Ball of "Chi" 2: Is "Chi" a physical force?

Hi, Steve Barnes here with another episode of Fire Dance Tai Chi. So we talked about the ball of chi concept yesterday, where you rub your hands together until your palms get hot, shake your fingers out, then you put your palms together close enough that you can feel the warmth and the tingling between them. Like right now, I'll do it so I have to relax. I can't quite feel it. Oh, a lot of tension in there. Okay, there are. Now I can feel it. Let me relax. Inhale through my nose. Diaphragmatic breathing. Okay, okay, Okay. I can feel it. There are days when it gets big as a beach ball. Other days it's as shallow as a bb. But right now is not bad. All right, so what you want to do is to answer question that might be occurring to you. Certain occurs to others. Are we talking about some vortex of mystical energy here? There's no need to go there at all. If you rub your hands together, you get friction. Your palms are literally warm. Okay? If you relax enough, your capillaries are less constricted and can produce warmth of their own. You also become more sensitive. So to a certain degree, the more relaxed you are, the more. This palm, for instance, is both radiating energy, heat, and able to sense energy from this palm here. So you are relaxing both palms so they become warmer and more sensitive. And the more that you do that, the further apart you can get your hands and still feel that. Now, is there some imagination involved here? Of course there is. What you're looking for is what is the feeling of relaxation in your body that allows your blood to flow, that allows the greatest amount of muscular relaxation, so that when you move your body, you are as relaxed as you can possibly be. Centered. You're learning how to center yourself. When you do a Tai Chi form or you do a qigong exercise, you learn how to center yourself, which means that your muscles are hanging on your skeletal structure. You're not supporting yourself with muscular tension. And from that position, the more relaxed you are, the easier it is to flow, to move, to sense the parallel between this and being able to enter flow state when you are writing. For instance, rather obvious when you're tense. When you're tense, your breathing gets up in your chest, your breath gets shallow and rapid. Literally. Once you start learning how to create that ball of chi, then you ask yourself, how relaxed am I? How. How slow do I need to breathe to get more and more and more of that relaxation? Then being able to tie that in with your breathing, your movement through life. Now, think about it. If you're doing Tai chi and you're doing push hands. It's a matter of, can I maintain this level of relaxation while someone is pushing at me? Okay. How do I have to stand to stay balanced when someone is pushing at me? If you can see the parallels between that and staying balanced and relaxed when you're dealing with life stress, then the movement during push hands is a metaphor. It is analogous to the stress you have in life. The same thing is true for the solo form. By deepening your stance, bending your knees more, you put more stress on your body. Can you stay relaxed? How much relaxation? What does it feel like to be relaxed? Do the qigong exercise. How do you have to relax to feel the warm air between your hands when you take that ball of air? And after you do that, by the way, shake your fingers out and rub the energy, the warm hands all over your body, shoulders, arms and legs and sides and chest, abs, just feel like you're spreading it all over your body. It's not necessary to suggest that there's something mystical going on here. The psychological is purely enough, the physiological is purely enough. What exists beyond those levels, I don't know. I know that there are things beyond the flow state into the state of non duality and that there are some physiological analogies for these things that the, the. There are things that happen mentally when you move into non dualism that also impact us physically. But you don't have to worry about that. We're just talking about, let's get you healthy. Let's keep your mind, your thoughts, your eyes, your breathing and your movement all synchronized, all synchronized. And you can do this for 60 seconds once every three hours, literally just this, feel that, feel this moving your hands, relaxing, keeping the warmth, keeping that ball of warm air. If you can do that, then you move that into a standing position, move that into a walking exercise. Think about that when you're sitting and writing or doing some work of some kind. When you are in an argument, if you can take the time to recognize that the best way to resolve an argument is to understand exactly what's really going on. And you cannot do that as long as you're thinking, me, me, me, it has to be an us, it has to be a them. You have to be paying attention. And in order to do that, you need to relax. So having learned how to hold the ball of warm air and relax and pay attention to what you're doing then translates into your ability to pay attention to the other person, to relax under emotional stress. So what we want is to take the Tai Chi movement, which is profound movement. It is beautiful movement. And if you're not learning the Tai Chi form, then you just take the Qigong exercises and you practice them. And you can do them for five minutes a day to an hour a day. Nobody's stopping you. The question is, what do you need to do to be the person who can do the things that will allow you to have the life that you want? If you'd like to join the Fire Dance Tai Chi workshop, Please go to www.firedancetaichi. com. Take.