Habits create....

Habits create….

“Actually, it goes the other way

Wouldn't it be great to be gifted? In fact...

It turns out that choices lead to habits.

Habits become talents.

Talents are labeled gifts.

You're not born this way, you get this way.”

Seth Godin’s Blog, 2/22/13

I often appreciate Seth Godin’s comments.

While this equation is somewhat simplistic, it does contain truth.  You become what you do. 

What talents do you want cultivate?  What ARE you doing?

Tom

Tai Chi Chuan and Struggle

Tai Chi Chuan and Struggle

There is an old Japanese proverb:  Fall down seven times, get up eight.

Struggle is inescapable.  There’s no way to escape struggle.  If you have, you are out of luck because struggle builds character.  It sounds so cliché to write that but we all know it’s true.  It’s a healthy thing to tackle ANYTHING that offers you a struggle.  Working through life’s difficulties is one way to grow as a person.  Taking on a challenge you care about is another way to grow.

The fact of learning specific moves, but then using relaxation, the body’s internal connections and “non-doing” to create those moves, creates a struggle.  The student is stuck between trying to do something specific and then letting go of most of the muscles in the body to execute that something specific.  We are asked to move but not to use our muscles.  Most of us do not possess this ability.  If moving your body with minimal effort does not come easy, more practice is needed.  As Prof. Cheng Man’Ching has stated, if you lack natural ability, you just have to work harder.

I know that I have avoided doing push-hands with many players over the years because of my own fear of not being able to compete or win.  That was a mistake.  On one level, I simply did not want to engage in my own personal struggle.  I didn’t want to look bad.  I wanted to have the skill without going through the tough exercise of losing again and again and again.  I just didn’t want to struggle.  That qualm was my internal struggle of sorts – to move past the vulnerability I felt while being confused and uncertain (like most of us when we start push-hands.)  Now I’m a born again advocate who believes in engaging struggle, not avoiding it!

Some of us like to avoid the struggle with tai chi by sitting on the side lines and watching the class, believing they are learning.  Others want books or videos.  But you never learn tai chi by watching or reading.  The doing IS the learning, even if that doing is not very good.  The stumbling IS the lesson.  It leads to success.  I try a move this way and it doesn’t work.  I try a move that way and it doesn’t work.  Ah!  Now I see!  This is how you do the move!

It is not a case of “doing equals success.”  It is a case of “doing creates real understanding which leads to success.”  You really know something when you understand that one way fails and yet another way works.  You cannot understand movement and relaxation by watching.  You have to get into the pool and flounder.  This approach is similar to what a baby experiences when learning to walk.  Except babies have no consciousness of failure.  They just flounder until they get it.

Not that this struggle is all hardship and woe.  The little victories feel good and motivate us.  But after each victory comes another struggle, a process that continues for some time.  Well, forever actually.  At some point there is enough accomplishment that the enjoyment factor increases.  But the struggle never leaves.  It seems to me that long term tai chi students like the sense of solving an intricate puzzle.  From that perspective, it’s lots of fun!  Because the puzzle is endless!  It is like a wonderful mystery novel with infinite volumes to consume, each one revealing a new aspect of the drama.

In life, hard-won victories are the most meaningful to us.  Tai chi offers the added element of experiential learning: When you understand something in tai chi, your whole body and mind understand it.  This has even greater meaning to most of us because it provides a completeness and a clarity that much of life lacks.  In this regard, tai chi is like the lowly apple.  You can only understand an apple once you have bitten into it.  After that, you will never NOT understand what an apple is.  An apple is not an intellectual exercise.  Watching an apple somehow never does the trick!

The other benefit in struggling with tai chi, aside from its well-documented benefits (greater health, less stress, more balance, fewer falls…), is that the short-term defeats are rather benign.  You don’t lose life and limb, love or work.  You just have to take more time to work with it until you gain more little victories.  In that regard, it is essentially risk free.

Most students quit before the snowball of experience has taken over and real benefit or meaning appears.  But if you can accept struggle as the very tool that gives you the riches you seek, you are way ahead of the game.

Lastly, if success creates arrogance, then struggling is for naught.  Challenge needs to teach you humility and generosity!  Many of us go through an arrogant phase in our tai chi practice.  We fool ourselves by thinking small victories equals profound knowledge.  “I know more than you.”  “I’m the top!”  This attitude is not the place to end.  The place to end is knowing that there is more to learn, that learning is more struggle, that we all have our challenges, defeats, successes, joys, frustrations, talents and limitations.

