Interfaith retreat will be led by Hillary and her husband, Ving Tsun Sifu, Matthew Johnson. Come enjoy a day of peace: Alternating periods of dynamic meditation featuring qigong and walking meditation with standing and sitting meditation along with short talks by both retreat leaders on practical applications of all forms of meditation. Vegetarian Pot-Luck Lunch. Please bring something to share.
Free. Donations gratefully accepted. Suggested donation $25
Please no perfumes or cologne. Silence all cell phones etc.
Please register using the form below.
Check out our full calendar of classes by clicking on the photo!
Since tomorrow is the new Buddhist Meditation Center opening in Little Village in Chicago it feels like a good time to bring this post back.
Why?
Because as the potential for new teaching, new students arises it’s a time to reassess how the teaching occurs. To ask, what is most important to say, to share.
If a new person asks, so what’s tai chi and why should I do it? What does a good teacher say?
I feel like Popeye. I want to say, “Eat your spinach! It’s good for you.”
So, with tai chi, we can say, tai chi has this and that benefit to you but in the end, in order to really understand, a person has to do it themselves.
Tai chi can help you reduce stress and be healthier in the body and the mind. How do these things happen? You have to do it and see for yourself.
Tai chi (or taiji) is not something you can learn by thinking about it or by doing some complex analysis. Beginners and more experienced practitioners learn the same way … through direct experience. It’s through this direct experience, this intense, sharp focus, maintained throughout the form, with the total object of the mind, the body/breath/mind, brought totally together as one that does the teaching. A teacher can guide you but even that on … Read More
Just wanted to let you all know, that Calm Chicago is on You Tube. You’ll find our short videos about the 18-form qigong to help support your practice.
Each video deals with just one posture right now. And while getting to a class or involved with some kind of one-on-one instruction is ideal, in the meantime, I hope these can help answer questions you may have.
Let me know what questions you might have.
And if you’re interested in studying but can’t make it into the center, let me know because we’re be happy to come to your home, office or community space. We’re right here in Chinatown, so the South Loop is particularly close by.
Please say hello to the center’s two fish, Yin & Yang.
Meet Yin and Yang, the center's two calm fish. They remind us daily that everything changes.
They have a pretty pleasant environment with lots of plants around. We’d love to have more plants, so we can really freshen the air in the center as much as possible without chemicals. Many thanks to Vincent for all the plants you see here. They were a gift in our prior location and in the move had to be re-potted and trimmed up some. Moving plants in -4 degrees weather is not ideal for the delicate house plants but they seem to be bouncing back.
We love a lot of plants at Calm Chicago. Makes the air clean and healthy.
So, if you have some plants you’d like to donate, they’ll be gratefully received. We get a pretty good amount of indirect light from the south.
We’ll be adding a jade plant soon. Lovely for the center because the soft, round green leaves are beautiful and grow only very slowly. This is how we develop our own practices in tai chi (or taiji), qigong and meditation…slowly, breath by breath.
Thanks so much to our teachers, family, friends and students for all your support. I am ever grateful. Together we make the city more peaceful and less stressed. I bow to you all for your efforts and dedication.
The center will be offering lots of wonderful new seminars this year. We hope you’ll join us as much as you can. Please let us know what you’d like to see offered that would really be of benefit to lots of people. We may not respond to every single idea but we’ll gratefully receive them all.
Many thanks, Hillary and Matt
The central yin and yang in our logo, symbolic of two fish, constantly moving, swimming, going up-coming down.
Just a flash of insight from practice the other day. Like many of my realizations, nothing earth shattering on the surface but buried in its simplicity is a deep thing.
Let’s see if I can put it into words.
Tai Chi (taiji) and meditation allow us to start the day mindfully and without stress
Every day I get up at 5:30 and do some qigong, tai chi and standing meditation to start the day. What happened was, as I looked at the clock on the wall in the center, I knew there was only 40 minutes to practice. At 6:40 a.m. I HAD to be DONE, because the drive to work can take a long time. The Deadline? Be at the desk no later than 8:30. But as often happens with tai chi and meditation, it feels so good and I want to stay and keep going.
I mean, I love tai chi and meditation even more than I like triple scoops of Mint Chocolate ice cream in a dark chocolate dipped waffle cone.
But, if I kept going, I’d be late for work. And that would cause a lot of suffering and trouble for not only for me with the boss, but for colleagues who rely on my presence to get their jobs done.
So, at 6:40 I turned off the light and locked the door to the center. I walked to my car carrying my breath and mind in each step, full and empty, full and empty.
Quan Yin reminds me to balance compassion with wisdom, to do what the next truly appropriate thing is, not just what I want to do.
There was the pleasure of a clear mind from practice and the knowledge that the decision to stick to the schedule was a benefit to me and those around me.
The deep lesson. There is a time for everything. A time for tai chi and a time to drive to the office. Sticking to the schedule reduces stress. The ego is reduced in size. The ego and it’s desire to selfishly pick and choose are set aside for the larger good; a more peaceful day for all the interdependent beings.
