Posts Tagged ‘Tai Chi Technique’

This ebook, Tai Chi and the Alexander Technique Principles of Good Body Use, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical, and it will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to do tai chi with ease, elegance, poise, and released joints.
This ebook is also for sale on all AMAZON websites in a KINDLE format.
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)

There are a lot of books out there on tai chi, but many of them treat tai chi as if they were talking about a stationary body. They try to help you hold a specific position and place the parts of the body. Stationary alignment is never good enough, because even if you look better when you’re doing tai chi, if you are trying to hold good posture, you will still hurt, because you are blocking flow throughout the whole body.

There is another big problem in defining good tai chi posture in a static sense. When you align parts of the body with tension, you cause compression in all of the joints. This means as you do tai chi, when you move through space with too much tension and holding in your body, you will cause joints to wear out through unnecessary muscular work and excess tension, and you will hurt. You may look great, but you will feel bad.

This ebook goes into extraordinary detail on what the different parts of the body are doing as you do tai chi, and it gives explicit directions on how to move with ease and balance. In this ebook I teach you how to monitor what is going on in your body as you go through the tai chi forms, and to be in control of your body in an easeful, graceful, and powerful way.

The ability to do tai chi with ease and balance and flow in the whole body in a fully upright alignment is how you get to move with ease and grace and not cause any wear or tear to the body. This means that as you do tai chi, there will be no downwards compression into the joints. In fact you can learn through his ebook to have more space in your joints, than when you’re sitting or lying down.

This ebook, An Alexander Technique Approach to Tai Chi, describes in detail doing tai chi consciously, by using the principles of the Alexander Technique to move with as much ease and balance and grace as a natural dancer. I’m a certified Alexander Technique teacher, and I used the principles of the Alexander Technique to change my walk from a lumbering weightlifter walk, to someone who moved without causing pain and strain and injury to my body.

The Alexander Technique is unique because it asks you to do very specific things to help you do tai chi without hurting yourself. But the Alexander Technique also does another thing that is unique to the technique. It helps you identify any misconceptions you have about movement. Example: Many people believe the foot goes forward before the knee bends when you walk, but the knee always bends first before the foot and lower leg swings through. It has been my experience as an Alexander Technique teacher that most people walk and do tai chi as if the foot precedes the knee, and this is very hard on the knees.

So, the Alexander Technique will help you identify misconceptions about what the body does in a tai chi form, and this ebook will also help you let go of the tensions and habits and hunkering down that are so hard on the body when you move. In many ways, it is the letting go of what you don’t need to do when you do tai chi that makes tai chi effortless.