I’m a beginner, about 4+ months into ChiFusion, no previous experience with Tai Chi or Qigong. I’ve worked through Levels 1 and 2 … Yesterday I did my Level 1 early in the morning, then mid-morning began my Level 2 routine. … I then started Lifting Water, and after a minute or two, my hands and forearms started trembling uncontrollably as I raised them. This didn’t feel like fatigue, rather like my arms were over-excited or something. It felt like a surge of pressure or energy that had nowhere to go and caused a shuddering sensation as I lifted my arms. When I tried to relax my arms to quiet the shuddering (still lifting), my legs actually started shuddering too!Another student wrote:
This alarmed me a bit, as I’ve not had this happen before, so I stopped exercising, and went into my relaxation routine (Embracing the Pearl and Falling Water) and everything calmed down and I was fine. This morning I performed both Level 1 and 2 routines with no trembling/shuddering.
I’ve been doing [other styles of] Tai Chi for about a dozen years now … that is similar but usually just with my fingers. They will begin to flutter as I move through my [non-ChiFusion] Tai Chi forms. I’ve heard that, in fact, it’s a result of the energy in your system. It’s not harmful and I’m told it’s relatively normal.I actually had trembling as well when I was a student. When I became a teacher, I looked at the experience in great detail to find out what was going on. Trembling is a complicated issues in Tai Chi and Qigong, because many different situations can cause it.
That’s why I brought the question up. It doesn’t happen all the times but it was rather disconcerting the first time I saw it.
It only happens after I’ve gotten into my routine after about 15 -20 mins.
Assuming it isn’t just simple muscle fatigue, with trembling I usually look for:
Increase in energy flow through meridians Increased flow encounters a blockage in a meridian Overflow of vessels into meridians (storing too much chi or storing without meridian preparation) Misalignments in movements Physical problems (pinched nerves, misalignments, dehydration, and other medical conditions)
For #1, if you are relatively new to advanced chi training, sometimes the body isn’t accustomed to the increased chi flow. This can cause trembling. The trembling goes away though once your meridians become habituated to the increased flow. Assuming you are practicing regularly (5 to 6 times a week), the trembling shouldn’t last for more than a few days, certainly no longer than a week, as the body adjusts.
For #2, the trembling is caused when increased chi flow encounters a blockage in the meridians. Ideally, the increased flow will remove the blockage and the trembling will go away. This can happen in a single practice session, but may take a few days or a week. But if the blockage is really stubborn though, it may last longer. If it does, other intervention (acupuncture, Qigong massage, herbs) may be needed to help with the blockage. #3 happens when students work on chi vessel storage Qigong or Tai Chi BEFORE working Qigong to improve meridian circulation. Unfortunately, this is quite common among Tai Chi students outside our ChiFusion program. (It should be rare among ChiFusion students who’ve never done Tai Chi before, because we work on meridians first before working on storage).
The reason it is common is that Tai Chi is usually taught as a vessel storage practice. The idea here is that if you work on Tai Chi storage and store enough chi, it will “overflow” the vessel reservoirs and automatically flow out to the meridians, and automatically improve meridian circulation by forcing the chi out the vessels.
That’s the theory. In my experience, it usually doesn’t work quite that smoothly. In the first place, most students cant get enough storage to happen to make that “overflow” work for them, at least not until a few months or years of practice. Then when they do get the overflow, the meridian system is often not prepared for the increased chi flow. The overflow becomes a bull in the china shop, causing all sorts of problems as it encounters blockages and discontinuities in the energy system. Trembling is often a major sign here.
This is what happened to me as a student. And unfortunately, my meridian system never seemed to “right itself” using this method. It always responds the same way to the increased chi overflow. And as the student becomes better and better at storage, the overflow becomes more regular, and the trembling becomes a regular feature of the student’s practice.
Prevention is the best medicine here – work on circulation BEFORE working on storage. (We talk about this both in the “Energy Pathways” section of our advanced training, plus in our Complete Chi Health webinar that we occasionally hold for people on our mailing list. We discuss how you can structured your practice and how we’ve structured the ChiFusion program to do this.) If you’ve seen some of the introductory videos to the sample lessons in our course, I mentioned how I started over at one point, stopping everything I was practicing and going back to the beginning. This is part of the reason I did that. I needed a meridian system “reboot”, to give my meridian system a chance to right itself after stressing it out for so many years.
#5 are usually physical problems that are not a result of practice, but practice can bring them out and make them more obvious. Pinched nerves often cause trembling. The irony of course is that while you might experience trembling in your hands, for example, the pinched nerve is usually NOT in your hand. It might be in your spine, neck, shoulder, or elbow. Spinal vertebrae that are out of alignment might not even be noticed by you during your regular day, but Tai Chi might be showing them to you.
Believe it or not, dehydration might also cause trembling, and again, you might not notice it during the day, but Tai Chi can bring it out. There are many more physical causes and medical conditions that can cause trembling. (Actually, I’ve just been emailing with a new student who joined us that has Essential Tremors, a medical condition that causes trembling in some postures.) So if the trembling is persistent, you might want to have this checked by a chiropractor, osteopath, medical doctor, or other health professional.
For the first student above, I suggested that his experience was most likely #2 above. He should monitor this for the next week or so. If the trembling comes back and stays around, it might be something else. But if it has happened just once, and stays away for a few days, it was probably #2.
For the second student, it’s a little more complicated. I suggested that it’s probably #3, based on a few things he said: that he has been practicing Tai Chi for a dozen years, it happens during his form, and it happens after about 15 or 20 minutes in. I’m wondering if it takes him that long to build up the storage in a practice session until it overflows. And if it happens sometimes and not others, he might just be sometimes hitting the “high water mark” for overflowing, and sometimes not.
But it could also be #2 with a stubborn blockage, #4, or #5. If it was #2, he should probably notice the trembling as he practices the meridian work in Level 1 of his new ChiFusion program. If it’s #4, he might want to see if it’s reaching certain postures in his practice (rather than just practicing for 15 to 20 minutes) that is causing the trembling. Keep in mind that I can’t give medical diagnosis, but #5 is the least likely in my opinion, though it’s a possibility he should check out.
Trembling is so complicated that it’s hard to know exactly what’s happening without some experimentation and observing on each student’s part.
.
View the original article here
No comments:
Post a Comment