T’ai Chi Chih discipline presented at University of Verona, Italy in Nov. ’01

It took me a year and three meetings with Professor Larocca to finalize the date: November 3rd. Professor Larocca is in the field of Special Education Science (“Special” stands for “related to people with special needs”). No date could have been worse: that weekend 50% of Italian people are on vacation, and the University is open “on professor discretion.” In other words, nobody except for Professor Larocca was active that day. It was too late when I realized that, and the date was no longer changeable. In spite of that, about 300 people showed up. I had prepared a dozen different pages on my computer, just to keep a punctual track of what I was saying. My computer was connected to a VGA projector, so that people could follow me, reading my notes on a huge wall.

I started talking about my story. For 10 years I had been affected by a severe form of interruptive insomnia. The “official” medicine couldn’t do anything for me, so I started my own search for health. It was during such journey that I accidentally stumbled into TCC practice.

At this point in the lecture, I pointed out the separation between mind and body in our society: how many times do we look at our knee and with surprise notice a bruise or a scratch and think: “When did it happen?” We could as well say, “I wasn’t there.”

How can we bring our mind closer to our body? From the Orient there is a whole spectrum of disciplines with that same goal, from Chi Kung to Yoga. They come from far away but there is nothing mysterious about them: all you need to approach them are a mind and a breath. Then I introduced the fourth state of consciousness, and talked about the fact that reaching a state of peace does not mean isolating oneself. From the Tao Te Ching, in the translation by Steven Mitchell: “Empty your mind… This doesn’t mean to suppress your thoughts, but to step back from them… This has nothing to do with the intellect and its abstractions. The mind is originally empty, and only when it remains empty, without grasping or rejecting, can it respond to natural things, without prejudice. It should be like a river gorge with a swan flying overhead; the river has no desire to retain the swan, yet the swan’s passage is traced by its shadow, without any omission.”

Another example: “A mirror will reflect all things perfectly, whether they are beautiful or ugly; it never refuses to show a thing, nor does it retain the thing after it is gone. The mind should be as open as this…”

Meditating is a way of relaxing without losing tone. Through meditation our perception of life changes: we come to know experientially that we are connected to the Universe and to the other beings by a common origin.

— Consciousness —

. . . Meditation can bring transforming experiences that can deeply change our participation in life.

According to the Indian tradition, there are five main obstacles to the total uncovering of our consciousness: desire, hatred, laziness, anxiety and skepticism. Our true self is compared to the bottom of a lake, and the obstacles to our view of it are respectively: colors (desire), boiling (hatred), algae (laziness), wind (anxiety) and soil (skepticism).

Buddha said: “Be the empty cup.” In other words, be receptive. This does not imply boredom for the deprivation of something. It does not mean lack of interest. On the contrary, if you can empty your cup you can choose to fill it in anyway you want. We live as though we were going grocery shopping carrying with ourselves the whole kitchen every time: it is terribly difficult buying something new, and carrying it home is a monumental chore. Emptying our cup can bring a healthy detachment from the thunderstorms of life, and from that will come the most precious strength, the strength of calmness.

There is an old Indian story: an old tigress, starving and pregnant, comes upon a little flock of goats and pounces on them with such energy that she brings about the birth of her little one and her own death. The goats scatter, and when they come back to their grazing place, they find this just-born tiger and its dead mother. Having strong parental instincts, they adopt the tiger, and it grows up thinking it’s a goat. It learns to bleat. It learns to eat grass. And since grass doesn’t nourish it very well, it grows up to become a pretty miserable specimen of its species.

When the young tiger reaches adolescence, a large male tiger pounces on the flock, and the goats scatter. But this little fellow is a tiger, so he stands there. The big one looks at him in amazement and says, “Are you living here with these goats?” “Maaaaa,” says the little tiger. Well, the old tiger is mortified, something like a father who comes home and finds his own son with piercing and tattoos. He swats him back and forth a couple of times, and the little thing just responds with these silly bleats and begins nibbling grass in embarassment. So the big tiger brings him to a still pond.

This little fellow looks into the pond and sees his own face for the first time. The big tiger puts his face over and says, “You see, you’ve got a face like mine. You are not a goat. You are a tiger like me. Be like me.”

So the little one is getting that message; he’s picked up and taken to the tiger’s den, where there are the remains of a recently slaughtered gazelle. Taking a chunk of this bloody stuff, the big tiger says, “Open your mouth.”

The little one backs away, “I’m a vegetarian.”

“None of that nonsense,” says the big fellow, and he shoves a piece of meat down the little one’s throat. He gags on it… but he’s nevertheless getting it into his blood, into his nerves; it’s his proper food. It touches his proper nature. Spontaneously, he gives a tiger stretch, the first one. A little roars comes out… The big one says, “There. Now you’ve got it. Now we go into the forest and eat tiger food.”

Properly interpreted as metaphors, mythological sources can show us what we can see also through meditation: they can show us our tiger face. The tiger face stands for our true face, our true nature, our true self. We normally live a little slice of what we really are: in other words, we are so much more than what we settle for. It is here that we enter the realm of spirituality.

