Tag: steve rowe

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Semantic Satiation In Tai Chi

Steve Rowe

Semantic satiation is when you’ve repeated a word many times and it loses its meaning and becomes just a sound, this can also happen with tai chi techniques. You’re practising your form day after day, month after month and year after year, the form has become a moving meditation, suddenly that technique that you’ve done so many times feels wrong. This is how when your mind and movement have gone from ‘absorption’ to ‘insight’, the conditions are right for these insights to arise. Your mind is receiving messages from the body to tell you ‘this isn’t right’ and that it … Continue reading Semantic Satiation In Tai Chi

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Respect Is A 2 Way Street

Steve Rowe

Many martial artists learning capacity has an expiry date. They get what they want or need from a teacher or system and some stop progressing at that point or move on to someone or something else. It’s a hard pill for some teachers to swallow as they feel discarded and that the work they put into that person was wasted but that’s not true. If the student stops learning at that point they’ve reached capacity, but the teacher’s contribution still have added value to their life. Others have got what they wanted or needed from one teacher and now need … Continue reading Respect Is A 2 Way Street

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Body Intelligence

Steve Rowe

Body IntelligenceThe more we train, the more get to realise and utilise this skill. The mindfulness aspect of training means that as we develop good posture and deep breathing: Our body calms down,Then our emotions calm down,Finally our mind calms down and becomes more aware, focused, sensitive and intense. This means that instead of trying to train subjectively and having to take instruction, as we’ve been indoctrinated to do with the desire to ‘become’ something, our new state of being is able to observe objectively to see and feel what is actually going on. This unified state of inner calm … Continue reading Body Intelligence

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Qigong In Plain English

Steve Rowe

From this morning’s training –Insights couched in analogies and plain English (my skill). Think of the ‘arches’ of the feet and the palms of the hands as like sink plungers ‘sucking and blowing’ energy when everything is connected through the body with the bows in the jointed parts storing and releasing the energy to and from them. The energy is ‘coloured’ and intensified by emotion and intention like releasing a morning stretch and shivering at the spine sending and bouncing pinballs like in a pinball machine. If you get this, our minds work in a similar way and our training … Continue reading Qigong In Plain English

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My Day’s Training Schedule

Steve Rowe

I always start my Tai Chi coaching sessions by asking the students how they’re getting on with their training programme, any questions, any problems or any comments, and it helps me to shape the day’s study. I thought over the next few days I might share some of the most common thoughts. One of the most common comments is ‘I’ve been concentrating on one particular form or part of it’. The problem is that while they are doing this the other forms and skills slide. I practice everything in the syllabus every day, in the morning I’ll meditate, do the … Continue reading My Day’s Training Schedule

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Your Body Knows Best

Steve Rowe

Back on the antibiotics for infection in my knee and have all the side effects of bad stomach, pain in all my arthritic joints, fatigue and a bit of nausea so my morning training took a strange turn. You know how when you do your morning stretch it’s different to a ‘training’ stretch? I often refer to it in qigong because it has a ‘stimulate, store and release’ quality to the energy. Well, today my body spontaneously did it in every tai chi technique and it alleviated a lot of the side effects of the antibiotics. Sometimes our bodies know … Continue reading Your Body Knows Best

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Mudras & Martial Arts

Steve Rowe

Every Tai Chi and Karate body and hand ‘attitude’ and shape can be considered a mudra. Mudras are internal actions, involving the pelvic floor, spine, joints, cavities, diaphragm, throat, eyes, tongue, anus, genitals, abdomen, and other parts of the body and the energy of these actions are then expressed through the hands. In Tai Chi it is said that’s its important to have ‘beautiful hands’. All the hand shapes in Tai Chi are categorised in the Karate kata ‘Tensho’ also known as ‘Rokkisho’, ‘Heavenly Palms’ or ‘Spirit Hands’. The ‘6 Hands’ of Tensho represent the ‘5 Animals’ and are grafted … Continue reading Mudras & Martial Arts

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Don’t Overtrain

Steve Rowe

I think I overtrained yesterday, by the time I went to bed, everything hurt and this morning everything is sore and due to low testosterone from the cancer hormone therapy, radiation and age, emotionally fragile. So morning training has to be ‘small frame’ and ‘double meditation’ to heal. The 8 core skills are soften, connect, open, close, stretch, compress, twist and release, so small frame meant that I didn’t use stretch and compress meaning no fajin. This meant that I moved the energy around the body and kept it in to nourish it and heal ‘monk’ style. Double meditation means … Continue reading Don’t Overtrain

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The Art Of ‘Preframing’

Steve Rowe

Running a successful martial arts club. It’s important to understand the art of ‘preframing’ on all is levels. Recruiting lots of people with inaccurate adverts ‘because they work’ will give you high recruitment but also high attrition levels, by explaining exactly what you teach and what the outcomes are is important to filter your potential students and so you don’t have to waste both your time and theirs. More importantly it will reach the potential students you want who might be put off by your ‘catch all’ advertising. It seems that most club owners haven’t thought out exactly who and … Continue reading The Art Of ‘Preframing’

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How To Know You’ve Grown Old

Steve Rowe

How to know you’ve grown old while watching TV:You don’t know if you’ve seen the series beforeYou can’t remember what happened in the last episodeYou have your phone open to ‘cast’ so you can find what else the actor’s been inYou cringe at all kinds of explicit sex scenes even when you’re on your ownYou cringe at tampon adverts about the ‘flow’ exclaiming “I don’t need to know that!”You cringe at adverts for ED medicationsYou say “Christ, he/she’s got old!” When you see an actor you recognise, forgetting that you have as wellYou put on something you want to watch … Continue reading How To Know You’ve Grown Old