Steve’s Musings

The readings for the June Embodied Daoist Book Club, hosted by Dao Shr Suzy, included an essay: The Daoist Discourse on Nature by Dessislava Damyanova The theme was how to attain a more stable state of equilibrium by reining in wide swings of emotions. Daoism...

John Haskovec sent me a link to a video called The Science of Yoga. If you replace the label Yoga with Tai Chi throughout the article, it still rings true. I know this is preaching to the choir, but sometimes it is good to remind ourselves why we want to keep on this...

I've been reading up on posture, breathing, and their relationship to well-being in the book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor. It may come as a surprise, but you can get healthier by standing up straight and breathing through your nose. Better...

During a recent online class, I dispensed some erroneous information about how chemicals change in your body during meditation. Thanks, John for helping me set the record straight. And for anyone else who catches me in such an inexactitude (I love my thesaurus),...

In 1973 a tomb was unearthed in the Hunan province of China, which was originally sealed in 168 B.C. In it were the bodies of the Marquis of Dai, his wife, and his son. The tomb also contained thirty manuscripts, including two versions of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Jing,...

We all know the old joke: A tourist stops an old man on the street in downtown Manhattan.He asks: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”The old man wags a finger and replies: “Practice, practice, practice!” One may ask, “Why practice? It’s just the same old stuff over &...

It took me a while to track this down. The Chinese names for this image have been variously translated as: Diagram of the Internal Texture of Man Diagram of the Inner Scripture Chart of the Inner Passageways Diagram of Internal Pathways Chart of the Inner...

These suggestions come from the booklet ‘An Introduction to Tai Chi’ by the Harvard Medical School. I have edited and condensed the material here. For the full text, I recommend you harass the Longmont Public Library into providing you a free copy. Failing that, it is...

Today, I received a copy of a Harvard Medical School special health report called: ‘An Introduction to Tai Chi.’ This is a 46 page booklet that recommends Tai Chi as an exercise program for mental and physical well-being. The Harvard Medical School doesn’t make...