What does Tai Chi and other mindful exercise practices have to do with your driving ability?  They can help you handle an immediate stressful multitasking situation more calmly, with more awareness and therefore more safely.

Imagine the driving scenario when you are merging onto the highway from an entrance lane. The traffic on the main motorway is busy, the speed is fast and it doesn't look like anyone is considerate enough to let you merge into their lane smoothly. Let's take a look at how a calm, relaxed, and in control driver would handle this situation.

Prior to merging onto a fast, busy motorway from an merging road you are aware of, and able to, let go of any excess tension in your mind and body & are able to keep a cool head in preparation for the stressful task ahead. Your shoulders are down, your grip is relaxed but controlled on the steering wheel, & your posture is comfortably straight. Yours senses are heightened and you proceed to - keep a 3 second distance from the car in front of you; simultaneously check if there's an unpredictable driver behind you; look in the mirrors to see if the driver on the left lane of the highway is going to slow down & let you in, or cut you off. Meanwhile you are aware of, but are not worried about the ever-shortening distance you have left before the merging lane ends. For those brief seconds you - ignore the song playing away on the car stereo system/the kids fighting in the back seat/the untimely question being asked/or the ringing of your hand phone - to place it on the all-important task milliseconds ahead.  You are in the moment, aware of, but not flustered by, all these stressful factors. Your "intention" is to safely and seamlessly merge onto the motorway. Your hand lightly flicks on the indicator to give ample warning of your actions, you time the merge, you apply the correct pressure on the accelerator, and gently turn the steering wheel as you merge the car into the left lane of the motorway. If anything unpredictable happens you calmly react and are aware of the safe options available to you in that moment.

A mindful exercise like Tai Chi develops the ability to clear the clutter from your thoughts & tension in your body, cultivate a light-relaxed awareness that allows you to calmly respond "in the moment" to such a common stressful scenario - making you a safer driver.

Authour - Lee Chang Tye
www.relaxedmindtaichi.com

In February this year TIME Magazine cover story was about: "The Mindful Revolution: the science of finding focus in a stressed-out multitasking culture". Mindfulness is now apparently accepted by the mainstream and it says a lot about the levels of stress in our culture & society - and that we should do something about it. To a Tai Chi practitioner this mindfulness aspect is nothing new. But inevitably when mindfulness is brought up meditation and yoga are the ones oft referred to. Tai Chi barely gets a mention. In the style I do my teacher regularly stresses to: "listen to your body"  which is a mindful practice that develops your skill applicable to release stress & tension and restore calm.

Firstly to get rid of tension you first must be aware of it. "Listening to your body" in Tai Chi develops your awareness of different areas of your body, e.g.- where your feet, legs, hips, upper body, shoulders, arms, hands, fingers & head are in relation to each other and being aware of the amount of tension each part is holding. After being made aware that there is tension, learning how to let go of it. Are your shoulders raised, chest tensed, hands & fingers tensed, lower back stiff, posture stooping & spine not aligned vertically? Learning to let go of bodily tension allows the mind to let go of its underlying stressed state and be more calm. This is only one part of the Tai Chi puzzle.

Authour – Lee Chang Tye
https//www.relaxedmindtaichi.com

Here's a good article I found posted on linked in about the benefits of Mindful Meditation in "Scientific American"  which is what Tai Chi is: "Mindful Meditation in Motion".  What is surprising is that actual physical changes in the brain are noted as mindful meditation is regularly practiced - most notably the amygdala (associated with lower order brain activity e.g. - stress) shrinks and the pre-frontal cortex  (associated with higher order activity e.g. - awareness, decision-making & concentration) becomes thicker resulting in a better, more thoughtful  control over the primal stress response.  With regards to pain this article reinforces the previous post I wrote about how mindfulness affects the interpretation of pain. That is, the practice of mindfulness seems to allow the practitioner to have more control over the thought processes that exacerbate the experience of pain, hence lower the experience of pain felt. They (regular meditators) still feel it but the pain is lessened & they think that this is a permanent change in perception & brain structure!

Check the article out:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2014/06/12/what-does-mindfulness-meditation-do-to-your-brain/?WT.mc_id=SA_sharetool_Twitter

One of my students who has been studying meditation for over 20 years explained a simple yet terrific meditation technique used to deal with stressful thoughts that arise. It's too good to not share it. She says that when you have a stressful or negative thought that pops into your head, you just observe it in a detached fashion then imagine that you have a few balloons floating beside your head. You place the stressful or negative thought into one of the balloons and tie it up, then let go of the string and watch the balloon float away.  Thanks Jan.

I went to a talk about Sahaja Yoga Meditation today and was pleasantly surprised by the similarities between that system and the Tai Chi system. From my crude and initial impressions it appears that  both systems acknowledge a type of  subtle energy as "Life Force" that permeates the universe & is within us; both systems work towards freeing blockages and let the energies flow more freely within our bodies; both use the mind to facilitate this process;  both aim to calm the mind; both focus on the importance of the spine & nervous systems, sacrum and top of the head (although they focus more on the fontanel and we on the crown of the head), both use the palms to feel the the energy flow.  Both try and develop the link between our energies and the universes' by purifying (and strengthening?) the internal energies to harmonize with the universal energies. I don't know enough to make a comprehensive comparison and naturally there were many differences in details, processes, about various things/perspectives but I feel that (for me) to get the subtle energy feeling (warmth, tingling etc) in ones palms, the Tai Chi standing or stationary Tai Chi exercises, are much more efficient. The visualizations they use whilst in the sitting meditative postures are good and much more personal than listening to the body in Tai Chi, but I find that moving meditation suits someone like me much better than sitting still. All in all, I think there's a lot both systems can offer each other.