Tai Chi - Five Ways to Wellbeing

Tai Chi for Health and the Five Ways to Wellbeing.

Research on Tai Chi and Qigong appears to demonstrate the potential benefits these slow, meditative movements can offer adults and older adults looking to remain active into later life. Participants in our classes and at our workshops regularly report, anecdotally and via our evaluation forms, the benefits they feel after joining one of our classes.

We have found these benefits tend to fall in three themes or groups:

1. Functional Benefits
Being more active, improved balance, better coordination and mobility, feeling stronger, deep sense of relaxation, reduced stress, enjoying higher quality of sleep.

2. Emotional Benefits
Feeling more connected, more confident, sense of authenticity, more resilient, feeling of mastery, a sense of calm, humility, grace and ease, a willingness to take on other activies, a sense of Mindfulness throughout the day.

3. Social Benefits
Becoming more engaged in with others, within their community, as a volunteer, or expressing an interest in assisting or even leading a class, and becoming an accredited instructor too.

Image by Michael Hren

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Dr. Peter M. Wayne, at Harvard Medical School, talks about the benefits of Tai Chi as being cohesive and integrative. In his book, The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi, Dr. Wayne describes Tai Chi as having a number of active ingredients beyond the common therapeutic factors normally associated with public health programmes:

'Perhaps what makes Tai Chi so special is that this holistic, multicomponent exercise affects us at physical, psychological, social and philosophical levels. Its multilevel effects are especially important for complex chronic diseases that involve many systems throughout the body…' P. 29

Wayne Peter M. PhD. with Fuerst Mark L. The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi. Boston: Shambala, Harvard Health Publications; 2013.

We think the active ingredients described by Dr. Wayne fit within the evidence based model for wellbeing by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) called the Five Ways to Wellbeing.

The Five Ways offers people a simple way to take an active role in their health and wellbeing. They include:

Five Ways to Wellbeing

Image source: https://www.mentalhealth.org.nz/home/ways-to-wellbeing/five-ways-to-wellbeing-downloads/

Within our classes and workshops we see the Five Ways to Wellbeing in the following ways:

1. Connect – Joining one of our classes can prove a big step for some people. Our relaxed and warm atmosphere encourages people to form new friendships and develop informal social networks of support. 

2. Be Active – Tai Chi fits perfectly as rewarding activity that people enjoy and keep doing. Participants like to know that good evidence supports the reported benefits. 

3. Take Notice – We introduce people to a key Tai Chi principle called Jing, meaning mental serenity or mindfulness. Fostering a sense of Jing helps people listen to their bodies, listen to others, and take notice of the world around them. 

4. Keep Learning – We use a progressive teaching approach in all our classes and workshops. We offer people just the right amount of challenge to foster a sense of growing mastery as they continue to learn and practise their movement skills. 

5. Give – Within our classes we see people connect with others to offer support both within the class and in ways outside of the classroom too.

Whatever reason you have for joining one of our Tai Chi classes we introduce you to the principles and benefits from your very first class. The Tai Chi for Health programmes and Qigong we teach have many depths for you to explore.

Bring an open mind, a willingness to practise a little at home, and you will soon feel the benefits too.

Please do share this blog post with friends, family, and colleagues if you think they may like to find out more about our evidence based Tai Chi and Qigong programmes.

Tai Chi and Qigong Class Silsden

New Tai Chi and Qigong Class Silsden Town Hall

We look forward to starting our newest Tai Chi and Qigong class on 22nd August 2019 at Silsden Town Hall.

Classes will run every Thursday 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Your first class is half price and then £6 per week on a pay as you go basis with no need to book.

We offer a warm welcome to everyone, especially those just starting. No special clothing or equipment needed. Just wear comfortable clothing, flat-soled shoes and a smile! Please bring a drink in warm weather.

Silsden Town Hall offers a fantastic accessible venue with a large ground floor room with lots of natural light. It has easily accessible toilets and the Community Library in the room next door. You will find a car park across the road which is only 60p an hour.

