Steve’s Musings

Osteoporosis Revisited

Osteoporosis Revisited

Several years ago, I researched Qigong approaches to osteoporosis. Much of my focus was around Mantak Chia’s Bone Breathing exercises. Using his material as a guide, I developed a series of Qigong exercises that, over a period of eight weeks, taught people with...

read more
Tai Chi Is Not Just Exercise

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...

read more

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...

read more

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...

read more

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...

read more

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...

read more

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),...

read more

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,...

read more

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 &...

read more

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...

read more