How to Teach Beginners

August 11, 2018

Principles of Teaching Tai Chi to Beginning Students
By Master Vincent J. Lasorso, Jr.

   When I wrote for Tai Chi magazine during the 1980’s the world of Tai Chi Chuan and Qigong were entirely different than today. Information was scarce and education was passed by direct transmission from teachers who dedicated their lives to the art. Although there was a movement of spiritual sensationalist who did feel good versions of Tai Chi Chuan, the majority of Tai Chi and Qigong people were pursuing the arts religiously to transform themselves as warriors and mystics.

   The information age has allowed a wealth of Tai Chi knowledge that was hidden and suppressed to come forward. The negative side is that much misinformation has been disseminated lowering the quality of education to a point where all the currently lauded benefits of Tai Chi Chuan will fade away. Its unexplainable healing will disappear and its physical benefits will be on par with “Silver Sneaker” programs.

   We live in a world of Tai Chi now where a person can be certified to teach by participating in a single weekend workshop, and with a couple more workshops, become a “Master Teacher”. They promote the lowest denominator of Tai Chi Chuan like network marketed health products, building an evangelical downline, that reaps profit for the “Grandmaster’s” at the top of the pyramid with minimal benefits for the buyers of the product.

   In the mid 1990’s I spoke out against this “evolutionary” trend occurring in the qigong community in an article in Qigong Journal. My point then was that we as a community of teachers were running a risk of losing our authority of expertise and quality of our art, by abandoning our traditional qigong to teach more consumer friendly watered down medical qigong. The goal of the medical qigong community was to train medical doctors, whose only knowledge of qigong was from the workshops that they had taken, and enlist their endorsement of qigong practices as legitimate healing therapies. Workshops, certification programs and licensing protocols were created by ambitious qigong practitioners who willingly deluded themselves into believing they were advancing their art by diminishing its quality and placing it into the hands of medical institutions. They thought all the scientists would see the truth in Qigong and it would become a mainstream therapy. It didn’t happen. And now we are seeing the same trend in Tai Chi Chuan.

   I secluded myself from the politics and limitations of the worldwide Tai Chi Chuan community in 1991 to run my own little school. Core to the school was an educational system that reclaimed the original quality of form, healing, and metaphysics, that are organic to Tai Chi Chuan. After 27 years of tweaking the program, I feel its good to share some of the major points of our beginning teaching with instructors and prospective students, that have worked for us at the White Willow School of Tai Chi.

1. Segregate Levels of Tai Chi Chuan Instruction:

   Every student is stressed attending their first day of classes in an entirely new and unfamiliar environment. The stress is amplified by the fact they are here to learn and study a program they know nothing about. A large amount of that stress is eliminated when they find that their classmates are also beginners. Everyone is studying the same beginning curriculum at the same time. This commonality creates an instant camaraderie among the classmates, it encourages sharing of problems and successes, encourages more questions, and eliminates the performance anxiety of not having to measure up to the other more experienced students. The biggest benefit, is it allows the teacher to take the time it takes to explain the material, improving the quality of the instruction and ensuring student safety.

2. Begin the Tai Chi Chuan Program with Qigong Training:

   Tai Chi Chuan has been represented in the west, and by Communist China, as a dance like practice of gentile exercise and moving meditation that produces healing results. Therefore, the beginning student expects that they will be learning to swing their arms and legs around in a choreographed dance that will bring them improved health and fitness. Unfortunately, what they don’t expect is how difficult and tiring it is to learn that dance.

   In the world of controlled studies, there is no doubt that subjects who commit and complete the studies have improved health benefits. But in the real world, half of the students drop out of form based classes due to discomfort, difficulty, and a lifestyle that doesn’t accommodate the daily practice required to do forms, usually within the first two months. (Thus the logic of six to eight weeks introductory sessions rather than twelve to twenty.)

   The best program then is one that minimizes discomfort, risk, and the confusion, both in learning and practicing, the choreography of Tai Chi Chuan. This is easily achieved through the stationary and accessible exercises of qigong. Qigong focuses directly upon the principles of the movement technology itself and almost immediately produces positive results. Truthfully, the only reason why Tai Chi Chuan forms have any healing benefits at all is because they are practiced with the principles and theories of Qigong! Therefore, it is best to start at the root of the entire philosophy.

3. Learning Should Be Wonderful:

   We have all seen science teachers who create entertaining and wondrous experiments that explain difficult theories in very simple terms. When you have a class full of beginners you can create a presentation that is interesting, entertaining and filled with advanced material that is easily assimilated. Qigong is an infinitely magical, mystical and complicated science that defies our conventional paradigms. When the mind and the body are integrated wondrous things happen. I focus my teaching on the wonderful.

   There is nothing more fulfilling for a student than to be shown a mind/body technique that does the impossible, that makes their body move or act in a way that they couldn’t conceive, and then be capable of successfully doing it for themselves within a few minutes.

   The body is a box filled with amazing tools that modern humans have ignored or misinterpreted, that can make anyone’s life easier in minutes. The teacher becomes a guide using the mind/body and physical training of qigong to take the student through a journey of their own body and unlock new secrets hiding in plain sight. The students look forward to their classes anticipating what new and amazing thing am I going to learn about myself today.