The Dalai Lama warns us to meditate with perseverance, as the mind moves slowly in this field, and Justin Stone comforts us by reminding us that in walking through the tall grass day after day a trail will form, making it easy one day to cross the meadow.

But how do we meditate? Through mind or through body? What is the difference?

Well, we can choose between one or the other, and IF WE PRACTICE REGULARLY, the results are the same. In my experience, the real difference is in the fact that meditating through the body (as with TCC practice) is much easier than through other methods, and I tried many.

— T’ai Chi and the Scientific Research —

. . . . Because of its simplicity and versatility, the T’ai Chi Chih discipline is today taught in the U.S. in many facilities: in juvenile and adult prisons, at HMOs, to Alzheimers patients, to Schizophrenics at the Cincinnati University Hospital, as a pain therapy (for 10 years now) in Minneapolis… In this last case, it is being financed by the insurance, a clear sign of the fact that concrete results have been found and its effectiveness has been proven. And just to give an example of the broadness of applications TCC practice can give us, a group of nuns who are TCC instructors practice the TCC movements as a prelude to contemplative prayer. . . .

At this point one hour had elapsed, and I got everybody up to perform “Push Pull” and “Around the Platter.” I considered that, given the very little space people had in front of them, these movements were the most contained. First I gave a few technical indications, then we all did six repetitions of the two movements to the music “Silent Joy,” by Anugama. . . I think that the first part of that music is just wonderful. Not a single person remained seated, and their eyes were attentive, their hands incredibly soft.

— Short History of TCC —

I’ll save you the first part as everyone reading The Vital Force knows about it…

We learn the TCC practice from the outside in, but it will flow from inside out. It is not a philosophy because it is not something to understand or to believe, but just to experience. For the same reason it is difficult to talk about it: Justin Stone compares it to chocolate. Imagine describing it to somebody who does not know what it is, you’ll see it is impossible. “Here, try it” is the only feasible approach. About the difficulty of talking about spirituality, the Tao Te Ching is even more drastic: “He who speaks, does not know, he who knows does not speak.” This is the problem for spiritual teachers: they have to be blabber-mouths, but, according to the Buddhist tradition, their words are like fingers pointing to the moon. If you look at the finger, you do not see the moon.

Many of you probably have heard about Yoga. Well, with Yoga we share the same goal of connecting mind and body, of reaching psycho-physical health through circulating the Vital Force inside of us. The difference is in the way we do that: in TCC practice we are standing and we keep moving gracefully and slowly. In Yoga the postures are still and maintained in time — the longer, the better. In TCC practice, the softest we can become, the better. Again, the Tao Te Ching underlines the importance of softness:

Men are born soft and supple;
Dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
Dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
Is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
Is a disciple of life.

The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.

. . . [Showing the yin/yang symbol]: This is the symbol of Chi. The two colors, black and white, the Yin and the Yang, stand for the two opposites that compose everything in the Universe: day and night, high and low, hot and cold, the sweet side and the bitter side of a man, attack and defense in a game ….. In each side there is a dot of the opposite color, indicating that nothing is completely Yin or completely Yang, as in the most negative situations there is always something to be learned. Also, the dots indicate a seed of possible change. If you run through the external circle with your finger, you will see how you will go from the thin beginning of one of the entities into its fullest development, to turn into its opposite, like life becomes death and pleasure indefinitely sustained can turn into pain. The cyclical rhythm of Yin and Yang is a sort of “celestial breathing” involving the whole Universe. The duality of this symbol is not suggestive of conflict, but rather representative of reality as it is: male and female, day and night, etc. The night doesn’t fight the day to be next to it, and the same is true for the day.

So, the moral lesson behind this symbol is: man, with his behavior, must synchronize with the cycles of his nature, and harmonize with them. REFLECTING ALL THIS INTO PHYSICAL MOVEMENT, WE PRACTICE THE TCC MOVEMENTS. IT IS THROUGH TCC PRACTICE THAT WE ENTER AND PARTICIPATE IN THE ACTIVE PLAY OF THE OPPOSITES. TCC practice so becomes the archetypal search of the self, the dream of the many tales, the sacred Grail, the epical adventure of the hero, the battle for the comprehension of our humanity.

There is nothing to be taken for granted in TCC practice, and in my classes I always welcome a healthy level of initial skepticism: only when the results will corroborate what you heard will it be logical to believe it.

— Interdisciplinarity —

The TCC discipline is apt to be taught in many different educational fields, as its results are applicable to practically every subject. Thinking of myself as a teenager or a young adult, I listed some of the benefits TCC practice would have given me in those school years. Here is a highlight of the points I developed in my speech:

• Consciousness of what you do, of how you do it and of its effects on you and on others around you. This can bring a clearer vision of your limits and possibilities.
• Knowledge of the self brings internal growth, a better relationship with the environment, together with an increased level of individual and social responsibility.
• Health and wellness values.
• Concentration skills, higher level of lucidity, a more serene mind, internal balance.
• Prevention of juvenile problems
• Easy integration of situations of handicap

— Articles and evidence —

I scanned directly from the Vital Force, the NY times, American health magazines and various Italian magazines for articles on TCC practice and: Alzheimers, multiple sclerosis, pain therapy, physical therapy, elderly, research, arthritis, juvenile and adult prisons, HMOs.

