Author: Sam Langley

The article “Hypnosis for Tai Chi” is reprinted on Slanted Flying website with the permission of the author Sam Langley from his personal Blog.

Imagine that your Tai Chi skills have improved. You’re ten times better. When people watch you move they are immediately impressed by the fluidity, the grace and the power of your Tai Chi.

Hypnosis has long been used by athletes to boost performance often to great success.
Tiger Woods, Mike Tyson, Andre Agassi, Dorian Yates and Michael Jordan have all used Hypnosis to improve their game and so have many martial artists.

You might be aware of a study done at the University of Chicago by Dr Biasiotto involving Basketball. The subjects were split into 3 groups and tested on how many free throws they could make. The first group practiced shooting free throws for an hour every day, the second group just visualised shooting free throws, and the third group did nothing.
Dr Biasotto tested the participants after 30 days and the results were astonishing. The first group had improved by 24% and the second group, using only visualization had improved by 23%!

Is it possible that Hypnosis can make you better at Tai Chi? I would say it’s highly probable!

Tai Chi is difficult, at least that’s what they say. Maybe viewing it as difficult will make it so. If we change how we perceive our practice there might be a chance we can change it. There’s no doubt that Tai Chi requires dedication and obviously you do need to actually practice. Hypnosis can help you become more motivated to do so.

For a while, after one of Master Chen Yingjun’s annual visits, I can often retain a memory of how he moves. When I practice the form I imagine I’m him and I believe it improves the quality of my Tai Chi. You can sometimes experience something vaguely similar just by watching a video.

If you visualize yourself as a master you will gradually move closer to that ideal.

Deep Relaxation is fundamental to Tai Chi and seems to be the biggest stumbling block for most people. I’ve met, seen and pushed hands with many people who had good alignment but weren’t relaxed. If you can become more relaxed mentally you will become more relaxed physically and Hypnosis is a very powerful method for achieving this.

The reason I decided to create a Hypnotherapy session for Tai Chi is that several of my students have asked me how they can become more relaxed. My initial response was ‘Practice more’ but then I remembered that I’m a qualified Hypnotherapist!

It’s not the first time I have combined both practices. I’ve occasionally used simple Hypnosis techniques at the end of my classes. The first time I did so was a light bulb moment.

The good news is that as a Tai Chi practitioner you will have an advantage when it comes to self-hypnosis. You are probably more relaxed than most people and therefore will go into a trance state more easily.
What will happen if you close your eyes and run through the form in your head? Try it now.

Does it feel as though this could be a beneficial practice? Could it conceivably strengthen your mind-body connection?

One thing is sure: It won’t make you any worse and there’s tons of evidence to suggest it will make you a lot better!

Check out the mp3 download available for Hypnosis for Tai Chi!

The article “5 Life Problems Solved With Tai Chi” is reprinted on Slanted Flying website with the permission of the author Sam Langley from his personal Blog.

There’s no such thing as a cure-all and if you’re looking for increased wealth or a new relationship then Tai Chi might not help you. But what it will do is profoundly change you as a human being. There are so many ways in which Tai Chi helps you that they could fill a very thick book but here are 5.

Stressed

Stress and anxiety can be very unpleasant to experience. You feel restless and out of control. Tai Chi practice teaches you to relax. The more you do it the deeper you can relax. The mind and the body are intrinsically connected and so the more you’re able to relax your muscles the calmer your mind will become.

In Tai Chi, we practice relaxing whilst moving, holding postures and during partner work. We are training ourselves to maintain a deep level of calmness no matter what happens.

In 2018 there was a study comparing Tai Chi with more traditional forms of exercise for stress reduction. The study concluded that Tai Chi may be superior to normal exercise in this respect. There are other studies showing that Tai Chi reduces stress but more need to be done because anecdotally there is a lot of evidence.

I see how effective Tai Chi is in reducing stress every week in my classes. In the beginning, some people are very tense. After a few classes, they seem more relaxed and at ease. After a few months, they are noticeably much calmer.

Tired

If you’re constantly tired, feeling sluggish and lacking energy then Tai Chi will help enormously. After your first session, you’ll feel something change. A friend of mine likened it to plugging yourself into the mains! By improving your posture and learning to relax you will improve your circulation and your breathing.The better your posture and the better you’re breathing the more energy you’ll have. Tai Chi really strengthens the legs which improves blood circulation and your general sense of wellness.

A study conducted in 2017 showed that Tai Chi was more effective than conventional therapy for treating fatigue.

I know people that have used Tai Chi to overcome Chronic fatigue and I myself find that the more I practice, the more energy I seem to have.

Can’t sleep

In my experience, you’ll never sleep as deeply as you do after a long Tai Chi session. Because Tai Chi is so good at tackling stress and anxiety it results in you sleeping better. Exercise, in general, is probably good at combating insomnia but when you combine exercise with relaxation and meditation, as Tai Chi does, then the results are even more powerful.

