Do you still have your vase?

After the strong wind and shower two days ago, my peony is falling apart in backyard.
I need to use string to pull them together. After done some yard work this morning,
cutting some flowers and putting them in to my vase, I remembered the vase story I have heard.

A war general was cleaning his desk. He accidently knocked off his favorite vase. Just right before the vase touch the ground, he caught with his quick hand. He realized he was sweating at the moment. “Why?” he asked himself. “ While I was in the battlefield, fighting with the enemies, I never sweat. Why today, why now. I could lose my life then during the battle but this is just a vase.” After he thought it over, He broke his vase.

I always tell myself, I don’t have any thing when I was first born, and I will not bring any thing with me after I die. Anything I have here are some thing I gained. I should be happy on what I have. Sometimes, arguments and conflict came because something you never had and will not bring to your coffin. I wanted to lose all my vases as well. What about you? After you read this, Do you still have your vase?

Are we really all going to Heaven?

What a beautiful sunny weekend we had! I did some gardening and then joined my friend Teresa’s BBQ at rooftop. If you read our website, you saw we auctioned one of our classes to support woman who had Aids, that’s where Teresa use to work. Teresa is only visiting Boston this weekend because she accepted a job in NC a year ago. She love the food and entertainment here and she had a good job here in Cambridge, but she took that job anyway because she think people need more help there.

Here is a Buddhism story,

Once, a person asked the Buddha,

“Where will you go after you die.”
“Hell, of course!”
“Why hell, you suppose to go to heaven, right?”
“If I don’t go to Hell, who is going to teach these people in hell being a good human?”

I didn’t try to imply that NC is hell, of course not. I am trying to say that some time the most wonderful decision ( good for you) is not the most wise decision( good for the world), so before you make the decision, think three times and choose wisely.

Strong Shower, Tai Chi, and Jade Lady

It rained very hard last night. I thought many people would miss class. What a surprise! Almost every one was there. We went over the movement Fair lady Works Shuttles (to four corners).
People are very careful. They wanted to make sure their movements are right. After I gave applications of the movements to them, they have a better understanding and the movement become smooth. Even though I only taught two corners in last night's class, they got some decent information for this movement.
"Some people translate to Jade lady Works Shuttles instead of Fair lady. Character "Yu" means Jade. When we talk about fine and expensive jade, we talk about a jade with fair color and no black spots. A nice jade looks very fair and even. A better translation should be fair lady since a lady is not made of Jade or wearing any jade."

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

Viewing Self-Defense in different ways

I will give a Seminar on Self-defense tomorrow. When people think about self-defense, they will think about how the opponent attack you, and then how you going to attack back or escape. That’s not really self-defense is about, that’s is only a part of it. This is the procedure during the self-defense. There is before and after. In tomorrow’s seminar, I will show how can you prepare yourself before the attack or even prevent the attack, and what if it happens, how you deal with it and how you wrap up. Grandmaster Cai use to teach some of the techniques to the secret police force for the Chinese government. They can use the minimum energy to defeat the enemy with maximum power. I think it will be very exciting for most of my students, since we only discussed about Tai Chi in our public class. It will be some new knowledge for them.