Working with the Chi for Self-transformation

Chi is the life-sustaining, life-enhancing force that mobilizes and evolves us. It is our very life, and we can learn to work with it to assure personal harmony and assist self-transformation.

Good intentions, positive resolutions and affirmations, though used by many well-meaning people, do not necessarily produce lasting changes. If we hope for greater freedom, function and fulfillment, we must look beyond temporary approaches such as reprogramming or drilling the subconscious level of mind and applying various coping strategies, if we desire significant changes that will endure.

The practice of T’ai Chi Chih is a known way of bringing about life-transforming changes. T’ai Chi Chih allows us to work directly with chi, the evolutionary energy. Until we can internally alter the quality of chi, it is unlikely that meaningful transformation will occur. By working directly with chi, we can literally remake ourselves, assisting the process of actualizing our inborn potentials for dynamic health and harmonious living. Justin Stone, the originator of T’ai Chi Chih, often emphasizes that the quality and character of circulating chi directly influences our state of mind and that the relationship between mind and chi is reciprocal. (This relationship is a very useful theme for contemplation.)

T’ai Chi Chih is a non-demanding discipline that allows us to develop and modify the flow of chi within us. Again, the quality of chi expressing through us largely determines our state of health and function. Several veteran practitioners of T’ai Chi Chih have asserted that steadfast practice will not only raise one’s level of health and mental capabilities, but also awaken one’s intuitive abilities and creative function. Intuition and creativity are manifestations of one who is operating from an evolved level of consciousness.

What is this chi, this life-giving energy that seems to foster growth while enhancing function and perceptivity? Professor Wen-Shan Huang, Justin Stone’s revered teacher and friend states: “In this Universe there is an ever-active, ever-creative Life, and an inexhaustible source of life-energy, which is made available to mankind when a fitting stage of development is reached. It is particularly significant that it has a great reverence for life.” Professor Huang, a T’ai Chi Master, was sharing his realization that chi operates as a perpetual impulse for power. The practice of T’ai Chi Chih provides us with the opportunity to discover how to open ourselves more completely to the abundant, benevolent force that we refer to as chi. When we invite chi to express through us more abundantly, self-evolution is quickened and we experience increasing degrees of health and enlightened perception.

Self-transformation is an ongoing process of unfolding our potentials and cultivating our innate fullness of being. When we use the gentle, flowing art of T’ai Chi Chih regularly and conscientiously, each involvement with it, each practice session is a potential initiation, a new beginning that reveals fresh insights and possibilities. When we work with chi by learning to build its potency of expression and discover how to circulate it more thoroughly, we become increasingly familiar with its nature and its intended thrust in our lives. This intelligently directed energy instructs us as we more intimately acquaint ourselves with it. Because of our growing awareness and recognition of the nature of chi, a profound gratitude arises–a heartfelt thankfulness is born naturally through our recognition of what is so. As we continue to progress and evolve, we joyously exist in loving gratitude, for we are consciously linked with life’s Essence.