The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi

The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi is a wonderful, elegant book that embraces the tensions between science and art, modern research and traditional wisdom, movement and stillness, and effort and effortlessness. (Location 123)

As I sat on stage at the interface of two very different cultures—Eastern healing arts and Western science (Location 224)

the modern Western medical community increasingly has relied on a reductionist framework for defining health, managing disease, and training physicians. (Location 257)

The Eight Active Ingredients of Tai Chi are as follows: (Location 647)

1.  Awareness (including mindfulness and focused attention)—Perhaps the most fundamental ingredient underlying Tai Chi, the slow, deliberate movements and attention to breathing, body positions, and sensations, fosters acute self-awareness, a prerequisite to all other ingredients. The emphasis on moment-to-moment awareness results in mindfulness and improved focus. (Location 648)

2.  Intention (including belief and expectation)—Additional active ingredients of imagery, visualization, and related cognitive tools alter intention, belief, and expectation, and contribute significantly to the therapeutic and physiological effects of Tai Chi. 3.  Structural Integration (including dynamic form and function)—Enhanced integration within and between multiple structural and physiological systems is another key active ingredient that underlies Tai Chi’s therapeutic effect. Biomechanically efficient shapes and patterns of movement have functional consequences across many systems. 4.  Active Relaxation—Tai Chi’s circular, flowing motion helps shift the body and mind into deeper levels of relaxation, and is a form of meditation in motion. (Location 651)

5.  Strengthening and Flexibility—Tai Chi provides moderate aerobic training equal to levels obtained in walking at a moderate pace. The integrated movements result in less strain, greater power with less effort, and better balance. The slowness of the Tai Chi movements, in combination with slightly flexed stances and placing weight on one leg at a time for sustained periods, leads to significant lower extremity strength training and increased loading on the skeleton, which promotes strong bones. In addition, slow, continuous, relaxed, and repetitive movement also results in dynamic stretching, which enhances overall flexibility. 6.  Natural, Freer Breathing—More efficient breathing improves gas exchange, massages body tissues, including internal organs, helps regulate the nervous system, improves mood, and balances and moves Qi within the body and between the body and the environment. 7.  Social Support (including interaction and community)—Being part of a group has proven therapeutic value for various medical conditions, including cancer, heart disease, depression, and anxiety. In ongoing Tai Chi classes, students develop a strong sense of community, and with rich interactions and support from teachers and peers, often undergo a profound journey of self-discovery. 8.  Embodied Spirituality (including philosophy and ritual)—Tai Chi creates a practical framework for practicing living with a more holistic, Eastern philosophy that integrates body, mind, and spirit. It can also be a powerful vehicle to add a spiritual dimension to your life. Also, the ritualistic practice of Tai Chi may help amplify and sustain its therapeutic benefits. (Location 658)

When I began teaching students the simplified movements similar to those used in our clinical protocols, emphasizing the Eight Active Ingredients, I saw quicker results and students kept coming to class. Among students who studied for only a few months and did not learn the formal Tai Chi choreography, I observed improved balance, strength, and greater sense of well-being. They also quickly learned enough simple exercises to practice on their own and more readily integrate Tai Chi principles in other physical activities. Students who moved on to learn the sequences of traditional Tai Chi forms were stronger and more grounded in Tai Chi principles, and they could safely take on more complex moves. (Location 735)

penetrating networks of connective tissues. As you pour or rock from side to side, imagine you are kneading or folding Qi-filled juices deeper into the fabric of your body, gently and patiently dissolving ‘glued-up’ tissues, melting tensions, and flushing out toxins and old ‘issues’ embedded in tissues.” In her landmark book Imagery and Healing, Dr. Jeanne Achterberg writes, “Imagery has always played a key role in medicine. Imagery is the thought process that invokes and uses the senses; vision, audition (hearing), smell, taste, the senses of movement, position, and touch. It is the communication mechanism between perception, emotion, and bodily change. A major source of both health and sickness, the image is the world’s oldest and greatest healing source.”10 The use of active imagery and expectancy has multiple therapeutic effects.11 Simply visualizing movements without physically practicing them can improve recovery of motor function in stroke survivors, as well as encourage learning of new complex movements. Growing evidence suggests that brain areas engaged in the actual performance of movements are, to a significant extent, also active during (Location 856)

Tags: orange

about a movement uses the same parts of the brain as when actually moving.12 Meditation research shows that positive intention and imagery can significantly influence the brain and many physiological functions.13 The rapidly growing field of placebo research also supports the diverse, often robust therapeutic effects of belief and expectation, which are central to Tai Chi.14 (Location 866)

Tags: blue

WASHING YOURSELF WITH QI One of my favorite moments in teaching new Tai Chi students, both in clinical trials and community-based classes, is introducing a Qigong warm-up exercise called “Washing yourself with Qi from nature.” This very simple exercise, done either standing or seated, is designed to gather in healing, rejuvenating, peaceful energy from nature and guide this energy through every cell of the body, starting at the crown of the head and moving down through the chest, shoulders, spine, all the internal organs, through the legs and feet. I ask students—commonly older housewives and retired blue-collar workers with little or no exposure to New Age practices—to imagine doing this exercise while standing on a mountaintop, a beach, or wherever they feel they would be surrounded by nourishing energy. I invite them to trust the energy to permeate and revitalize every cell of the body, while at the same time filtering out tired, sick energy and washing it out through the soles of the feet into the earth. Then I’ll abruptly stop, smile, and acknowledge with them how odd or weird these ideas all sound. They typically agree, and we all laugh together. I’ll then share with them some of the research my colleagues and I have done related to the placebo effect; our research supports the Tai Chi principle that (Location 873)

Tai Chi leads to a more efficient posture. Better structure and postural control is an explicit goal of Tai Chi and underlies its martial and health applications. (Location 2277)

As a teacher, one of my primary goals is to encourage students to carry themselves consciously in a more-upright posture, centering the head over the torso, the torso over the hips, and the feet so that key joints are aligned to maximize balance and minimize strain. It is very satisfying to watch a student’s posture change over time, seeing the student move with more ease, efficiency, and awareness, both in and outside of classes. (Location 2278)

From the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine, improved structure and posture frees and facilitates the flow of Qi, leading to higher levels of function and health. From a Western medicine perspective, better posture and biomechanics reduce strain and wear and tear on joints and tissues. (Location 2282)

So, being able to sit into the kwa means you have good flexibility and range of motion in the hip and pelvic area (the hip flexors and especially the psoas and the iliacus muscles), and symmetry on both sides of the body. A sedentary lifestyle and traumas to the pelvic area, even genetic issues such as a difference in leg lengths, may lead to imbalanced muscles. Some literature shows that imbalances in the psoas and related core muscles may be associated with back, knee, and neck problems, and they also may affect your gait and balance. (Location 2299)