Why Try Tai Chi and Qigong?

Our regular participants tell us how they feel at the end of our classes. They say they have better balance and feel stronger, meaning they can do jobs in the garden more easily, enjoy walks with family and friends, and feel more independent.

Tai Chi and Qigong offer people an ideal exercise that goes easy on joints while strengthening muscles and improving balance. Many of our participants tell us how much better they sleep after a class and how it has helped reduce blood pressure.

As an accessible exercise for everyone tai chi and qigong has featured in research (including a recent feature in the BBC TV series, Trust Me I’m a Doctor) demonstrating its benefits for improved health and wellbeing.

If you have a serious health condition you may wish to contact your G.P or specialist first to check if you are ready to start an exercise class.

If you think a family member, friend or colleague would like to know more about us and our classes please do share this blog page with them.

Helen and Philip look forward to seeing you.

For more details phone 07528 959091, or

Message us on Facebook at: m.me/Huntun.taichi

Daoyin - Meditation in Movement

We're very pleased to announce we've partnered with EnergyBodi Sensation based in Rossendale, Lancashire, to offer a unique series of Daoyin - Meditation in Movement Workshops. You can find more details at our Facebook Page.

Daoyin - Meditation in Movement Workshop Poster

What is Daoyin?

Daoyin (Qigong) - Daoyin means to guide and pull. Daoyin originates from ancient China. Daoyin sequences move with a elegant and balanced flow of the whole body in tune with our natural breath pattern. Rather than stretching we move within a comfortable range of movement to avoid putting unnecessary strain on any particular joint or muscle group.

With regular practise we build strength and suppleness while calming the mind. Coordinating the mindful movements with a natural breathing cycle creates a deep sense of relaxation and wellbeing.

Daoyin Tu - Copy housed at the Wellcome Trust, London

Daoyin goes back a long way. Archaeological evidence excavated from the Mawangdui Tomb 3 (sealed in 168BC) in the former kingdom of Changsha, shows a 'Guiding and Pulling Chart' with ladies and gentlemen enjoying various Daoyin exercises. You'll find the original chart housed in the Hunan Provincial Museum, Changsha, China. You can find a copy of the original at the Wellcome Trust, London.

Dates for Your Diaries 

All workshops fall on a Sunday - 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm

• 28th October 2018
• 16th December 2018
• 3rd March 2019
• 28th April 2019
• 23rd June 2019

£20 per workshop

We look forward to seeing you as we explore these unique exercises with their emphasis on BodyMind integration.

To find out more please do get in touch:
0759 800 4645

Philip & Helen

Tai Chi for Health - Stay Strong, Improve Your Balance

Regular practice of any of the Tai Chi for Health programmes helps people to build and maintain body strength. The slow movements found in Tai Chi for Health offer a low impact way of building muscle tone without putting the joints or muscles under too much repetitive strain.

And why is it so important to maintain all round body strength? Well as we age and or experience long term illness, or if you find yourself in recovery from a significant surgical procedure you'll know just how quickly we can lose muscle strength. You'll remember just how long it can take to get full strength back to the level you enjoyed before.

This article in the New Scientist magazine suggests just how important maintaining muscle strength can be to our long term health and wellbeing. The Tai Chi for Health programmes you learn in our classes emphasise the progressive building of strength for this very reason.

Elderly Lady Enjoys Her Tai Chi Practice

 Image by Tom Thai - licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

The UK's four Chief Medical Officers recognise the important role Tai Chi has to play in building strength and maintaining balance. It is your relative muscle strength that affects how well you can maintain your balance. One of the prime reasons for people participating in our classes is to improve their balance. We see more and more people with a recommendation from their GP or physiotherapist for this very reason.

