healing for that particular organ. Or you might simply need to perform the Tai Chi Qigong method all the way through to get an over-all body re-balancing. However, you might also be moved towards the normal waving form done in around 13 minutes depending upon the state of your body at that given time. If you are not that advanced at this time and you aren't sure about it, do the Tai Chi Qigong Waving method as that is the supreme Qigong method that will suffice to re-balance in the absence of any automatic re-balancing.
You will indeed know, when you are re-balanced as you will be 'firing' on all cylinders with energy to spare, to use on higher tasks or simple mundane tasks like all fo those little jobs around the house that you have been putting off etc. And the absolutely amazing thing to me is that only one person in the household has to do this in order to balance out the whole atmosphere of the house and family! A warm blanket seems to descend over you and your family, re-balancing the whole. The reason is miraculous. In just the same way that if any one part of the body is re-balanced, so too does the rest of the body fall into balance, and just as if the mind falls into balance so too does the whole body, if only one body in the whole house falls into balance so too does the whole house and all that lives in that house, and if a house falls into balance, so too does the village have a chance to fall into balance!
Over the years that I have been practicing Tai Chi and Bagua, I have always thought that I had finally found the true method of practice, that which the old masters were trying to tell us about, but couldn't because it was almost impossible to put it down into writing. So all they had to go with was simply that we would practice enough to get to the point where we too would discover what they knew automatically. However, at this stage in my own life, I believe that I have truly discovered the true Taijiquan and what the old masters were trying to tell us. That of Waving form and its derivative of Tai Chi Qigong. And it is my deepest hope that I am able to pass this information on to others especially my own children, so that everyone can finally gain the incredible benefits that this deep and totally meaningful art has to offer. Then you'll always have what you need to balance the body.
Someone asked me the other day when he saw that I was perhaps spending more time on Baguazhang in my writing and own practice, should he also be considering performing Bagua along with his Tai Chi training? So I told him a resounding yes! Tai Chi and Bagua are like the two wheels on a cart, without one or the other the cart falls down eventually. They compliment each other even though they are on opposite sides of the cart. So even if you are able to only learn the basic Bagua form, this will be of great benefit to you in your efforts to re-balance your body and mind. Tai Chi 'opens' Bagua 'closes' while Fa-jing will 'lock' it all into place.