When we appreciate that we all have our challenges, defeats, etc., this adds to our capacity for compassion for self and others.  My struggle is your struggle; my joy is your joy.  No, not that my specific struggle is your struggle, but the fact that we both have to work with struggling, that struggle is a given for us both.  Likewise for joy, defeats, talents and so forth. We are all in this soup called life together.

One last thought.  An admired teacher I know advises push-hands students to “give up struggle.”  The way to learn, he says, is by completely NOT struggling.  He means that if you stop trying to NOT get pushed, and just let yourself get pushed, you will learn more quickly.  He’s right.  How do we give in to what is, and learn from that situation, even as we face defeat?  The struggle here is with our egos.  There is no defeat.  There is only process….

Fall down seven times, get up eight.

The Science of Meditation on Stress Reduction

Ah, the science of meditation.  In terms of this report, tai chi has tremendous potential in reducing pain or depression and increasing cognitive functioning.  Tom

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

Mindfulness starts with the body: somatosensory attention and top-down modulation of cortical alpha rhythms in mindfulness meditation

Catherine E. Kerr, Matthew D. Sacchet, Sara W. Lazar, Christopher I. Moore and Stephanie R. Jones

Using a common set of mindfulness exercises, mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness based cognitive therapy (MBCT) have been shown to reduce distress in chronic pain and decrease risk of depression relapse. These standardized mindfulness (ST-Mindfulness) practices predominantly require attending to breath and body sensations. Here, we offer a novel view of ST-Mindfulness's somatic focus as a form of training for optimizing attentional modulation of 7–14 Hz alpha rhythms that play a key role in filtering inputs to primary sensory neocortex and organizing the flow of sensory information in the brain. In support of the framework, we describe our previous finding that ST-Mindfulness enhanced attentional regulation of alpha in primary somatosensory cortex (SI). The framework allows us to make several predictions. In chronic pain, we predict somatic attention in ST-Mindfulness “de-biases” alpha in SI, freeing up pain-focused attentional resources. In depression relapse, we predict ST-Mindfulness's somatic attention competes with internally focused rumination, as internally focused cognitive processes (including working memory) rely on alpha filtering of sensory input. Our computational model predicts ST-Mindfulness enhances top-down modulation of alpha by facilitating precise alterations in timing and efficacy of SI thalamocortical inputs. We conclude by considering how the framework aligns with Buddhist teachings that mindfulness starts with “mindfulness of the body.” Translating this theory into neurophysiology, we hypothesize that with its somatic focus, mindfulness' top-down alpha rhythm modulation in SI enhances gain control which, in turn, sensitizes practitioners to better detect and regulate when the mind wanders from its somatic focus. This enhanced regulation of somatic mind-wandering may be an important early stage of mindfulness training that leads to enhanced cognitive regulation and metacognition.

Tai Chi Chuan and Leadership

Tai Chi Chuan and Leadership

I must admit I have a queasy feeling about “leadership.”  Leadership presumes a certain authority and most leaders project a sense of perfection.  We want them that way.  But I assume all humans – leaders included – are flawed.  So why should we believe leaders when they presume their authority?  Do we ever hear a leader come out and declare their deficiencies for the entire world to see?  In our hero worship culture, we either follow blindly, or try to find a way to tear them down.  Of course, it is we who put leaders in their place.

To my mind, it is OK to have flaws because how can we not?  As long as you know you are flawed – and I know I am flawed – life will go on in a much more forgiving and agreeable way.  Tai chi practitioners know this well because any serious tai chi player will feel deficiencies in their form.  There is always more to learn about you.  Always. 

And what is leadership in the first place?

You can look in my blog site for The Humble Hound by New York Times editorialist David Brooks, a very tai chi like approach to the subject.  Not everyone agrees with his position.

I’ve certainly experienced a great deal of “top-down” leadership.  This usually amounts to “What I say goes!”  Why?  Because they are “right”.   To be “right” is problematic.  The top-down perfect leader who is right rarely listens to oppositional forces.  But because we are all flawed, leaders who believe they are “right” are just as often NOT right.  How many disasters have befallen the perfect leader?  Mountains of disasters!  Often, “being right” is the beginning of the end.  The antidote to “being right” is “being engaged,” the beginning of real success.  Which leads me to tai chi.

