Teaching Tips for T’ai Chi Chih Teachers

(A look at learning/teaching integrated movement.)

By Linda Braga

At the July 1992 Conference, Steve asked me to share some information about brain dominance patterns and how these affect movement. My knowledge has come from working with Learning Handicapped children for 28 years. I am particularly interested in how the brain affects gross and fine motor skills, learning styles and naturally-occurring dominance patterns. The brain controls all these skills and influences how we learn and what we learn. Most brain functions, simplistically put, fall into two categories–simultaneous processing or sequential processing. When both hemispheres are “switched on”, we can perform an integrated motor movement with both sides of the body performing easily, effortlessly, automatically. If we have to “stop and think”, we switch to our preferred dominance mode which may not be integrated.

How does this relate to T’ai Chi Chih? It helps us understand that each of us moves in a unique way, based on our preferred dominance pattern and the amount of motor movement we’ve experienced in our life through early childhood creeping and crawling, running, jumping, rolling, skipping, walking and sports participation. We are the product of all the motor movement we’ve experienced. If we do not move effortlessly in T’ai Chi Chih patterns, but have parts of the movement that “are hollow”, or not synchronized, then we are most likely not in an integrated mode but in our preferred dominance mode.

Most teachers (and students) want to improve their form but are unable to through words and demonstration alone. Their brain dominance pattern prevents them from making the switch.

So, what can we do?

Information about how to improve motor movement patterns is available in many forms today–everything from pills to improve memory to visualizing the “perfect move” (such as offered by cybervision).

I especially like the books published by the Edu-Kinesthetics Foundation because they are written for parents and children in a simple, understandable format. And their books offer a variety of ways to help both hemispheres to “switch on” simultaneously and become ready to learn/process/perform a more complex movement.

This information is valuable to us as T’ai Chi Chih teachers. It gives us a basis for understanding movement and ways to improve/refine it. This in turn helps us to become better observers of movement in ourselves and others, and discover which aspects (arms, legs, torso) are not integrated. It enables us to coach others to move more synchronistically by pointing out exactly what is out of synch. The “teachable moment” becomes the one in which the student is moving and continues to move, making adjustments in posture, timing, and flow. Non-integrated movement can be changed by first “getting the brain ready” to process simultaneously.

For more information, please contact Linda Braga