Subjects in a 2011 study reported that Tai Chi made significant improvements in their sleep. The study concluded that Tai Chi was an effective nonpharmacological approach for sleep complaints.

Lacking confidence

As your body becomes stronger and your mind gets calmer it only seems natural that you will feel more confident. Tai Chi gives you balance, both physically and emotionally as depicted in the Tai Chi symbol (yin yang). I’ve seen shy, meek students gradually transform as they get stronger.

As a martial art, Tai Chi eventually gives you the ability to hold your ground. When someone pushes, you won’t move. This ability can only be achieved through relaxation and is nothing to do with brute force. Once you can hold your own space you won’t feel so fragile or defensive around other people because you’ll have a tangible measure of your own power.

Physical problems

Tai Chi is well known for it’s ability to heal. When nothing else works Tai Chi often can. I know people that have healed their backs, recovered from injuries and rehabilitated themselves after strokes with just Tai Chi.

Back issues are very prevalent in the modern world due to too much sitting and increasingly poor posture. People fork out hundreds of pounds to chiropractors for a momentary fix when they could be learning how to help themselves.

When you improve your posture and your body awareness you will also address your physical issues. Tai Chi works in a very different way to most forms of exercise. By becoming straighter, more relaxed and learning to move in a coherent way you start to develop internal strength. Your internal connective tissue (known as the fascia) is vitally important to your physical well being and Tai Chi is one of the few forms of exercise that strengthen it.

There are numerous studies showing that Tai Chi is effective in treating back pain, stroke rehabilitation, balance, arthritis, osteoporosis, hypertension and much more besides.

In Conclusion

There probably isn’t a panacea for all of life’s problems but Tai Chi comes pretty close!

The article “Qi” is reprinted on Slanted Flying website with the permission of the author Sam Langley from his personal Blog.

I can feel something. A kind of fullness. As I move, the feeling changes. It almost feels as if something is moving me. I hear my daughter crying and it’s gone.

Qi is like a badger, it’s very shy.

If you look too hard it seems to evaporate. It is something that can be felt but not measured which leads materialists to conclude that it doesn’t exist.

Often disagreements come down to semantics. What do you think Qi is?

Qi in the context of martial arts or Chinese medicine is merely a convenient label for a phenomenon that can be felt. If you have acupuncture you’ll probably experience strong feelings of energy coursing through your body. Western Science doesn’t seem to provide a satisfactory explanation for what’s going on here and so we call it Qi.

What animates your body? What is life or consciousness? Within the current scientific paradigm, these are difficult questions to answer. If all matter is essentially dead stuff then how is anything living? Taoist philosophers described the life force that permeates the universe as Qi.

It’s understandable that people are sceptical. Qi is a much-abused word. So many Tai Chi teachers play up the magical, ethereal and intangible aspects of the art which gives the majority of people a very mistaken impression of what it’s all about.

In my experience people often fall into two camps: Those that think any talk of internal energy is bullshit and those that can see, feel and exchange Qi with trees, the universe and extraterrestrials with little or no practice.

But whilst Qi itself might be elusive it is possible to scientifically test the effects of Acupuncture, Qigong and Tai Chi on a person’s health. There are numerous studies showing that Qi practices are very effective for many different problems and it is widely accepted that they work. Is there a materialist explanation of WHY they work? Maybe but it’s probably deeply unsatisfactory.

The Chinese are practical people and have been historically less concerned with WHY things work than IF they work. Meanwhile, in the West we have been steadily dissecting, reducing and questioning everything. Scepticism is healthy, in my opinion, but if something is proven to work and WHY it works doesn’t fit into your model of reality then it could be that your model needs to change.

I can feel something. Is it Qi? I’ll say…..yes I’m happy with that term because I can’t find a better one.

The article “Pay Attention!” is reprinted on Slanted Flying website with the permission of the author Sam Langley from his personal Blog.

During standing practice, something occurred to me: Awareness is the first and most important principle in Tai Chi. It sounds obvious now but when it hit me I had to go and write it down.

Most of us are a bit stiff, holding tension in much of the body and we need to work out how to let it go. This requires paying attention. I can only relax my chest when I perceive the tension and the same goes for my lower back and my hips.

We also want to improve our posture, not for aesthetic reasons but to enable deeper relaxation and develop whole body connection. Again, we need to be aware of our body to straighten up and balance properly.

Mindfulness is a word that is, perhaps, a little overused these days and as such is starting to lose its meaning. Tai Chi, however, is in part a mindfulness practice. You can’t learn Tai Chi unless you pay attention and you’re not really practicing it if you’re not paying attention.
It’s interesting to me that Tai Chi requires you to concentrate but also improves your ability to do so. Maybe it’s enough to simply practice regularly and your awareness will grow naturally all on its own? Or perhaps not. If you take a look around any Tai Chi class you’ll see that some people are paying more attention than others. 