Why should you think about balance as important to your overall health and quality of life? In the UK 30% of people aged 65 and over will experience a fall at least once a year. For people aged 80 and over it rises to over 50 per cent (NICE, 2013). Falls become the number one reason older people get taken to the emergency department in hospitals across the country. Most falls don’t cause serious injury but they can leave you distressed and begin to lose confidence. NHS Choices recommends regular practice of Tai Chi in its guidance on falls prevention.

Make sure you choose a reputable Tai Chi for Health Instructor rather than a tai chi teacher who expects you to learn the martial arts or expects you to perform strenuous movements by yourself or with a partner. Recommendations from the Tai Chi for Health Institute on what to look for when choosing an instructor include:

“All Board certified instructors have attended the workshop, completed prior preparation and fullfilled requirements to be a safe and effective teacher of the respective program, and registered with The Tai Chi for Health Institute. Our training is comprehensive and specific for our programs. All instructors are required to be updated every two years to maintain the certification.”

If you would like to find out more or think a family member or friend might like to read this post please do share.

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to get in touch. We'd love to see you in one of our classes covering Baildon, Bingley, Keighley, Saltaire, Shipley and Skipton.

All the best, Philip and Helen.

Tai Chi, Nature, and Health

“We seem to know that time spent in green space is just what the doctor ordered.”

I wrote the above quote as part of a guest blog for the support organisation AfterTrauma. In that blog I talk about how natural spaces can help us cope with the ups and downs of life and the growing evidence from science that supports our intuition. And what has this got to do with your practise of tai chi chuan.

Well, if you delve a little deeper into the roots of tai chi you soon find out that those roots spring from the rich cultural and philosophical ground of Taoism (sometimes written Daoism). This short, beautiful film below gives a good primer on Taoism and how it relates in particular to the martial arts of China, the same roots from which our tai chi for health programme stem:



I often encourage people who come to our classes and workshops to see if they can find a little private space, a garden if they have one, or a quiet corner in a park for instance, where they can practise their tai chi form outside.

People don't hesitate to say how their practice of the tai chi form takes on a new sense of meaning when they do so. Some of the sequence names found in the various styles of tai chi that we learn, such as wave hands in clouds and gather celestial energy, suddenly make perfect sense when performed outdoors.

I hope this short blog and the links within it encourage you to get outdoors. You don't have to practise the tai chi form outdoors to get the benefit, taking a short stroll, or taking a seat in a green space will reward and reinvigourate you. You'll find yourself slip effortlessly into that mindful state that eases our sense of wellbeing in the world.

Forest Bathing or Shinrin-yoku

In Japan you will find people go to specially designated forest trails to ‘bathe’ in the healing balm of the trees. They literally call it forest bathing or Shinrin-yoku, and researchers have found that regular strolls in these lush spaces can offer profound health benefits for people living with many different long term physical and mental health conditions.

As I wrote in the guest blog for AfterTrauma, time taken to relax in green spaces proved especially important for my recovery from the significant trauma I experienced when I had my accident. It continues to remain an important part of my ongoing health and wellbeing today. So, if you can, get outdoors, relax and enjoy.

If you enjoyed reading this you may like to visit my other blog/website where you will find more pieces that touch on the arts, medicine, poetry, and more.

Do have a family member, friend or colleague who you think would like to read this blog? Please do share it with them.

Please do get in touch to let me know your thoughts.

All the best

Philip

Tai Chi Damps Down Inflammation Genes

Tai Chi as a moving mindful meditation appears to have a marked positive impact on dampening down inflammation in our bodies. This research study shows how our bodies inflammatory response effects both our physical health and mental wellbeing.

 

Tai Chi – Mindful Meditation

 

Two links well worth a read:

 

The first, an easy to read article from New Scientist that summarises the amazing implications of this study.

 

The second, the full research paper published on Frontiers In Immunology which the article above summarises.

 

A little tai chi practise each day will help. If you think a family member, friend or colleague would be interested in this post please do share it.

 

We look forward to seeing in you in one of our classes, one to ones or workshops.

