The importance of non-verbal communications

Can a story be told with nonverbal messages alone?

https://vimeo.com/19208251

Tai Chi Chuan Journal 2 Free Moving Chi Gong and Tai Chi forms

“Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.”

A big portion of a book that I read this summer was about emotions. According to it, an emotion is an expression of energy in motion – e-motion. In our Tai Chi classes we deal with emotions a lot: we try to be aware of them, to control them, to make the most efficient use of the energy generated by them.  

Previously, I was curious myself about such subjects. I watched a lot of videos and read books dedicated to the emotion control. Most of them were focused on the same thing – letting go. There are, however, different methods of letting go. Mano, a student of Osho, teaches us to let go all of the old emotions and feelings, which were out of our attention, but still remain in our body and mind, by simply screaming, moving in a dance, jumping, and laughing. Pretty crazy, right? I do it all the time though, when I’m alone.

In our Tai Chi class, during the past weeks, we learned free moving Chi Gong, which I think is another good way to release our emotions and emotional pain body. The clue is in concentrating on the things that bother you – your physical or emotional pain, and then start moving. The movements should come from your heart-mind, not from the “mind” that we use to plan everyday activities or to solve math problems. Being aware of your feelings, while you perform the free moving chi gong movements, is not the same as thinking about your movements. You shouldn’t think about them at all. Things should flow naturally. Your body knows how to relax and release negative emotional “remnants”.  Also, after you let go physical pain, anxiety, impatience, etc. there is some free space which you can fill with peacefulness. Free moving Chi Gong is not only about focusing on negative aspects. It also helps to deal with positive feelings like love, gratitude, happiness, etc. Again, you just need to concentrate on all the good that you are feeling and move!

In class, when performing the free-moving chi gong, I try to observe my feelings and look at the impact the chi gong exercises have on me: I try to compare before and after the activity, and it does feel different. It feels light and free. I would compare it to dynamic meditation. I think it is important to feel comfortable “with yourself” and feel confident “in your skin”. Someone said in class that he doesn’t want to move anyhow and he just stays still. I think the problem is in being unable to connect to your inner-self and discover who you are.

Usually, the only problem that I have to focus on during the Free moving Chi Gong is so far is the lack of sleep. I try to deeply breathe in all the tiredness and then breathe it out. Then I relax my body and mind. I feel how my eyelids are relaxed, and I spread this state of relaxation across my whole body. If there are some random thoughts – I observe them and then picture them as birds flying away from my mind. I observe my breathing pattern. It is usually breathing with my abdominal part – I expand it when I am breathing out and contract it when I’m breathing in.

When I practice Chi Gong at home during weekends and sometimes evenings of Tuesday and Thursday, I feel just a feeling of gratitude and love, and I’m expressing it with Chi Gong. I entirely relax myself and move. My movements are often just yoga stretching, or sometimes I’m just lying on the floor and breathe in and out, trying to “clean” my meridians and fill my whole being with light.

During the past weeks we also learned the Tai Chi Forms, i.e. Preparation Posture, Beginning Posture and the application of them in martial art aspect. We practiced a lot by ourselves and then later we applied this knowledge to our opponents. I consider Tai Chi as a peaceful and graceful kind of all martial arts. We do not harm, we just control the flow of our energy and the energy of our opponents. We efficiently use it by applying tai chi forms we learnt so far. 

Positive Thinking and Habits

On a construction site in the Midwest, when the lunch whistle blew, all the workers would sit down together to eat. And with singular regularity Sam would open his lunch pail and start to complain.  “Not peanut butter and jelly sandwiches again!” Sam moaned about his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches day after day after day. Weekes passed, and the other workers were getting irritated by his behavior. Finally another man on the work crew said, “If you hate peanut butter and jelly so much, why don’t you just tell your old lady to make you something different?” “What do you mean, my old lady?” Sam replied. “I’m not married. I make my own sandwiches.”

