“The key is to be in a state of permanent connectedness with your inner body—to feel it at all times. This will rapidly deepen and transform your life.” ~Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
“Relax your shoulders, keep your head high, stay grounded,” I cue myself as I walk through my morning Tai Chi. It’s still dark, but I know my moves, and my arms and legs move with confidence and ease.
Most of my life, I was a person with anxiety. I didn’t know I had anxiety, even though it was trying to speak to me as tension in my body, shallow breathing, chaotic thoughts, and extreme emotions. To me, it was just my normal, baseline state of living. Until one day, when anxiety finally got my attention. On that afternoon, I collapsed on the floor with severe lower back pain and had to spend time in bed, unable to move my legs.
The pain was excruciating and debilitating. The doctor said I had a herniated disc and suggested surgery. Surgery didn’t feel like the right thing to do, so I started researching other options.
Miraculously, I came across Thomas Hanna’s book Somatics or Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health. In black and white, the book explained the root of my problem. I had chronically contracted muscles in my lower back.
The book states that when, due to chronic stress, our muscles contract repeatedly over a long period of time, the tension can become so severe that the muscles can’t relax themselves anymore. The tension squeezes and presses the nerves, and we feel pain.
I began an exercise program described in the book, which helps relax the muscles in the body. The exercises are based on developing somatic awareness. I also continued practicing yoga and deep breathing and finally decided that I needed therapy to address the root of my stress, which was living with emotional abandonment and neglect as a child.
In therapy, I did family-of-origin work and forgiveness work. I also worked on my confidence and self-esteem by taking on challenging professional tasks, learning public speaking, and traveling the world for my job. Anxiety was still always there, but now I felt it and knew its signals and was able to respond with somatic awareness exercises and deep breathing.
In 2016, I walked into a Tai Chi class. Not knowing what I was doing and just moving to the cues of the kind instructor, I experienced something amazing. I felt like I walked into myself. The unusual movements connected my body and my brain, and I felt the freedom of movement, which I didn’t remember experiencing before. Right there and then, I knew I would do this strange and powerful dance of freedom forever.
It takes time to learn Tai Chi forms, and I began learning, little by little, watching Florinda, our instructor, in class like a hawk and practicing the movements I remembered at home. I also asked a few women from my group if they wanted to practice together outside of the class. We danced together the ancient Tai Chi moves under the ancient oaks near Lake Pontchartrain in southern Louisiana.
Over time, I began feeling freer and more connected to myself and the world, the way I did as a very young child in my early childhood memories. On an average day, I started feeling less anxious.
Tai Chi originated from Asian traditions of martial arts and is translated from Mandarin Chinese as Supreme Ultimate, Cosmic Mind, or the Universe. It’s over 2000 years old. Tai Chi movement is beautiful and unusual, asymmetric and rhythmic, centered and grounded. Practicing TC, we move left and right, forward and back, sometimes in a circle, rarely standing on both feet, mostly balancing on one foot or the other.
The best way I can describe TC is that within all that movement, somehow, we are able to relax and move and breathe in sync with the breath and rhythm of Life. Or, perhaps, when we relax, we become one with life, and life holds us, moves us, and rocks us like a baby to the rhythm of her breath.
Tai Chi is based on the principles of yin and yang, which represent the opposite yet inseparable qualities of life, such as darkness and light, joy and sorrow, material and spiritual. Practicing Tai Chi, we learn that the opposites of life are inherently connected and that we have to try and accept it in its wholeness. We may even relax our resistance to adverse situations in life.
Tai Chi is a powerful self-care tool, and the phenomenon called Sung, or internal tension release, is at the heart of it. Peter Wayne, in his book The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi, calls it “rocking the baby.” Because of the gentle, rhythmic, flowing movement and deep breathing, we literally rock our body like a baby, soothing and comforting every system—nervous, muscular, digestive, respiratory, endocrine, etc.
The internal dialogue turns off, the thoughts slow down, and emotions subside. Suddenly, we are in a calm inner space, relaxed, alert, confident, and true, moving like a “stealthy cat,” as a TC practitioner in one of my groups said.
Another amazing thing about Tai Chi is that a group of practitioners move together, synchronically. Each person’s movements are uniquely individual, yet invisibly connected. There is a sense of belonging and support, and for the duration of the form, the group becomes interconnected in a calm, shared space, like a cohort of cranes, flying together in a beautiful configuration.
What about my anxiety? It is still with me often, but now I think of it as a friend who came to remind me to take a break, breathe, do Tai Chi, and relax.
About Lana Bird
Lana Bird is a certified Tai Chi and Yoga instructor, w/ATCQA and Yoga Alliance, ERYT-500. She created a YouTube channel to help everyone who wants to learn and practice Tai Chi, at YouTube.com/@smallstepstaichi
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