Thank you

Helen and Philip :)

What Is Tai Chi?

What comes to mind when you first think about T‘ai Chi? You may think of Chinese people rising early in the morning to take part in slow, meditative movements to ease themselves into the day. T‘ai chi, often written tai chi, as we know it today has come on a long journey from its origins. Despite a number of theories to tai chi's origins no one theory has yet managed to pin down this elusive art.

 Outdoor Tai Chi Practise in Beijing's Temple of Heaven.

Image by Craig Nagy, Vancouver, Canada. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Written in full we ought to say T‘ai Chi Ch‘uan which loosely translated into English means Supreme Ultimate Boxing or Source Fist. This meaning offers us a clue to tai chi's origins within the self-defense and martial arts of China. We would more commonly describe those fighting arts as Kung-Fu in the west.

Nowadays we can best describe tai chi as an art and an exercise. It appears from a growing body of research that regular practise of tai chi offers people some important health benefits. In particular, improved balance, flexibility, fitness, strength, lowering blood pressure, general heart health, mental health and symptoms associated with stroke, fibromyalgia, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.

Tai chi emphasises the integration of mind with body. This integration marks tai chi as a unique form of exercise along with another associated exercise practice from China referred to as Qigong (chee gung), older still, known as Daoyin, meaning to guide and pull. To get a feel for this integration you practise tai chi movements, or forms, slowly as one smooth flowing movement with a deliberate focus on those movements.

Daoyin tu - chart for leading and guiding people in exercise.

This image from Wellcome Images, a website operated by Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation based in the United Kingdom. Refer to Wellcome blog post (archive). Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

‘This is a reconstruction of a 'Guiding and Pulling Chart' excavated from the Mawangdui Tomb 3 (sealed in 168BC) in the former kingdom of Changsha. The original is in the Hunan Provincial Museum, Changsha, China.’

Tai chi truly represents a whole body form of exercise as you coordinate your hands and arms with the controlled transfer of your weight from one stance to another. In other words to perform tai chi well from start to finish you must engage all parts of the body. The hands, arms, legs and feet all move in circular and spiral patterns with turns of the torso via the waist, neck and head. 

A saying associated with the practise of tai chi – 

“ When the wind blows the whole tree moves

.

Regular practise of a tai chi form can strengthen and mobilize the joints and muscles, improve physical fitness and induce a deep sense of mental relaxation. The slow and low-impact nature of tai chi make it ideal for people recovering from illness or injury and those living with chronic health conditions.

Not that people who live with long term health conditions should only practise tai chi for health. In China, fit and healthy people practise tai chi to cultivate and sustain their health. Anyone can benefit from a little tai chi practise each day.

People performing Tai Chi Chuan at the Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing, China.

Image by © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Our tai chi programmes differs from the traditional approach to learning tai chi where you had learn and perfect many complicated sequences of movements over many years. Some tai chi forms go on for well over a hundred moves with complex and difficult movements to perform. We encourage participants to enjoy the tai chi movements within a safe and pain free range of mobility. Participants can take a seat for some or even all of the session. A key message in our classes goes – If it hurts, stop doing it.

The Harvard Medical School's Osher Center for Integrative Medicine has found that people can enjoy all the health benefits of tai chi from very simple movement sequences derived from the traditional long form tai chi styles. For example the first part of our Tai Chi Foundations programme takes no longer than three to four minutes to complete.

So, there you go, a snap shot description of tai chi. Tai chi has much more to offer though. Through regular practise you begin to realise the depth of meaning within the principles that underpin tai chi. The movements truly do embody a cultural and philosophical way. 

If that has peaked your interest then please do get in touch. If you think someone you know, a member of your family or a close friend might benefit from tai chi please do share this page.

We look forward to seeing you.

Helen & Phil

Tai Chi For An Active Lifestyle

Tai Chi gets a recommendation from the UK's four Chief Medical Officers as an activity that offers tremendous benefits to adults.

