Remove All The Pressure That Builds Up Within You

Sensei Sandeep Desai

The secret behind T’ai Chi’s popularity is its ability to improve the lives of people of many different ages and occupations. It can progressively increase the potential inherent in most of us and reduce the harm caused by living a stressed-out life. T’ai Chi can be practised to improve health, reduce stress and experience being alive. Its martial arts aspects appeal mostly to the young. Many people operate under a tight set of deadlines and put in excessively long hours at work. In doing so, they often go without adequate rest or sleep, which depletes them for their tasks. It then requires them to put in yet more hours at work in order to make up for the deficits. Short T’ai Chi breaks can relax your system sufficiently and help you attend to your work in a more functional and healthy way. How does T’ai Chi manage this? The neurological overload caused by lack of rest slows down your ability to think creatively or make accurate observations. Your capacity to send correct signals to your subconscious mind gets diminished. Your subconscious mind is like a slave. It will obey any order you give it. That is the thought behind hypnotism. Therefore, it is important to refrain from telling our subconscious mind anything that will impede our progress. T’ai Chi, by relaxing your nerves, regenerates your subconscious mind, restoring its ability to function at normal speed. Changing the internal environment brings about space in your mind that often acts as a precursor to sudden problem-solving insights. We often find ourselves in a situation where we work hard on a complex problem all day and can’t quite figure out what to do about it. After a good night’s sleep, however, the solution seems to appear out of nowhere. Artists and writers often practise T’ai Chi to uplift their creative mood or to spruce up their body and mind. T’ai Chi provides a thorough stretch to the muscles of the neck, back and shoulders, melting strains and pains that you acquire during work. Nagging pain in these areas increases your susceptibility to anger, frustration, and depression, which impedes your thinking and ability to relate positively with your colleagues. By increasing oxygen delivery to the body, T’ai Chi increases blood and energy circulation to and from the brain. When the brain doesn’t receive sufficient blood, you experience difficulty while making decisions. When enough blood gets to the brain, you can easily bring in new ideas, energies and plans necessary to achieve your objective. People in the 30 to 50-year age group constitute the largest section of the workforce. This midlife phase is the toughest but also the most productive phase of life. You feel you have the experience and energy to face life’s challenges. During midlife, the pressure is on! Your working, social and family responsibilities mount year after year. If you allow all this to drop, you will not be able to realise your potential. What we often forget is that we all possess latent powers like energy, skill, sound judgment, creative ideas and even physical strength and endurance, in greater measure than we realise. Through stillness and movement, T’ai Chi taps into these powers, giving you the much-needed confidence to endure ever-increasing pressures with a smiling face.