Of course, all these pages (about 30) clearly appeared on the wall so the audience could see the actual articles, and follow a few highlights I had previously underlined on each page.

— Exercise Science: the missing link —

I remember very vividly the concept of body and mind I inherited from my school years, as a young adult: body and mind were two separate parts, the mind was by far the most noble of the two and the body was made up of different separate parts. The more you would separate arms, legs, trunk etc., the more promising the results of your exercise would be. Furthermore, physical education meant vigorous and fast activity only.

I know that today things have changed, that exercise is taught as a means to experience body and mind during different activities. But again, the activities taken into consideration are only of the vigorous kind. Actually, the more vigorous, the better. Inside and outside of the gym, at school and outdoors, if anybody says: “I am in shape,” in our western culture everybody would think: “You must be an athlete, probably running five miles every morning, playing tennis or swimming during your weekends, rock climbing every time you see a mountain, etc.” Almost nobody would associate the fact of being in shape with a broader view, with a healthy mind in a healthy body, in harmony with each other.

The official definition of “in shape” depends on the individual goals, but this is another subject. What I want to underline here is that body knowledge and body consciousness (the most noble goals I would expect from a Physical Education department) do not come from vigorous activity only. Muscles specialize in the activities they perform. The more various the kinds of movements we execute, the more skills we add to our repertoire, the broader our body knowledge will be. Furthermore, deep mind-body connection can be established only through conscious and slow, sometimes still, movements.

When I was studying to become a fitness instructor, I was pleased to notice a new perception of a human being. Health and wellness aimed to a psycho-physical state, not to a combination of muscles and bones as it was during my adolescence. The definition of health is now (from my fitness instruction handouts):

• Physical and mental well-being
• Freedom from disease
• Personal responsibility
• Lifetime commitment

The concept is taken even further in the wellness definition:

• Good physical self-care
• Using one’s mind constructively
• Expressing one’s emotions effectively
• Interacting creatively with others
• Being concerned about one’s physical and psychological environment.

Finally, a human being is a little more human!

It is time for Physical Education Science to fill this gap, to add the missing link in the string of subjects being taught in its departments. TCC practice, a discipline so young, already entered some universities in the U.S. I will tell you about the few whose teachers I know directly, but there are more:

• From 1999 at Kean University, NJ, Physical Education Department
• From 1997 at the University of Southeast Alaska, in Sitka, Physical Education Department
• At the College of Lake County, IL, Physical Education Department
• In China, T’ai Chi Ch’uan is not taught through the Physical Education Dept., but by the Faculty of Medical Science’s “Internal Dynamics” department. It is interesting that T’ai Chi Ch’uan, in the Eastern culture where it was born, is perceived as a discipline belonging to Medicine and not to Physical Education. It is an indication of it being seen as a broader, more “proven” practice. Well, I can only assume that they probably know it better than us.

Western and Eastern medicine do not exclude each other. Our official medicine usually waits for people to get sick, and then takes care of them. We have the scientific method, but the Orient, after millenniums of careful observation of human nature, could really give us a hand and finally bring a concrete meaning to the word “prevention.”

— Why T’ai Chi Chih practice? —

• Simplicity: it can be learned in about 10 lessons.
• Modularity: while the order followed for the movements is important, it is not necessary to perform them all every time we practice. Humblenesss and perseverance are more important than that.
• Effectiveness: we have seen the evidence through actual stories (including mine). We have seen the justified curiosity of the press toward TCC practice.
• Versatility: in the U.S. and in Italy I have been teaching TCC classes to a broad spectrum of different disabled persons. My background is not as a specialist in the handicapped field: my master’s degree is in Electrical Engineering. And yet, it was easy to be successful: in Italy, when I start teaching at a facility, after a couple of weeks, TCC classes become permanently offered to the patients).

I have told you how important it is to perform the TCC movements softly: the more advanced, the more a student will be soft. So I will conclude my speech with a tribute to softness, coming again from the Tao Te Ching:

There is no self-consciousness in the newborn child. Later on, the mind wanders into self-images, starts to think: ‘Should I do this? Is this movement right?’ and loses the immediacy of the moment. As self-consciousness develops, the muscles become less supple, less like the world. But the young child is pure fluidity. It isn’t aware of any separation, so all its movements are spontaneous and alive and whole and perfect.

If an adult body becomes truly supple, though, there’s a quality to its movement that the child doesn’t have, a texture of experience, a fourth dimension of time. When we watch a 70-year-old hand move, we feel, “Yes, that hand has lived.” All the bodies it has touched, all the weights it has lifted, all the heads it has cradled are present in its movement. It is resonant with experience; the fingers curve with a sense of having been there. Whereas in a child’s hand there is a sense of just arriving. The child’s movement is pristine and innocent, and delightful, but a truly supple adult movement is awesome, because all life is included in it.”