Human beings are very weird creatures. We all have pretty big brains, and so we can all clearly distinguish activities that do us good from those that do us harm. We all know, for example, that eating blueberries is much better for us than scoffing blueberry muffins-and yet!!
Those of us who have chosen to learn and practise Infinite Tai Chi, Chi Kung and Infinite Meditation know that both these activities have the potential to transform our lives for the better, whether our key goal is to lead a healthier, happier physical life, or to awake spiritually –and yet!!
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Of course, there are always one or two highly exceptional students who practise their tai chi and meditation for several hours a day, seven days a week, but most of us can only imagine having that much self-discipline and motivation.
Most of us find that even though we start each day, week, or month with the very best of intentions, time just seems to fly by, and our busy lives, or endless worldly challenges, constantly sabotage our best intentions to practise our tai chi and/or meditation more diligently.
But if we really want to improve our chances of succeeding to learn these life- transforming arts, we first have to recognise that blaming our busy lives, or any external event, for sabotaging our perfect practice is pure self-deception. Even if we work for say eight hours a day, look after our families for another four hours a day, sleep for seven hours each night, and spend two hours a day eating, bathing etc, that still leaves three whole hours each day of our lives for our ITC practice.
So, what is really going on when we get to the end of another month without really making much progress in our practice? The key to understanding this problem is to recognise how resistant we all are to any kind of major positive change in our lives.
We all long to be happier, healthier, and more loving and loved, but at the same time it is crucial to understand that we, or rather our egoic-selves, also resist -big time-all types of activities and practices that would really assist us to achieve these universal human goals. Paradoxically and insanely, we all have a very strong attachment to being in pain and to being miserable, even though we hate feeling so awful. Why is this?
First of all, we need to understand that we have all been ‘hiding in the darkness’ for eons of time. Even if you just take this one lifetime, you have spent most of your life to date being in a relatively loveless, dark place, and you have actually learnt to cope quite well with dwelling in that loveless place.
You are like someone who was born in a very small, dark prison cell, and is now so used to living in the darkness, that if someone were to suddenly open the door to the cell and let the light stream in, they would cower in the corner and refuse to walk out into the unknown, scary light.
We are all very afraid of the unknown, and comfortable with the known, even when the unknown offers us the only chance we have of finding lasting happiness and fulfilment. But our fear of the unknown is not the whole story. Deep down in our minds, and often way below our conscious awareness, lies a thick layer of guilt or unworthiness that can totally sabotage all our efforts to live happy, love-filled lives.
It is as though instead of hearing a message in our minds that is constantly telling us ‘You’re worth it’, we actually subconsciously hear a nasty little voice that constantly reminds us ‘You are not worth it. Who do you think you are to believe that you deserve nothing but lasting love, peace and joy? Get real!’
When we subconsciously buy into this extremely destructive programme of guilt and unworthiness, we have no chance of transcending it. It is only when we begin to raise our consciousness and become consciously aware of this dark, dark egoic programming, that we stand any chance of beginning to heal it.
So, when you notice, and own, your resistance to practising Infinite Tai Chi and/or Infinite Meditation, please give yourself a pat on the back. You have actually made a big step forwards towards living in light and love, even though it may not exactly feel like a step in the right direction when you become aware that you have spent another week not practising.
The key is that instead of blaming your lack of practice on work, your family or even the weather (it was far too hot/cold/stormy to meditate), you begin to accept that it is all down to you. You chose not to practice, and now you can change your mind and choose to practice. Simple! Well, actually it is simple, but not at all easy to do, because changing our life-long self-sabotaging, egoic programming is a life-long challenge. But as soon as you say to yourself ‘I am not practising because I am choosing not to practise’ rather than constantly finding external reasons or excuses for your lack of practice, I promise you that you are making real progress on the path.
However, when you do begin to accept that you are choosing not to practise, you have to be extremely careful not to beat yourself up about it and guilt-trip yourself about it. We all tend to think that guilt is a good thing because feeling guilty will push us to become a better person. But guilt is actually a very toxic emotion, full of horrible things like shame and rage. Ironically, feeling guilty about a certain type of behaviour-such as not practising ITC – can actually keep us trapped in that behaviour (too complicated to explain this fully here-just trust me on this one!)
So the trick is to notice that we have not been practising, refuse to feel guilty about it, but simply make a commitment to take one small step towards changing our behavioural pattern.
Healing and transcending our self-sabotaging egoic programming is a very complex spiritual task, and I am not going to write more about this healing path today. We will undoubtedly come back to it another time. But what I do want to do now, after the very first weekend of this year’s ITC course, is to share with you some practical tips that are proven to work whenever we really want to fulfil a particular goal in life.