My advice is: When you practice Tai Chi don’t add any distractions, just practice. I used to have a student that watched films whilst doing standing qigong which is definitely not paying full attention! So no films and I would also say no music.

It may come down to the strength of your intention. People with a passion for something tend to really concentrate on it. Those with the highest level of skill in Tai Chi very often have had health problems. As a last resort, they turn to Tai Chi to heal themselves and give it everything they’ve got.

It goes without saying that in the modern world there’s not enough awareness. When I cycle down Gloucester road I can count on one hand the number of people not staring at their phones and even those who aren’t are probably, invisibly, listening to them.

Any practice that improves your awareness is an important one. I’ve found that practicing Tai Chi improves my self awareness and as my self awareness grows so does my awareness of the world around me. I feel more present when talking to others and more aware of the effect of my actions.

The article “Letting Go” is reprinted on Slanted Flying website with the permission of the author Sam Langley from his personal Blog.

Human beings are industrious creatures. “How are you? Busy? That’s good. “Is It? What is so inherently good about busyness? Obviously, a certain amount of vigilance is required to survive but once your basic needs are met why continue running about like a headless chicken? If there’s a problem we tend to think we need to always ‘DO’ something to fix it. Work, work, work, do, do, do, no wonder everyone’s stressed out.

So if you are stressed out, anxious and restless what can be done? How about nothing? I mean absolutely nothing or as close as you can get. Linguistically speaking, you can’t DO nothing, after all, nothing suggests an absence of doing. So what I mean is, try practicing NOT doing.

The closest you’ll get to not doing is meditating. Of course, once you try to sit there and do nothing you find it’s impossible! You try to calm your mind and it gets busier…..so stop trying and just relax. This is isn’t that easy. How many people do you know that are capable of sitting on a train without looking at their phone? Imagine how it would feel to be happy just sitting there unoccupied.
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In Chen style Tai Chi we practice standing meditation or Zhan Zhuang which translates as ‘standing like a tree’. When I practice standing, my mind is focused in my body. It is an experience of letting go. I find there’s a small amount of tension in my hip and I let go, my mind is full of intrusive thoughts and I let go of that too.

As you practice letting go of physical tension you are increasingly able to let go of unhelpful emotions and you can stop trying to control everything around you. As far as happiness goes it might be the only sensible thing that can be done or rather, not done.

There is a concept in Taoism called Wu wei which translates literally as ‘Without action’ and is commonly understood as the art of not doing or as the philosopher Alan Watts suggests ‘Not forcing’. As Tai Chi has Taoist roots it is a very good way of exploring Wu wei. We don’t force things and we try to be as natural as possible.

As I write this I realise it all sounds contradictory. I have a theory that anyone attempting to make a particular argument will eventually contradict themselves and that’s fine with me. Writing articles is a good way to practice letting go. One could easily cringe at the babblings of their former self but really ……what does it matter? So it could have been written better, I choose to let it go.

Personally, I think we’d all be better off if we stopped trying so hard, to be good, nice, successful or happy. I have whittled my own philosophy down to one word which is simply….relax. If you can do that it’s quite likely that everything else will come to you a lot easier.

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The article “Language” is reprinted on Slanted Flying website with the permission of the author Sam Langley from his personal Blog.

The word ‘Relax’ is a pleasing one and I’ve yet to find a better word to replace it.
It is, perhaps though, problematic. We’re all it seems used to doing and not terribly adept at not doing.
When you tell someone to relax it implies that there is something to do.
How do you force relaxation? I don’t think you can.

Now you could accuse me of pedantry but I think that the language we use is very important
in shaping our reality.
The words we use habitually effect the way we think, feel and experience the world.
I used to work as a hypnotherapist and have seen how people’s use of language can have a powerful impact both on themselves and others.

In China they use the word ‘Song’ to describe the desirable body state required in Tai Chi.
Roughly translated it means loosened. The term ‘song’ is based on a character for ‘long hair that hangs down’.
To me this doesn’t seem to have the same meaning as relaxed.
When you’re slumped on the sofa watching TV you’re probably relaxed but that’s definitely
not the same feeling we’re trying to cultivate in Tai Chi.

Obviously you can’t think your way into getting the right feeling.
With practice you hopefully develop an awareness of tension and are increasingly able
to ‘Let go’ of it.

So maybe I should tell my students to ‘let go of tension’ instead of relax……but it doesn’t roll off the tongue as well and isn’t quite so relaxing to the ear.

Fancy learning Tai Chi in Bristol? Sam teaches regular classes and courses suitable for everyone.