Steve’s Musings
Tai Chi Is Not Just Exercise
First an apology. This article is a bit longer than usual. Some pent-up stuff here that just had to get out. This article started out as a confession, morphed into a rant, and then de-escalated into ordinary preaching to the choir. Much of this vacillation and angst...
Are You Happy Yet?
Lately, NPR has been touting the works of Robert Waldinger, who leads the Harvard Study of Adult Development. This is one of the longest-running studies of adult life ever conducted. They have been following hundreds of people since 1938 and have come to a very...
JudgMENTAL me
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...
Preaching To The Choir
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...
Posture and Breathing
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...
Chemical Changes During Meditation
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),...
The Daoyin Manuscripts
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,...
How to Get to Carnegie Hall
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 &...
The Chart of Inner Luminosity
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...
How to Practice Tai Chi
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...