According to the book “the Way of the Peaceful Warrior”, every predicament of your life has been arranged by you, consciously or unconsciously, and it is better for you to take responsibility for your life as soon as possible, instead of complaining and blaming everything around you. If there is an aspect of your life that you don’t like, (it can be your health, your body, your grades, or your personal life) you need to find your own path on how to make it “better”, or just accept it the way it is.  If you are aiming for success, there is a large number of important things such as creativity, focus, push, persistence, hard work and practice, which undoubtedly lead to it. However, here I’m going to focus only on such powerful aspect of a personal character as positive thinking because it can significantly affect your reality.

When I went to school in Kazakhstan, we used to have one “Health week” per semester. Usually on those “Health” weeks, we had seminars about HIV, suicide and depression, eating disorders, etc. None of these seminars included “healthy” topics; they were mostly outlined on negative things because the majority says that the absence of illness is health. Similarly, most of us think that we need to succeed first in order to be happy. We say “I have a good job, now I need a better one, only then I can be happy”. I believe we need to reverse such way of thinking just because if we don’t succeed we suffer, and in case we succeed, we set another goal; even if we finally get what we want, we still suffer because we can’t hold onto it forever.  However, if we try to reverse our “success formula” and try to think positively, our performance will significantly improve.  It is important to think positively because more than 80% of your work outcome depends on your optimism level and on your ability of considering stress as a challenge, not as a threat; only 10-20% is based on your IQ.  So how do we start thinking positively? If we start writing at least 2-3 things for which we are grateful, if we start making random acts of kindness, and if we meditate for at least 15 min a day (it was proven that meditation helps people to overcome depression and stress) we can easily turn it into a habit. Positive actions and thoughts will help you to achieve your goals faster.

Here is, by the way, a good video about "implanting habits", or how to start a change with a tiny habit and be awesome!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKUJxjn-R8

One of the seven habits of highly-effective people, according to Stephen Covey, is to begin with the end in mind. I think the power of positive visualization helps you to succeed in any beginning. When I was a child I kept visualizing a lot about me going to America. Its best educational system attracted me a lot, and I made a lot of drawings about my future life in America. Of course, I worked hard to get a scholarship, but I guess my power of visualization and my passion contributed a lot to my success. Like Steve Jobs used to say, that if there is no passion for an idea/job/project any rational person gives up when it gets hard. It is also always helpful to visualize the prosperity of your business, and it is important to think that it will help many people, not only you.

Beautiful song

makes me smile! :):)

Every morning starts with...

Shi Ba Shi

1 Awakening the Qi

2. Open the Chest

3. Paint a Rainbow

4. Separating the Clouds

5 Repulse the Monkey

6. Row the Boat

7. Lift the Sun

8. Turn to Look at the Moon.

9. Twist Waist and Push with Arm

10. Wave Hands through Clouds

11. Scoop the Sea and Look at the Sky

12. Push the Waves

13. Flying Dove Spreads its Wings

14. Punch the Mud

15. Flying Wild Goose

16. Circle the Sun

17. Step and Bounce the Ball

18. Quieting the Qi

Push that box away!

The nail that sticks up will be hammered down. This is a rule of social conformity. From ancient times, people generally tend to imitate other people, consciously or unconsciously.  There is an example from an old video on YouTube, where the three actors face the back wall of an elevator, and the fourth person, who unknowingly was videoed, by looking at everybody else, also decides to face the back wall. Here is a question, how did we survive the “threats” of environment in a long human history behaving like this? It might seem very surprising, but besides of negative effects on decision making processes and personal freedom, this conformity bias, as a large part of cultural evolution, brought us some superior outcomes. Well, perhaps conformity is very helpful in collaboration, observation, or social problem solving aspects, but if it was enough, we would never know growth and success.  Conformity feels comfortable, like a safe and warm box, and when you get rid of that box, leaving that “comfort zone” to try something new, you come to creativity, which is a very important life skill. 

Conformity was never sufficient in solving problems we encounter every day.  According to Albert Einstein, "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them", so we have to be flexible and imaginative because causes, conditions, and solutions of problems that we encounter are never the same. ENIAC, the first computer that was built in 1947 had thirty separate units, power supply and forced air-cooling; in addition to that, it had 19,000 vacuum tubes which were supposed to be changed about every twenty minutes because if one bulb stopped working it would literally take “forever” trying to understand which one was that. Why aren’t we using computers like that anymore? The answer is simple - we need innovations, to make our lives easier. Looking at all the latest technology, we see tons of applications of human creativity. One of the best examples is the latest IPhone by Apple (who are just experts of how to “Think Different”) which recognizes human fingerprints, and performs lots of other tasks.