The other night in tai chi class, one of us wanted to do the form together.  Because a form together with others is a different experience than just doing the form at home alone.  The group form is uniquely a “being with others in unison” kind of experience.  Engagement. Connection.  A group form can be leaderless, just like a small group of musicians.  We all follow each other.

However, there can also be a form with a leader.  When the direction of the form veers away from the leader, as the form will do, the leader then follows the group.  The leader follows the group who then follows the leader and so on.  Inherently, there is a lesson in leadership here.  Leaders lead by following then leading then following then leading and so on.  This kind of leading and following has nothing to do with any kind of perfection.  Everyone in the form is working on some deficiency while doing their best to follow or lead and be in unison with each other.

The tai chi form is a special relationship where the leader will anchor the pace of the group and model some good qualities, but once the pace has been set, the group chi is what creates the tai chi form.  Not the leader.  In tai chi, there a great deal of allowing.  Each participant allows every other participant to be themselves.  You give everyone a long leash.

Too often leadership today is a form of some kind of egotistical hubris.  Such hubris happens everywhere and is a real problem.  There has been an outcry for strong, even bold, leadership and a focus on “leadership” in the education system.  Yet there is no outcry for the kind of leadership authenticity that includes recognition of human frailty.

If you are a leader in push-hands practice, you work with each student individually.  In doing so, you address what that individual needs to learn and even HOW that student learns.  But you need to be honest with yourself and keep working with your own push hands skill.  Leaders can practice push hands by giving themselves a handicap and insisting on maintaining some skill they want to hone.  In the tai chi world, “investing in loss” is the term we use when practitioners would rather lose the game than win it by breaking the principles.  By “investing in loss”, leaders as well as students are more vulnerable.  Students work on what they need to work on and the leaders can work on what they need to work on. 

Other kinds of leaders exist.  One leadership style, in push hands, will persistently defeat the student.  The student has to be the kind of student that sees the benefit of working with a “hard” leader.  I believe it was Professor Cheng Man-Ch’ing (my teacher’s teacher) that stated if you push me a 100 times, and I discover one successful neutralization, I have learned an invaluable lesson.  Not everyone likes this level of exchange: Ninety-Nine losses to gain one insight.  “Hard” leaders have to be REALLY secure in their skills while really caring for their students.  At the same time, a student has to have great faith in the leader.  But even this kind of leader knows they have work to do.  Being Number 1 is not the same as lacking deficiencies.

In my view, real leaders would say:

“I see X in you, but you might want to try Y.” 

“You have many skills, but the one you need to work on most is Z.”

“What are you trying to do?”

“Where does your path lead you? What is the logical conclusion to your practice?”

“We’re in this together – I need to learn from you as well.”

“I used to believe N, but now I believe M.  What do you think?”

“How can we get this thing to work?”

“What are your thoughts?”

“What do you need to succeed?”

“I don’t know….”

This line of questioning is more than just “seeking to understand.” It engages the student/follower to find their own understanding before a leader intervenes.  A leader may have the answer to a problem, but the student/follower may have helpful insights and possibly a better solution.  Both learn in the process.

I just witnessed the downfall of a leader.  I doubt he ever expressed such statements as I have just noted.  He was “top down” and the base that he was leading did not like it.  The result?  War.  Politics.  Waste of time.  My side vs. your side.  Lies or misrepresentation.  Fear.  Frustration. More politics.  Bad publicity.  Firings.  Misunderstanding. Uncompromising “solutions.” Hirings based on favoritism.  One friend noted the problem was not in this leader’s intentions, but in his style.  Style?  I am beginning to think “Style” is exactly what leadership is.  Knowledge and expertise you can buy.  Style is something you have to “be”, and that being has to bring out the best in your group.  Since we all respond differently, a good leader perceives how to work with each individual.  There is no cookie cutter approach in the real world.

Tai chi principles can inform leadership styles: relax, integrate, focus, be inclusive, connect, get-with, listen, be grounded.  It’s that basic and it’s that deep.

If you decide to lead, it means you have to practice even more deeply.  Because others depend on you.  And ultimately, for your own growth, you depend on others.