Physical Activity for Adults

As a non-jarring exercise, tai chi can prove a super way to enjoying an active lifestyle, making friends and learning new skills.

You can view the accompanying factsheet for adults and for older adults to find out more interesting information on keeping active. You may also like to view a very useful longer form document called Start Active, Stay Active, for more detailed information.

Tai Chi Principles

Tai Chi Principles

Sung and Jing

Sung (sometimes spelt Song), pronounced ‘soong’, represents the most important principle to build into your practice of tai chi and qigong.

Sung has many meanings, such as to relax, to loosen, to open, to release tension. Sung, counter-intuitively describes an active state of relaxation. Not as some people think to relax like a ‘sack of potatoes’.

In the classes I teach I often use an analogy from archery of the perfectly tensioned bow. Not too slack. Not too tight. Just right. Full of potential energy just waiting for the archer to draw and release. Which brings us to a second, yet equally important principle, that pairs nicely with sung, called Jing.

Movement with Stillness

Jing, like sung, has many meanings, such as stillness, motionless, silent, quiet, peaceful, calm and tranquil. When applied to your practice of tai chi Jing describes a quiet mind. An anonymous Tang Dynasty Daoist classic called the Qingjing Jing – The Classic on Clarity and Tranquility –  describes the quality of jing as a mind free from worries and naturally at ease. One can also think about jing as mindfulness or being mindful.

One could say the mind must also have sung. We could also say, that without jing, a tranquil mind, we'll find it difficult to feel sung throughout our body. Each principle supports and relates to the other, like the balance of yin and yang, which together form the familiar diagram of tai chi.

Through our practice of the tai chi form, we begin to realise the meanings behind well known tai chi sayings, such as, ‘movement with stillness’ and ‘when the wind blows the whole tree moves’.

Sung - Tai Chi

Sung and Jing represent very real felt qualities. It can take a little time to get a feel for them. At first you may get a glimpse, just for a moment, as you practice your tai chi form. With some patient practice each day you'll find your feel for sung and jing grow quite naturally like the unfolding of a beautiful blossom.

What do sung and jing feel like? Well, remember the archer and bow analogy? As you get familiar with the movements of the form you can begin to release tension from your mind and in your body. As you find and release all those tensions you will feel your muscles, tendons and ligaments, all the joints in your body, begin to open, loosen and relax. You will have started to develop sung – active relaxation. Further more, as you practice your tai chi form each day you'll find that quality of sung carry into your day to day activities also.

Chen - Tai Chi

Many people find a tai chi class without ever hearing about, let alone getting the opportunity to practice the principles that underpin tai chi, specially, sung and jing. Without these principles, one's tai chi becomes just another set of physical movements or form of thoughtless exercise like so many that people do day to day.

With jing and sung present you'll realise how they relate to, and act as the key to unlock the door to the other tai chi principles: Chen - meaning to sink, to feel heavy, rooted to the earth; Huo - meaning suppleness, agility, elasticity and resilience; the controlled transfer of our weight from one leg to another; and the rhythm for the slow, continuous, flowing movements we aim for when we practice tai chi.

Huo - Tai Chi

As you get a feel for these principles you'll find the health benefits really begin to kick in. You'll feel more  at ease and alert, calm and focused, with more energy for your day to day tasks, have greater physical and mental strength, stability and balance. With your continued practise you feel a real sense of happiness, contentment and feeling uplifted.

Tai Chi - Feels Good

Tai chi ought to feel good. If you don't get to practise it you begin to miss it. Finding a good tai chi class can really help keep you motivated as you learn the movements and give you a great sense of camaraderie. A good tai chi class will have a happy and relaxed atmosphere with lots of laughter present. If you find a class like that you'll know the principles of Sung and Jing are present too.

If you have a friend who you think would benefit from coming to one of our classes please do share this page as a link on social media or email.

We look forward to seeing you : )