Effortless Living: Benefits of Tai Chi [How Tai Chi Can Help you Live a Better Life] Learn the benefits of Tai Chi, What is Tai Chi, and how the slow, soft martial art and moving meditation of Tai Chi can teach you to live life more effortlessly. Tai Chi instructor Susan Thompson explains how Tai Chi works on your physical, mental, and spiritual levels in this interview podcast with Blake O'Neill (to contact Blake, please email Susan).
They discuss how Tai Chi techniques create space in your body and in your own life, to allow energy flow, healing, balance and a softer, easier approach to life.
Susan describes how Tai Chi takes you from where you are and grows you from that starting point. She describes the philosophy of achieving balance through yin and yang energies and practice. She explains that Tai Chi is about cultivating softness and yielding in order to overcome challenges, exertion and difficulty.
By practicing standing meditation, mindfulness, and slow flowing movements, Tai Chi helps you return to your true self before the ego and before the distractions of life have taken you off course. Tai Chi and Qigong places you back to more of your original, untainted self.
Physically, Tai Chi accesses your deeper structures for power and efficiency instead of using brute muscular force. These principles of Tai Chi allow for you to generate force without exertion, strength without effort. Susan demonstrates these principles in a playful push hands interaction with Blake.
She advocates starting with just 3 minutes a day of Tai Chi, as it can profoundly impact your cardiovascular health, pain relief, injury recovery, anxiety reduction, and more. Most importantly, by making that small commitment, you are giving yourself a sacred time and place to unplug and return to your own stillness. Finding this place, even if for only 3 minutes, can change your life.
Tai Chi provides tools for athletes, those with pain or arthritis, highly stressed individuals, younger people overly plugged into technology, older people who want to bring vitality, longevity, flexibility and mobility into their lives and anyone wanting a more balanced life.
Tai Chi fills your inner spaces with joy and lightness.
Susan Thompson Tai Chi aims to spread Tai Chi globally through online courses, in person classes, KZfaq videos and live streams. She discusses the meaning behind obscure Tai Chi terminology and the limitations of modern shortened forms focused on externals rather than inner cultivation. This is an insightful look into the varied benefits of Tai Chi for all ages with a teacher passionate about sharing the essence of this ancient practice.For private lessons, retreats, workshops and live streaming lessons & classes, please visit me at: www.taichisusan.com
Timeline:
00:00 Introduction
01:00 Why do Tai Chi?
07:56 What got you into Tai Chi?
12:00 Is Tai Chi only beneficial to those Type A, hard hitting people?
13:24 Is Tai Chi Yin Yang
16:28 Benefit of Tai Chi: Creating Space
18:04 The origins and history of Tai Chi; Tai Chi martial arts
21:00 Learning Tai chi Forms external vs internal
22:00 Belly breathing and Tai Chi
22:35 Tai Chi as Moving Meditation
24:00 Tai Chi terminology
27:00 a brief history of Tai Chi
29:00 Susan Thompson Tai Chi classes
32:00 Susan Thompson Tai Chi goals to light up the world
34:00 Tai Chi forms vs learning Tai Chi deeply
35:45 Tai Chi for Football players, construction workers, hard hitting folks
38:00 Susan Thompson Tai Chi push hands demonstration
41:30 Benefits of Tai Chi: How much time investment to gain benefit
45:00 Three Minutes a Day of Tai Chi to change your life
46:24 Tai Chi; not just for older people
48:00 Making effective commitments
49:58 Unplugging in an external environment
50:37 Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey: Tai Chi
51:30 Tai Chi and Reverse Engineering Yourself
52:35 Filling your space with Joy, Bliss
54:52 Searching for deeper meaning: the Purpose of Life
56:52 Closing Comments
To connect on Social Media:
/ flowingmobilitytaich
Thanks for letting me part of your Tai Chi Journey!