Good Health Through Tai Chi and Qigong

Tai Chi and Qigong are amazing methods of achieving health, fitness and happiness. In the 500's B.C.E. the ancient sages of east and west agreed that the components of a healthy body are:

Strong flexible, pliable legs
Open mobile hips and pelvis
Flexible spine
Loose relaxed neck and shoulders
A vibrating skull

The components of good health are mostly ignored until through atrophy, misuse or injury they cause us pain. The White Willow system of Tai Chi and Qigong strengthens the components and reeducates people in proper, efficient, use of their body reducing the potential of injury or failure.

After four millenniums, we now have the science to support the observations of the ancient physicians and the clarity on how methods like Tai Chi and Qigong work to achieve a healthy body.

Strong, Flexible, Pliable, Legs

Good health begins from the bottom up, the legs. The legs not only propel us through the world they also act as a shock absorber for our spine and central nervous system. But the biggest role of the legs is literally as a second heart.

When blood leaves the arteries and enters the capillary beds the erythrocytes move into the interstitial spaces where they provide oxygen to the cells. Then they must make their way back into the veins where they travel to the heart. There is no pressure in the veins. The blood flow back to the heart is accomplished by the massaging actions of the muscles. The leg muscles power the veins and lymph circulation of the entire body.

If you look at the muscles of the legs you see they are designed like the heart, they provide a torsional action around the bone like the twisting of a dishtowel. The torsional force drives blood up the veins, overcoming gravity, to the heart.

To best accomplish the task assigned to them, the legs must be strong, flexible and pliable. Strength is not determined by how much weight we can push or how far we can run. Strength is determined by how well and how much of a muscle group works together to achieve a task. We have been conditioned to interpret a hard muscle as well “toned”. But any muscle, which is tense or hard when it is at rest, means the muscle is shortened and engaged. It is in a state of spasm. The constantly shorten muscle will misalign the joint above and below the muscle resulting in inflammation and possible degeneration of those joints. The engaged muscle reduces strength, efficiency and flexibility.

Massaging blood and lymph fluid out of the interstitial spaces of the cells removes metabolic waste and prevents inflammation. The muscles have to be soft and pliable so that they can squeeze the spaces and fluids like a sponge. Engaged muscles, which are hard, “splint” the region, preventing the massaging action like a dried out sponge. The more elastic the legs, the better the circulation of blood and lymph the less likely there will be any peripheral artery disease (PAD) or deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Elasticity extends to the arteries of the legs. Arteries that are stretched and elongated develop elasticity. The plagues of atherosclerosis only accumulate in arteries, which do not move. Running and elliptical trainers cause contraction, hardness, and shortening of the leg muscles. They do not develop elasticity through the repetitive actions of aerobic exercise.

Elasticity and pliability of the leg muscles is also instrumental in preventing falls. The process of loosening the individual fibers of muscles also trains the muscles to work “independently together”. Like an orchestra of many instruments playing different harmonies to produce a beautiful song. Each has an independent role but work together in the task. The looser and more independent the leg muscles, the more micro adjustments they can make to realign the foot and bones to properly redistribute weight upon the foot. They “wobble” but they don’t fall down.

In our Tai Chi training we work extensively with training cognitive awareness of weight distribution and transfer literally reprogramming the walking cycle.

The bones of the legs are like very high impact plastic in the dense sections with an inner matrix and cushioning. Their design makes them excellent at absorbing and dissipating the stresses of impact. Once again muscle shortening creates a problem. Shortened muscles place the bones in torsion misaligning them enough to diminish their elasticity. This allows the forces of walking and running a direct, straight line into the misaligned knees, hips and the sacro-iliac joint.

Open Mobile Hips and Pelvis

The interrelationship between the hips and the legs is critical to the function of the central nervous system. When we look at an illustration of the muscles of the hip it is obvious that all of the muscles of the hip connect to the sacrum and the lumbar spine. The pressures exerted by the shortening of these muscles influence the alignment, mobility, and pressures within the spine and the brain itself. Simple misalignment affects the lumbar nerves controlling the functions of locomotion, digestion, elimination, and reproduction.

The muscles of the hips most commonly shorten from too much sitting in a forward leaning position. When they shorten they prevent the full extension and inwardly rotate the femur bone. This will cause back problems, sciatica, hip inflammation and degeneration and knee pain. The most common symptom of femur rotation is weakness and failure of the hip muscles.
The most profound problem associated with shortened hip muscles is the splinting of the lumbar spine.

Flexible Spine

We have already shown that a misaligned spine affects the functions of organs and muscles. The role of the spine in good health is legendary. The vertebral column of the body is the core pillar of the physical structure and the conduit in which the brain extends itself into the center of the body.

In its structural role, the spine is a flexible column, which is the core of the tension structure of the skeletal system. Everything above the pelvis is connected to the spine. Ancient physicians and anatomist viewed the spine much like a structural column in a Greek temple. The pelvis was considered the base and the legs the foundation of the body. The spine was a column that bore the compressive weight of the arched structures attached to it. The spine has always been praised for its compressive strength. We define the spine as a load-bearing column because that is the pathological state, which we most often see. But that is not how the spine was designed.

