Tan Tien Chi Kung and Natural Breathing
“When in the course of life, natural low, deep, long and quiet abdominal breathing is replaced by high short and shallow breath- ing in the chest, we lose our inner stability. We have lost a major source of vitality and self-healing, as our breathing requires more energy than it generates. Through the loss of internal pressure, we also lose our inner power, as the balance between our inward pres- sure outwardly and the outward pressure inwardly has been lost.
“We can only regain our vitality by recreating this internal power so that the two powers are once again in a dynamic and reciprocal state of interplay. This is the inner meaning of Chi Kung: to restore the inner power by learning to breath naturally again.”
-From Tan Tien Chi Kung, By Mantak Chia
Physical Exercise, Meditation, and Motivation
People can also exercise early in the day to set a positive tone. There are people that talk about the hour of power, where they do some kind of exercise for 20 minutes, they read for 20 minutes, and they mediate for 20 minutes. Maybe you have a half hour of power if you don’t have a full hour. At least we are getting some kind of movement in our routine, even if it’s just ten minutes.
There’s a student that said , he used to only watch slip, trip, and fall videos. I didn’t know there was such a thing, but I guess I’d seen them after he explainedm it; it’s where people would fall down on the ice, and it would take them a few minutes to where they finally fell down and he just loved it. But those were the videos he watched. He started watching motivational YouTube videos and TED talks because we had assignments in classes to do that. He said his whole outlook on life changed after that. We can watch or listen to motivational things in the morning to start the day “on the right side of the bed.”
