Our mission is to give you tools and strategies that will help you move from being stressed to feeling your best.
In this episode we start discussing healing modalities and practices that have been helpful to us in our stress mastery journey. This episode, we talk about the origins and benefits of Taichi Easy, Deb is a Certified Taichi Easy Practice Leader.
Co -hosts Deb Timmerman and Barb Fletcher, are certified HeartMath® Trainers, and certified stress educators, who are skilled at helping people discover the power of living form the heart. To take the Stress and Wellbeing Assessment in Canada, click here. To take the Stress and Wellbeing Assessment in the US, click here.
Our mission is to give you tools and strategies that will help you move from being stressed to feeling your best.
In this episode we start discussing healing modalities and practices that have been helpful to us in our stress mastery journey. This episode, we talk about the origins and benefits of Taichi Easy, Deb is a Certified Taichi Easy Practice Leader.
Co -hosts Deb Timmerman and Barb Fletcher, are certified HeartMath® Trainers, and certified stress educators, who are skilled at helping people discover the power of living form the heart. To take the Stress and Wellbeing Assessment in Canada, click here. To take the Stress and Wellbeing Assessment in the US, click here.
SPEAKERS
Deb Timmerman 00:00
You're listening to the Less Stress in Life podcast. Your hosts, Deb Timmerman and Barb Fletcher are on a mission to help individuals and organizations manage stress and change. Together, they bring you real conversations, inspirational stories, and strategies to help move you from being stressed to feeling your best. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our series on 52 practical tools for less stress in life. This is already episode 22.
Barb Fletcher 00:33
And I'm Barb Fletcher. Our goal is to give you tools and strategies to help you move from being stressed to feeling your best. For the next few weeks, we're doing something a little different, we're going to focus on the mind body healing modalities. We've shared our love of HeartMath, but there are other modalities, too, that we both use and teach, that are helpful in calming and healing the body. Today, we're going to be talking about Tai Chi Easy, and Deb, I know that that is absolutely one of your favorites. I'm going to be truthful, I have never done Tai Chi. So tell me about it.
Deb Timmerman 01:18
I'm sitting here thinking about how to describe it. It is such an enjoyable practice of connecting to that inner healing space that Chinese medicine believes we all have, and it's just such a beautiful practice, wonderful music usually accompanies. So, I'll tell you a little bit about more about it. It's really the Chinese system of self care. So, they believe that everyone has access to this healing space within, and when we can get quiet, we can connect to that inner healing space. And it's all about balancing mind-body-spirit, or sometimes we call it yin and yang. So, those opposite things in our body, and you may have heard of those before hot, cold, Sun - Dark, it's all about balance, and really about moving energy or chi within our body.
Barb Fletcher 02:19
The origins of Tai Chi are 1000s of years old. How did this practice become so popular?
Deb Timmerman 02:27
So this particular practice was made popular by Dr. Roger Jahnke, he's a doctor of Chinese medicine. He's actually an American, and what he noticed was that there are some wonderful healing elements in the Tai Chi practice. But when you're looking at that, if you were Chinese and you were doing tai chi, you learned these movements or forms that we call them, and you'd learn 108 of them to start your practice. So, he had the foresight to think about how to bring some of those elements forward; There are five basic forms or movements in Tai Chi easy, and do it in a way that made it easy to learn, easy to teach, easy to do. And so he's been working on that for several years, it's becoming more and more popular, because it's such a researched healing element.
Barb Fletcher 03:24
We all know that sometimes there are things that the more athletic can participate in. Do you have to have a certain body type, or a certain skill or physical fitness to do Tai Chi?
Deb Timmerman 03:42
No, none of the above. What I love about this practice is it is available to anyone, regardless of how well you can move or how athletic you are. So, you can do Tai Chi seated in a chair. You can do Tai Chi standing. You can do it moving, or you can even do those movements and the visualizations and the breath work in bed. So, it makes it great for every age group. My favorite group that I taught, had a lot of ninety-year old’s I taught at an independent living center. And they loved it because they could do it to their own ability. So even if you could only raise your arm to your ear level instead of above your head, you still got the benefits of doing that. And over time, what was cool is they gained mobility and we're able to move that up farther and farther because it's so gentle on the body.
Barb Fletcher 04:40
You talked about movement as being one of the benefits and, you know extended range that they might not have had before other benefits of having a Tai Chi practice.
Deb Timmerman 04:51
Yes, up to like 2013 they had done a meta-analysis of how many research projects there were on TaiChi Easy and there were For over 500 already. So, you can imagine from that time forward another, what, eight years, how many there are. And what they found is that not only does it help with mobility, but stability. it helps lower blood pressure. And really, when we share what we do with HeartMath, we're talking about how to tap into that parasympathetic part of the body or that space where our nervous system is really at that neutral point, and Tai Chi easy is just another way to do that. So it includes all those stress relief benefits, even increased thinking ability and problem solving ability. So when you can turn those endorphins and those beneficial hormones on in your body, we get healing, no matter what the modality is.
