Tai Chi's Supreme Ultimate Benefit

by Bill Douglas /SmarTaiChi.com

Tai Chi's name of "supreme ultimate" gives a vision that is both profound and limitless. Articles and studies isolate taiji's individual mental/physical health benefits, but what about its greater potential, or its supreme ultimate purpose? For a world sagging from the weight of an exploding population, a straining environment, and the deafening roar of an information age igniting around us, taiji may offer much more than its more commonly considered benefits. Tai Chi may help the world thrive in a precarious future, not because taiji teachers have the answers, but because tai chi may help the world "open to its own answers." Yet, even though teachers aren't responsible for the answers, it may greatly enhance their teaching to consider tai chi's greater promise.

Tai Chi doesn't "fix" us, but simply enables us to "let go of our major malfunction, " which is our inability to "let go" of what is not healthful or useful to our evolving lives. Internally we feel blocked energy as stress tension. What causes the block is our "holding on" to what is no longer useful, be it a thought or a feeling. Imagine a river of change flowing at you constantly while you try to "hang on" to the past or to "old ways." This forces the river to beat you senseless. However, when you "let go" of the rock of the past and learn to flow, or surf, with the force of change moving toward the future you begin to thrive on that force, and rather than being destroyed by it you are lifted by it. Tai Chi lubricates our ability to flow with change, so that we can learn to surf the future powerfully with less damage. Discomfort and dis-ease, whether personal or environmental/social, is the result of us getting "stuck" in a way that won't allow inevitable change to flow through us. The same energy flowing through the world flows through us, and the discomfort or dis-ease we feel internally when we "block energy" is felt by the entire world when the world fights inevitable change, rather than working "with it."

The world has never more desperately needed tai Chi's lubricating effect. Modern times demand that we become utterly fluid in our ways of living, as the speed of social change moves at a deafening pace. Bill Joy, Chief Scientist for Sun Microsystems, recently said that due to the dawn of the information age, change is now not only doubling, but doubling exponentially every eighteen months, while psychological research shows that change is stressful, even good change. 70% of all illness according the to National Institute of Mental Health is due to stress, but actually rapid change isn't really the problem, but our inability to adapt to change is. Therefore, tai Chi could conceivably save American society $700 billion per year in avoidable illness, if tai Chi were used more widely. The stress crisis pushes us toward the opportunities of tai Chi.

The Chinese character for "crisis" is made of the two characters "danger" and "opportunity," meaning crisis provides not only danger but opportunity to grow. The "danger" of the modern stress crisis provides the world with such an opportunity. By fostering tai Chi's rapid expansion across the planet it may be literally changing the world. As corporations, hospitals, schools, and even prisons now adopt tai chi to help people deal with the stress of rapid change, something profound is occurring. For, just as tai chi's quiet mindful health practice encourages us to a healthier diet, sleep patterns, and life habits in our personal lives, it now moves society in healthier directions as well. When taiji is practiced in corporate boardrooms, hospitals, schools and even prisons throughout the entire world, it affects the decisions that create our future economy, environment, government, and society at all levels in more healthy and compassionate ways, just as it does within each tai chi practitioner's own life.

Bill Douglas is the Founder of World T'ai Chi & Qigong Day (www.worldtaichiday.org), author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong (Macmillan 1999), Ascent of Consciousness from the Modern Plague of Stress (due out in 2001), and presenter in T'ai Chi & Qigong: The Prescription for the Future video series. You many contact him at www.smartaichi.com.


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