Today we would refer to the spine as a flexible, mobile, cantilevered, segmented box girder, arched, suspension beam. The entire structure is comprised of box girder segments (vertebrae) in a structural arch configuration, connected together by fibrous cables (spinal discs, ligaments) and moved by upon the cabling functions spinal muscles. All the organs of the body, the structures of the upper body and all the muscles of the upper body are directly or indirectly “hung” upon this magnificent beam. As long as the beam stays in tension, “tensegrity”, all is fine with the world. Changes in mass due to muscle building or weight gain will alter the balance of tension and place the spine into compression. When in compression the discs are no longer free of loads and are forced to bear the body’s weight making them subject to shearing forces, which easily result in herniation of the disc.

The spinal cord is a part of the lower brain, which controls and regulates activity of human functions deep within the body cavities. It originates within the skull and follows the center of the spinal column to the first lumbar vertebra. Nerves exit the spinal column and move into plexuses where they divide and innervate organs and muscles. There are two pairs of nerves that exit each vertebral space. Each side has a sympathetic nerve and a parasympathetic nerve. Muscular forces upon these joints tend to compress the parasympathetic roots, which are the calming source to whatever is on the line. The most vulnerable position is the 11^th and 12^th thoracic spaces and the 1^st lumbar. These vertebras are subject to tremendous shearing forces of shortened psoas, trapezium, and latissimus dorsi.

The nerves from these roots are responsible for the digestive and elimination systems of the body. Undo pressure on these nerves can cause chronic functional abdominal pain (CFAP) and contribute to irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

The healthy flexible spine is assessed in the following test:

Lay supine upon your back with your knees bent and feet flat upon the floor. There should be a space between the curve of your lumbar spine and the floor. Gently, without engaging your abdominal muscles) rock your pelvis so that the lumbar curve flattens on the floor. If the spine does not touch the floor with gentle effort then the muscles of your back and hips are too short to insure good health. The good news is that it only takes months (not years) of training to correct this problem.

The flexion of the lumbar curve, besides being an indicator of muscle shortening upon the spine, plays two important roles in health:

The first role is it assists in the circulation of cerebral spinal fluid from the lumbar reservoir into the brain. This action aids in the dissemination and release of hormones, cleaning of the brain, and stimulation of the production for dopamine in endorphins in the brain.

The second role is spine flexion assists in respirations by pulling down upon the diaphragm while at the same time lengthening the trunk to allow for the organs of the abdominal cavity to move downward. This action allows more room for the lungs to expand. Both of these functions are exercised extensively in the Movements of Peace Qigong.

Loose Relaxed Neck and Shoulders

Everything we have discussed so far pertaining to the spine also applies to the function of the neck and shoulders. The primary difference is that the nerves and vessels passing through the spaces of the neck are more critical to survival than the lower nerves. Shortened muscles in the neck can cause:

Headaches
Sinus problems
Tinnitus
Elevated blood pressure
Numbness in the hands and arms
Pain in hands and arms
Loss of blood circulation to the hands and arms
Sleep apnea
Shortness of breath
Swallowing disorders
Impairment to the functions of the legs
Impairment to the functions of the organs
Disc herniation

A Vibrating Skull

A vibrating skull is a rather radical concept when first presented, but when you sit with it, it makes sense. For the brain to function it has to reside within a very stabile and protected environment within the skull. Because of the need for stability, the brain has very little ability to clean itself, release hormones and protect itself from virus and bacteria. Now consider an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner in which high frequency sound runs through a fluid medium creating micro bubbles which wash debris from a surface. The vibrating skull is a low frequency acoustic cleaner and circulator of CSF. The pressure waves massage the structures, move the wastes of metabolism, stimulate the flow of non-differentiated stem cells for brain repair, and increases hormonal motility.

Muscles from the neck prevent the skull from vibrating allowing the inner workings of the brain to be polluted with waste. The waste interferes with the transmission and reabsorbtion of neurotransmitters across the synaptic gaps. The results are impairment of cognitive functioning, depression, anxiety and aging. A combination of the proper exercise and sound training eliminates the problem.

Applying White Willow Qigong and Tai Chi

The goal of good health is to strengthen and rebalance the components of health through movement, breathing and structured sound.

We begin with our Level One program. First we train body awareness, relaxation, meditation, and the activation of organic neural functions that mitigate, pain, and induce relaxation and healing.

As the student becomes aware of their body, we start to release shortened muscles and re-educate them through qigong movement patterns. The new patterns improve biomechanical functionality in the whole body. Working from the bottom up, the whole body is trained through Seven Principle Exercises. The next step is the addition of the Movements of Peace qigong exercises. The Movements of Peace work on the spine, pelvis, shoulders and central nervous system. From there we teach how to use sound to vibrate the skull and the whole body. In eight weeks the student has a body that works much better than the one the walked in with. They continue these exercises and move into the form work of Level Two.

Level Two teaches the student how to perform little drills to release and reprogram larger movement patterns, including walking itself. The drills soon combine to create the Heaven Form set. It takes about twenty-five lessons to learn the form, which acts as a continuous sequence of qigong movements.

Students move on to other levels of training that go into deeper and deeper patterns of release, reeducation and strengthening of components of health.