4. Present a Scientific Model of Healing and Principles:

   The best thing about Qigong is that there are hundreds of thousands of studies and testimonials that prove its effectiveness to heal and condition the body. The problem with Qigong is that its practitioners are more like religious zealots than scientists. And those who proclaim to be scientist’s have not mastered the material enough to know the difference between the metaphors and literal teachings of qigong esoterica. The result is that qigong is either presented as a pseudoscience that is no more than Humanist Faith Healing, or the metaphysics are abandoned altogether and qigong is presented as an “empty” calisthenics program. Most teachers split the difference. The great news is that qigong works in anyway that it is presented!

   Qigong Grandmasters have been telling their disciples for centuries how to heal with the “energies and sounds” of the breath and movement but no one listens. Literally.

   Since 1985, collaborative scientific research between western universities and the People’s Republic of China, has proven that the old Qigong masters’ (before my generation) healed people through the projection of infrasonic waves from their hands, generated by their breath, and templated into communication, through their own body. But we did not begin to know how this worked until 1995 when Harvard scientists defined that the primary communication of cells was through a process of acoustical motion, called Cellular Mechanical Transductive Communication. By 2004 scientist were recording the distinct voices and communications of cells with atomic microphones. The old masters were healing through “directive communication” and not undefined “universal energies.” But the masters knew this fact.

   Qigong healing results from using body movements and tracheal mechanics to produce directive infrasonic cellular communication to cells, which also accomplishes the goal of enhancing and repairing connective tissues and their cellular communication pathways. I describe this process in detail in U.S. Patent US9457166, sec. 20, Oct.4, 2016.

   The most important things a student needs to understand, in the first class, is that the Qigong is not a belief system but a logical, predictable and reproducible science. They need to have confidence that their efforts and work will quickly produce positive results.

5. Teach Fool-proof Relaxation Techniques:

   Mastery of relaxation should be the primary goal of any Tai Chi Chuan or Qigong program.

   Harvard physician, researcher, and founder of mind/body medicine, Edmond Jacobson, published in 1919, that stress caused all disease. He went on to prove that mindful relaxation alone cures most stress created diseases. Dr. Jacobson created a process called Progressive Muscular Relaxation (PMR) which is learning to consciously control the relaxation of the muscles and inner tissues of the body. His systems gathered widespread use and acclaim in the 1970’s and is still in use today. PMR research was a great support for Dr. Herbert Benson who quantified the “Relaxation Response,” and is the director emeritus of the Harvard mind/body center. Dr. Benson’s most recent studies have shown that merely listening to a recorded guided meditation, that includes progressive relaxation, for only twenty minutes per day, reversed the negative expressions of the subjects genes in just a few months. The ramifications of that study can potentially affect any genetic disease.

   Every student must experientially learn how to use progressive relaxation in seated work and within their exercises. Guided meditation with PMR should be the starting point of the initial class to provide the student the experience, and the skills to enter into deep physical relaxation. Students in a relaxed state learn the exercises easier, but even more importantly, they subconsciously anchor the relaxation to the exercise. Thus, when one starts to do the movements their body subconsciously begins the relaxation process. A guided meditation recording should be a part of the class take home material for daily practice.

6. Anchor Whole Body Breathing to Relaxation:

   Whole body breathing is a specific technique of mindful breathing, visualization, and movement which is combined with progressive relaxation skills. The routine practice of this simple technique through the day conditions the body to relax whenever the person does mindful breathing. During stressful circumstances, sometimes the only variable we have any control over is our breath. If all a person can do during a crisis is to breathe, the relaxation response will begin by the action alone. The Relaxation Response lowers heart rate, respirations, blood pressure, while gating off pain receptors and inducing the brain into a dominate Theta state to calm and focus the thoughts. The Whole Body Breathing burns off the chemicals released from the “fight or flight” response to stressful circumstances.

   Everyone is changed by this simple process.

7. Teach Movements Completely:

   Imitation is not flattery in Tai Chi Chuan. Students improperly imitating movements is the number one cause of qigong and tai chi injuries in both class and video instruction. Students should also be asked to stop trying to move along with a demonstration. Imitation during a demonstration diminishes attention, creates bad habits and uses incorrect neurons and muscles to create the action. Students should only do a movement after receiving a thorough explanation, demonstration and instructions on how to properly preform the exercise.

   All movement training must begin from the ground up through sub set drills designed to teach all the skills required for proper performance. No beginner can properly perform a movement without being taught in sub-set stages. If a person can not do a drill then they are unlikely to be capable of executing the exercise as presented. This allows the teacher to identify movements and neurological and learning problems in each student and correct them with additional drills while modifying the exercise itself to make it safe for the students abilities. All performance standards should be flexible enough to accommodate people with various skills. However, too many accommodations can make the movements ineffective.

8. Provide Reference Materials for Homework:

   Movement training uses a lot of brainpower so it is very easy to oversaturate a student with movements. Even if a student does well in a class they will only remember half of the material when they get home. Thus, its very important to provide the student with video and written material to assist their memory. For decades students have told me: “ I didn’t practice because I didn’t want to practice it wrong!” Since providing take home video on thumb drives, my students practice during the week and return to class with a good understanding of the material.

   A program that includes these principles has excited and motivated students. They have both an education and an experience, a commonality of language, that they share with everyone in the school throughout all levels of training.