Jan 30, 2008

Have You Heard of Tai Chi Light?

Just as I stumbled into practicing meditation, I became a Taichi/Qigong practitioner quite by accident. Almost 30 years ago, I did joint a taichi practicing group for a while, but was discouraged by its complexity and slow pace. Plus I had a quite busy job at that time and had very little time to spare. About 8 years ago, on a business trip to Shanghai, my brother asked me to look for a book about an exercise call "Taichi/Qigong in 18 forms." With some difficulty I did find this out-of-print booklet. As I read it on my flight back, I was fascinated by the simplicity of this form of taichi exercise. I thought it really makes sense.

Unlike the traditional Taichi and Qigong exercises which involve anywhere from 24 to 98 or even more consecutive moves that need to be memorized, this one has 18 rather simple moves to be performed six times each. I thought I could do that and reap similar benefit as from traditional taichi. In fact, I thought this form of taichi exercise would be perfect for the very busy people or people of advanced age since it is easy to learn, easy on the body, and takes only 15 minutes to practice.

Being a writer, I then spent a month or so to have the Chinese text rewritten into English while changing some of the archaic terms into more modern terms. With much difficulty, I followed the written description of the moves and learn the exercise. In the process, I also streamlined some of the moves and created transitions from one move to the next so the entire exercise flows fluently. I have been practicing this exercise regularly ever since. Two years ago, after numerous rewriting and incorporating my insight from my personal experience, I produced an instructional DVD for the exercise, which I call "Body-Mind Exercise" (BME) and nickname "Taichi Light."

In a future post I will describe the benefits of this exercise.

Jan 28, 2008

Strumbling into Meditation

As a meditator, I am a very new and almost accidental one. Up until four years ago, meditation to me conjured up the image of an old monk sitting cross-legged on a dirt floor in an old and dilapidated temple with his hands put together and mumbling something monotonous. Meditation was totally irrelevant to me. Then a close friend of mine told me he had spent 10 days in a meditation retreat during which everyone had to keep absolute silence. I thought that was weird and impossible to do for any sensible person. But the picture stuck in my mind.

A while later, on a chance trip to a Barnes & Noble store for a book I needed for a discussion group, which I didn't find, I came upon a book entitled "Vipassana Meditation" by William Hart. I read the book and became curouser. One day I told my son about the book and he told me he had been to that meditation center in Massachusetts twice. The next day I went on-line and signed up for a 10-day retreat. That was a rare, impulsive decision on my part, but that's how I stumbled into meditation.

I drove 300-plus miles to the Center's location in northwestern Massachusetts on a freezing Spring day in 2005 and almost killed myself when my car spinned around several times on the icy road on the approach of I-90 from I-81. Luckily the trailer truck that was behind me was able to stop in time and a kind hearted truck driver got out to stop the traffic so that I could turn my car around.

I arrived at the Vipassana Meditation Center in a rural area to find out that I must surrender my pen, phone, PDA, books, magazines, and all other electronic stuffs because there will be no writing, reading, listening to music, talking to others and even eye contact. Men and women were strictly separated at all time except during group meditation when all men were on the left side of the room and women on the right side. I thought to myself if a couple were to attend the retreat together they wouldn't be able to even say to each other "not tonight my dear."

More about my adventure into the meditationdom later.

Jan 26, 2008

Finally I am Here

Blogger's records show that I first registered for this blog back in 2004. Indeed I have done that but for a long time, I hesitated to start. On the one hand, I have a lot of things I wanted to share; but by the same token I was afraid I didn't have enough time to polish my writing and make it presentable. I picked the name "Alchuatlarge" because I wanted to use this space to talk about anything and everything. But I was afraid I was not knowledgeable enough about a lot of things.... You get the picture of a procrastinator.

Well, on the bus back from an off-Broadway show this afternoon, I finally decided to go ahead restart this blog and limit my posting to five areas that are dear to my heart. They are: meditation, taichi/qigong, retirement life, growing old, and alternative health maintenance. I have done a lot of reading and thinking about these subject matters and I do want to share what I have to offer but more importantly I want to use my postings to draw in others' ideas, insights and experience plus critiques on these subject matters too. So I welcome everybody's constructive comments.