Barb Fletcher 05:52
Typical practice, how long does it last?
Deb Timmerman 05:54
Typically, when I do Tai Chi, easy practice, it is an hour, and it has four elements in it. So, there's breathwork; connecting to your breath and moving that breath within your body, and growing that breath to grow that energy. Self-massage: So, it uses acupressure points to help move lymph. And of course when we move, we can move that lymph with massage, and with breath. It helps to increase blood flow. And then there's always a movement. So, we call those forms, so gentle movements, and forms. So, depending on how many times we've met together, we might work on one or two elements, or we might do all of the elements. And then there's a component of meditation. So, putting all of those things together and getting into a very quiet state, using that breath and using those movements to increase that energetic flow.
Barb Fletcher 06:52
I'm always interested to how long it takes to see some benefits. Do people feel differently right after they've done a Tai Chi session?
Deb Timmerman 07:02
I would see that people feel differently right after because usually when they come to a practice, they want to be there because their day has been crazy, or they're seeking out a way to connect and downshift. So yes, but over time. I think when I started doing it, I saw lots of mobility increases, like at about the three- or four-week mark, and then those just went up. It is what helps keep me mobile. I mean, I'm a big girl, there's a lot to move around here, I can't do typical things that a lot of people would do like running and jumping, I my knees just won't take it. But I can do this.
Barb Fletcher 07:43
You and I have talked about balance and being such an important one. And having spent our time in aging, we know that mobility and being able to stay active is certainly one of the big keys for us. So, I think anything that we can do to strengthen our balance, it's just a really positive thing to consider, no matter what age, I just know that at my age when I fall down, it doesn't feel quite the same. When I hop back up. I, you know,
Deb Timmerman 08:17
I think even too like flexibility, even in some of the young people, they're not very flexible. Because our jobs are more sedentary today, we don't move around. Even people who have running practices might use the same set of muscles all the time. Whereas this is a lot of rotation, very slow, so it's very gentle on the joints, very gentle movements. And just, which is why everybody can do it.
Barb Fletcher 08:44
So, in the episode seven we talked about, from a Heart Math perspective, we talked about the four domains of resilience. And it feels like this practice touches all of the domains.
Deb Timmerman 08:57
Yeah, I would agree. I think the movement part of it helps with our physical resilience, when we can tap into that centering and calming emotions, which helps us with emotional resilience, psychological for sure, because it does improve our mental stability and ability to concentrate. And I love that it also supports the spiritual domain. With that mind body connection. A lot of times we don't think about spirit, being connecting to ourselves, we think about that in a religious context. And we've talked about that before as well. But this is like that connection to you, your soul, who we are to be. And I love that this practice really focuses on that connection to self and connecting with that inner being in that healing space.
Barb Fletcher 09:54
I'm listening to an audio book by Martha Beck, and she talks it sensibly about that. Spirit and, and inner knowing that we often overlook when we get busy, so anything that can slow us down so we can hear more clearly is a good thing. Where would someone find practice groups?
Deb Timmerman 10:18
the healer within foundation is where I trained. So you can go to healerwithinfoundation.org. And they'll list a lot of the practice groups that are around, and they are all over the world, not just in United States, but Canada and around. And you could also Google that like on Facebook, there are a lot of people doing virtual Tai Chi sessions, right now, the differences that you want to look for Tai Chi easy, versus Tai Chi, because it will give you those elements of the four baskets, which is a little different than having to learn a whole practice, you could just tune in for an hour and get a lot of benefit.
Barb Fletcher 10:57
Our call to action. As our listeners are contemplating how resilient you are, perhaps having a measure or screening to give you feedback would be valuable. So, Deb and I both offer a stress and wellbeing assessment tool for insight on where you are on the stress and resilience continuum. And we are going to include links if you're in the US, and we'll have a link. And if you're in Canada, I'll have a link and in these will be included in the show notes. And we would encourage you to just spend 10 minutes and find out where you're beginning to Debbie, do you want to talk about the workshop that's coming up?
Deb Timmerman 11:46
Sure. I am going to host a Tai Chi Easy workshop at the Savvy Women's Retreat Center, which is on the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan, and August on afternoon. So, if you happen to be in the area or want to make an create time out of your schedule to get an idea of what that practice will look like. You can find that on the less stress in life Facebook page under Events. And I'll also put the link in the show notes. I wish I lived closer. You could join us virtually maybe?
Barb Fletcher 12:19
maybe
Deb Timmerman 12:26
less stress in life is possible. If you're new to this kind of thinking and would like to explore what's possible for you. We'd love to connect. You can reach us through our website at less stress in life.com. That's less stress in life.com