Try to live blamelessly, without causing trouble for the self or others.
Do you have times like that? Where you have something you have to do but would rather do something else? How does that play out for you? Are some times harder than others to be disciplined with? Why is that?
The world is a pretty complicated place. So, the last thing I want is to make it more complicated that necessary. How about you?
Antidote? Simplify
For years, one of the things I’ve sought after, is a way to make things simpler. To reduce all those bummer, stressed out feelings that come from too much complication. I love tai chi, qigong and meditation because amongst their many fine qualities, one stands out day after day. That is the demand they make for me to maintain a close, sharp attention to the breath.
Why Does The Breath Matter?
Without the breath coming in and out, I’m just a dead body. The breath is so close to my life. It provides one of the keys of life; Oxygen. I can go a while without eating. I might get hungry but I’ll live. I might get a head ache, but I’ll live. On the other hand, I can’t hold my breath very long. Even magicians on tv or in Vegas, can only hold their breath so long. Within a few short minutes - no breathing? No living. End of story.
Breathing Means - Pay Attention Right Now
Paying strict attention to the breath keeps me firmly engaged in the present moment. When I can train my mind single-pointedly to observe the breath, I stay right here in this moment, letting go of worry about the past or future. After all, I’d never try to hold on to any one single breath. It’s a fool’s errand. It’s the nature of the breath to arise, peak and fade away. Each one after the next. Each one slightly different. Long. Short. Ragged or steady and so on.
And, when I stay right here, life gets a lot simpler.
If we rush our taiji practice, what are we doing? We’re rushing through taiji just so we can check that off our list of things Very Busy People Do, so we can rush to the next thing – get that done – check it off and the next and the next and so on …
And we do this all day long.
Why?
Maybe if we see that long list of things checked off, we feel like we can stand back and say look at all I accomplished today. Or, maybe when we rush around, the feeling of frenetic activity gives us the delusion that we’re Working Very Hard. And that’s like, the American way.
But we should not let ourselves be fooled. Rushing around, frantically with no mind on what we are doing because half our mind is already thinking about what we have to do next or what we forgot to do yesterday and what we’ll have to do tomorrow because surely we’ll run out of time today … Feel like you need to breathe right now from all that rushing? Me too.
One of the main points of taiji practice is to let go of all that, all the worldly concerns (not forever) and just relax and be fully present in the moment. Present, fully aware that you are breathing, moving the body, slowly, mindfully. Now, isn’t that better? We practice taiji not to get somewhere – but just because it feels good. Our mind and body come together with the breath and we begin to restore some balance, bring some softness, flexibility into all aspects of our being.
Not a bad deal for an exercise that requires no special equipment! So, try it. Sneak off at work into an empty room, an under used hallway, even the bathroom and grab a slow five-minute taiji or qigong break. (OSHA recommends that office workers take five minutes each hour away from their tasks for best health and performance.) You’ll save yourself a lot of visits to the doctor in the long run because you’ll be healthier. And your company will even safe money because you don’t miss work because of illness produced by stress.
Will your first session of taiji turn you into a perfect human specimen? No. But over time, you’ll see a big difference.
Taiji is one of those things that makes us feel better from the very first time we do it and is something we can practice for the rest of our lives.
Interesting research published in the New England Journal of Medicine showing the many benefits of taiji for severe pain and chronic conditions. Especially nice that this study refers to the many levels of benefit taiji provides for body, mind and spirit. I read recently somewhere, that TCM practitioners joke that the only place the mind and body separate is in medical textbooks!
Before the study, “I didn’t know tai chi from a sneeze,” said Ms. Petersen, who has diabetes and other conditions. “I was like, ‘Well, O.K., I’ll get to meet some people, it will get me out of the house.’ I didn’t believe any of it. I thought this is so minimal, it’s stupid.”
After a few weeks, she said she began to feel better, and after 12 weeks “the pain had diminished 90 percent.” She has continued tai chi, lost 50 pounds and can walk three to seven miles a day.
Dr. Shmerling said that though tai chi is inexpensive compared with other treatments, some patients would reject such an alternative therapy. And Dr. Gloria Yeh, a Beth Israel Deaconess internist and co-author of the editorial, said others “will say, ‘It’s too slow, I can’t do that.’ ”
But she said it offered a “gentler option” for patients deterred by other physical activities. “The mind-body connections set it apart from other exercises,” she said, adding that doctors are seeking “anything we can offer that will make patients say ‘I can really do this.’ ”
Calm Chicago offers Yang taiji, the same taiji practiced by the Tufts study participants. Who can do taiji and enjoy the many benefits? Anybody. Whatever your situation, we can adapt the taiji to fit your abilities. And, you’ll have fun . WHat other medicine can say that?
Generosity: Our guiding principle I am no expert on Chinese language but here is what me teachers have told me about these characters. There are two ways to say/write generosity in Chinese. One way uses only two characters. That way of expressing generosity is for simple or maybe, more minor ... Continue reading »