On one of the first topics of our Business Opportunities in Engineering class we covered a lot of aspects of creativity, and now I will try to focus on questions like “Why can it be hard for us to be creative and what kinds of obstacles we encounter when we try to turn our ideas into actions?” Also I will talk about my “lessons” of creativity taken from my own experience.

Once I read that NASA performed some creativity tests on children, the result of which was that 98% of them had scored as “highly-creative”. However, when they retook that same test couple of years later, only 30% remained in a “highly creative” range. How can we explain the lack of creativity and why does it vanish as we get older? I think one of the reasons is that we get under a significant influence of family, school, university, clubs, and other social institutions. In other words, we get into a “box”, or system of standard rules, such as “There is only one right answer”. People are getting used to live in a comfortable system. Some studies show, that even if a person spends more than a decade in prison, he doesn’t want to leave it anymore, because the world outside is so different, unpredictable and “uncomfortable”.

I think, in general, fear and doubts kill creativity and dreams more often than failures. People are afraid of making mistakes and are scared of being criticized or misunderstood, and there always will be someone who judges and misunderstands. You just never have to stop and pay attention to killer phrases like “Don’t be ridiculous”, as well as you don’t need to explain yourself. I totally agree with what Steve Jobs said once: “People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do”. It does seem crazy when you try to be creative and extraordinary, just because it is NOT STANDARD and it’s not what other people usually expect from you; it doesn’t have to be successful, but at least it is different and it teaches you something new.

There is one thing I can tell you about creativity – it is all around us, and it is all inside of us. You can find beauty and ideas everywhere. One can cherish perfection, as well as one can be inspired by imperfections, just because they make a significant difference. Whenever I feel that creativity is “locked” inside of me – I let it go with a help of such activities as painting, coloring mandalas, playing musical instrument, exploring and learning something new. Whenever I feel I’m overwhelmed with classes, I give my mind a good respite from my
“noisy” and “ineffective” thoughts with a help of running, meditation, and meeting people. There is always an infinite amount of opportunities provided by my life, so you just have to push that box away and grab what you need, even if it’s impossible - my teacher is used to say that “there is less competition in doing impossible things”. A rule of thumb is not to resist the challenges which you encounter, but to learn through them. I learn a lot about myself in “bad” days, and the lessons of my “bad” days help me to move on and be creative. I considered my major to be highly challenging, but now I just laugh at such an early conclusion since I see how much it has to offer me, and how much it shaped my way of thinking.

There are so many ways and places when you can feel yourself as an excellent source of creative ideas; for example, Thomas Edison slept in his lab, so he could instantly right down ideas he saw in his dreams. J.K. Rowling sketched down Harry Potter’s world on a piece of napkin when she was traveling on trains, and Rene Descartes was working on his ideas when he was lying in bed. I have found it very interesting that usually the best ideas come to us when we are fully relaxed, not when we are on our work place, stressing out about homework and projects we have to do. Often I hear that the greatest ideas are coming at night, when a person wakes up or about to go to sleep. There are a lot of examples, like a Russian scientist Mendeleev claims that he saw the periodic table of chemical elements in his dream, and as soon as he woke up he took it down on a piece of paper. Another similar story happened to a famous Russian writer Gogol, who had a lethargic sleeping pattern; he used to wake up with ideas for his great novels like “Dead Souls”, “Vii” etc. When I was a child I used to write poems before I went to bed. I was trying to understand why it happens so, and found some good explanations in one of the most recent books that I read, which describes the energy levels on which our brain is functioning. The one that is responsible for our creative thinking in a relaxed state is alpha level.

As I have mentioned, all the aspects of creativity are important to us if we want to grow and succeed because it really does seem sometimes that “Knowledge is limited and imagination encircles the world”. Try to think outside of the box, or just get rid of it.

This speaker is great, by the way! I like the way she looks at creativity: