Tai Chi and Qigong Happiness – Psycho-Spiritual Training

Survey after survey reveals that a growing number of us are unhappy, stressed, worried, and fearful about our lives. For example, in one Australian survey, the number of respondents saying they were happy dropped from 25% to 10% during a 10-year period. Other surveys report similar downward trends in other countries.

While many people practice Qigong and Tai Chi to improve their physical health and to relieve mental stress, these arts have much to offer in the areas of emotional and spiritual health.

While improving your physical health, Tai Chi and Qigong can also literally make you happier. It can increase your emotional freedom, make your life more successful and fulfilling, and lead you towards personal, spiritual growth. So even if you practice primarily to be healthy, or to recover from injury or illness, or even just to feel physically better, the emotional and spiritual aspects can greatly boost the level of health you’ll receive from these arts.

Of course, you may not be surprised that Tai Chi and Qigong can make you happier, more successful, and more fulfilled. After all, quite a few classes, books, and videos mention these emotional and spiritual benefits offered by Qigong and Tai Chi.

However, very few of these instructors use Chi Development all by itself to bring you happiness, freedom, and spiritual growth in Tai Chi and Qigong. Often times, they will add “extras” to their teaching, usually borrowed from Taoism, Eastern philosophies, meditation, and even “New Age” philosophies to bolster these benefits. You’ll find these “additives” common, especially among teachers who do not focus directly or intently on Chi Development.

However, Chi Development in Tai Chi and Qigong does not need this extra baggage. Instead, the Chi Development practices contain in and of themselves the paths to happiness and spiritual growth.

Many people, including many instructors, struggle with the idea that the physical practices like Tai Chi and Qigong by themselves lead to emotional/spiritual growth. Even instructors who do have a general focus on Chi Development sometimes struggle with this concept.

Both students and instructors often feel like they need to do something more or something special to make the physical practices more psycho-spiritual. This struggle often induces instructors – especially those who do not focus intently on Chi Development – to add “extras” to their teaching in order to offer emotional and spiritual insight.

However, you can look at this as a problem of both trust and understanding. In many Western cultures, we do not usually trust “physical” practices to lead us to spiritual insight. As a matter of fact, the “bad boy/bad girl” behavior of otherwise highly-skilled Western athletes adds to this mistrust. And unfortunately, the way Tai Chi and Qigong are often taught – either as mere physical movements to be learned, or as a set of principles to follow – does little to help us understand how these practices can lead to psycho-spiritual attainment.

Without a focus on Chi Development, Tai Chi and Qigong do seem “empty” of personal liberation and spiritual benefits. But unfortunately, a general focus on Chi Development does not guarantee you’ll receive these benefits either. Chi Development has to be focused in a few specific ways for you to develop happiness, freedom, and spiritual connectedness directly from your practice without “extras”.

We’ve found three specific ways in which to focus Chi Development in order to lead you to these psycho-spiritual benefits. They are:

1. PERSONAL INTENTION – Developing an “intentional” approach not just to Tai Chi and Qigong, but to your whole life. You specifically work on identifying the purposes that guide your actions – how and why you make the choices you make in your life.
2. SENSORY ACUITY – How we use our nervous system and brain to perceive and organize the information we receive. In this area, we are looking to increase both the accuracy and efficiency of our perceptions, so that we have access to more and more information with less effort.
3. PERCEPTUAL FLEXIBILITY – How you form your concepts, ideas, thoughts, and beliefs about yourself, about others, and about life in general. Tied in with both Personal Intention and Sensory Acuity, this thought-formation process goes beyond these areas to look at how we apply “meaning” to the information we receive from inside and outside of ourselves.

As I was researching ways to best teach the above three areas of Chi Development in our courses, I came across an interesting insight. You don’t have to learn how these techniques are used in the course to get the emotional and spiritual benefits from them. I heard students time and again say, “I don’t know what it is, but I’m actually happier since starting your program. I feel more connected to myself, to others, and to the world around me.”

So in our program, we usually don’t draw attention to these techniques or teach them directly, we just use them. This is just like we use the English language to teach, without teaching English. The kinesthetic Chi Development methods we use train both your body and mind for personal intention, sensory acuity, and perceptual flexibility as part of your natural Chi Development.