How To Look Inside Your Body

Tai Chi is known as an internal art because it is focused on what is going on inside the body.

This begins with learning to sense the structure and function of the body’s inner workings and grows into the ability to manipulate and even master them.

The first internal skills to learn are…

  • Relaxation
  • Structure
  • Internal Sensitivity (Learning to feel inside the body.)

Tai Chi focuses on these skills first because they make other kinds of internal work possible.

You can learn to expand or contract any part of the body, to tense, or more important, to relax any individual part of your body, or to make any part be more solid or more empty.

You can also learn to do these things with your body as a whole or with any individual part.

At first, you work with your own body, but eventually you can learn to sense and affect the internal workings of other people’s bodies as well. This internal skill has many uses both for healing and for combat purposes.

Internal sensitivity is a prerequisite for most intermediate and advanced Tai Chi skills.

You must be able to feel something before you can effect it.

  • If you want to pick up a quarter you must be able to feel your fingers.
  • If you wish to relax you must first be able to feel your tension.
  • If you want to effect someones breathing you have to be able to feel their breath.
  • If you want to send someone flying across the room with no effort you must first be able to feel the imperfections in their structure, their tension, their root, their intention, etc…

Begin developing your internal sensitivity and skill.

1. Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed or distracted and stand in Wu Chi. Relax as much as possible.

2. Take your mind’s eye and turn it as if looking downward into your body. Focus on what is going on inside you as much as possible.

You should close your eyes or do sleepy eye. For this exercise, you will want to feel and/or see with your mind’s eye what is happening inside your body as much as you can.

3. Take a deep breath. Inhale deeply and then exhale deeply.

4. As you inhale on your next breath, feel that breath go downward all through your body, through you legs all the way to the bottoms of your feet. As you inhale, feel, see, and experience the inside of your body as much of what is going on in your body as you possibly can.

5. Once you can feel your breath go all the way through you, try to experience more of what is going on in your body. Experiment with mind intent, breath, and various states of tension versus relaxation.

6. Take note of the sensations going on inside your body. Especially notice places of tension inside yourself. Try to find points of tension in your body and relax them.

When you have a training partner work with Clear Internal Push Hands as much as possible and learn to feel these sensations in others.

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