How to be totally Relaxed in Tai Chi?

Relaxation is the most important principle in Tai Chi.
It’s easy to talk about but hard to do. Here is how Huan's Tai Chi explain it to our students:

Relax your Joints: When you are beginner.
You need to start to try to relax from your hands, arms, elbow, shoulder, waist.
Fingers should not be closed, they should be open and relaxed. This is called relax your joints.

Relax and Gather energy to Dan Tian: When you reach above stage, then next one you want to get is to relax and gather all the energy to your Dan Tian. When your joints are relaxed, then it’s easy to gather all the Qi and energy to your Dan Tian.

Mind Relaxation: Now, mind relaxing is equally important as body relaxation. You mind should not have other thoughts but concentration on your Tai Chi. Without mind relaxation, your Tai Chi is not totally relaxed.

Relaxed on Reaction: many people are very relaxed when they perform Tai Chi, but they get tight and stressed when doing push hands, you need to train to feel relaxed while have reaction with another person. This need to be trained a lot to achieve.

Relax and Connecting: Once you reach all the points above, it’s time to connect all the energy together, and bring energy to any place you wish. When you reach this stage, it’s called using Yi (concentration) but using force. You will be able to use Yi to control energy.

Copyrighted By Huan’s Tai Chi ‘08