Practical Tips for Learning the ITC Long Form and Infinite Meditation
I recently picked up a book entitled ‘59 Seconds: Think a Little Change a Lot’ in which Professor Richard Wiseman outlines empirically proven, quick ways to ‘achieve absolutely anything’.
I will now just briefly summarise four techniques that Wiseman claims successful people have used to achieve their major goals in life.
1. They had a plan.
Successful people broke down their end goal into a series of smaller steps or sub- goals. So, for example, successful dieters did not just sit around imagining themselves at the perfect weight. They set themselves short-term targets of losing say ‘ 2 pounds this week’ and then ‘one pound this week, cause its my birthday on Tuesday’ and so on, until they reached their target weight.
So in ITC terms, you might set yourself the goal of being able to flow through the first quarter of Stage One of the Form without looking at the training DVD by the end of the month. Or, for Infinite Meditation, you might set yourself the goal of sitting quietly for 10 minutes every morning before breakfast for one whole week.
Evidently sub-goals work best when they are: Concrete
Measurable
Time-based
So do not just tell yourself that you are going to practise your tai chi more. Be very specific: workout exactly what you are going to learn/improve then set a specific time limit for achieving your sub-goal and then measure the extent to which you have achieved it.
2. They told others about their goals
Apparently telling friends and families that we are aiming to achieve certain goals in our lives really helps us to achieve them. Maybe the fear of looking an idiot if we do not achieve our publicly announced goals motivates us to try harder, or maybe on a much more positive note, friends and family would love to support us to achieve our goals-but first, they have to know what they are!
So in ITC terms, please tell someone you live with, or a close friend, what your specific goal is for the month, and ask them to support you. For example, if you have children and your goal is to meditate each morning, you might ask your children to support you in reaching your goal by being as quiet as possible whilst you are meditating.
3. They reminded themselves of all the benefits of achieving their goals.
In one major study of goal reaching, unsuccessful participants tended to focus on how failing to reach their goals would leave them feeling horrible, whereas successful participants focussed on how achieving their goals would enhance their lives.
So if you want to try this one out for yourselves, why not make a list of all the very positive benefits of becoming a fully qualified and really good Infinite Tai Chi practitioner-
‘My physical health will improve’
‘I will be a calmer, more positive, even radiant, individual’
‘I will make a real positive difference to my family/local community by becoming a calmer/more positive person and/or by sharing the miraculous art of Infinite Tai Chi’.
or ……………………………………………………………..
4. They got started
Now this may sound blindingly obvious. But a surprising number of people are chronic procrastinators, and apparently, the best way to overcome this bad habit is to start a project, even if we only spend a few minutes starting it before we take a break. So if you want to complete that ITC course essay on time, for example, get out a piece of paper and write down, or type, the title of the essay and a line or two of text. Now you have started it, you may be surprised how easy it is to come back to it and finish it well before the deadline.
So there you have it: four simple but proven ways to improve your chances of successfully becoming an Infinite Tai Chi practitioner. Set yourself a series of concrete, time-limited targets or sub-goals. Tell as many people as possible what you are trying to achieve, write out all the benefits of reaching your ultimate goal, and then get started with your practice –if just for a few minutes.
But I have to conclude where I began. Even if all these suggestions are eminently sensible, most of us will resist actually putting them into practice because our resistance to moving towards true love and light is so great.
However, the really good news is that failing to put our self-improvement plan into practice is OK too. Even if we stubbornly resist moving towards the light with all our might, an infinitely greater power is gently pulling us back home. Sooner or later, in this lifetime or the next, or maybe the one after that, each and every one of us will answer this constant call and begin to wend our way slowly, but inevitably, back home to love.
In the meantime, ‘just keep practising!’, and if you don’t, (which you won’t!) keep loving and supporting yourself unconditionally in any case. If you beat yourself up for not practising, you will simply compound your guilty egoic programming, whereas if you keep extending unconditional love and compassion to yourself, even when you are going off the rails, you will actually stay on track at a much deeper level.
This does not mean that you never give yourself a bit of a ‘kick up the xxx’ , but if you are going to give yourself a kick, please make it an unconditionally loving and compassionate kick – such as ‘I love you so much, I am not going to let you sabotage this real chance of lasting happiness. So quit moaning and moping about, put on the music, and let’s get waving those hands like clouds and pushing those ocean waves’.
by Peggy-Jane Rogers