the course he gets tired she any office she gong for a lot of people they don't quite know what that is so why don't you tell us what what you found and type she that was so important that you wanted to do it and you want to teach it and who was it good for well there's many claims joan made about the benefits of taichi many of them are anecdotal it's very difficult to scientifically prove the benefits of type cheat but there is no question that there are four major benefits of doing tai ji improving strength flexibility balance and reducing stress or calming yourself down and you know stress is actually the biggest killer in america because stress results heart attacks strokes so it's very important to learn how to control stress and reduce it in tight she will definitely do that you know i love about your stories in class how old it is to keep saying read two thousand years you share well again this is all open to interpretation but the general belief is that tide she originates it definitely originates as a martial art it's believed to be the oldest in deadliest of all oriental martial arts it's purely defensive there's no offensive movement you're strictly defending yourself and it was developed to help monks who were spreading the philosophy of taoism throughout china to defend themselves in a lawless society not that they had anything of great value but maybe for amusement someone might try to hurt them or kill them maybe for whatever little possessions they had and so the belief is before they would leave the monastery they would be taught how to defend themselves and the defense is based on the  theory yang is for purposes of our discussion yang would be strong yin would be soft or weak so if someone is very strong you can't defeat them with strength unless you are stronger than them but you could control them with the opposite of yang which is the opposite of philosophy in the in the ending of theory can be divided into two parts that are not necessarily in conflict with each other but in terms of tight she you cannot defeat yang with your own yank you can easily defeat yang with the opposite which is yet you want me to go further in you know so alexei someone is coming at you very strong with a punch and unless you understand the ancient martial application of the tights he movements is just a lot of mumbo jumbo and throwing your arms and feet around in it doesn't make any sense but once you understand what you're doing and why it's being done and how the union theory comes into play here so to illustrate if someone is trying to punch you or grab you if you try to hold them you're not strong  but if you use yin against their yang you can defeat them and what you're going to do is wait for the punch and then you're going to grab you're going to grab their wrist that's the weakness of the human body you see and you could pull them you control them by holding their wrists so you have here you're at the here you are defending yourself this is called the my chest and then i'm picking up my other hand and this the palm is yang your fingers are yen if i touch you with my fingers of break my fingers only touch  om and so i'm standing like this this is basic to tight sheets called the ball but in the ancient martial application this is my defensive pose i'm using my left arm in this case to protect my chest i mean using my right arm to protect my head i don't want you to touch anything on my head it's all very vulnerable so if you try to hit me or grab me i'm going to w them till you extend your arm and i'm going to grab your wrist and i'm going to pull you down i'm going to throw you this kind of like working with balance or against balance yes you have to maintain a very strong sense of balance and tight she is particularly beneficial for people who have been diagnosed with parkinson's disease but anyone and you know i have t o come in to this point that i'm seventy three years old and the statistic of senior americans older people falling is very scary the statistic is one out of every three senior citizens in this country are going to fall each year and then about thirty percent of those people who fall are going to require some form of hospitalization or rehabilitation so one of the basics of tight she is you learn about balance and you learn the technique of balance and there's something called definitely called muscle memory and if you are constantly practicing type she and working on your balance your body will automatically put you into a balanced position you have to have good balance to keep from falling and that's one of the real basic advantages of studying tight she balance and you know we do this we practice this all the time standing is the ability to stand and to drop your eyes you also mention that the names of so many of the moves each of the moves have names and the names you said were from nature yeah most and i've that's interesting that at the time that this were involved you know there was a greater hips the hips are critical for maintaining balance and your ability to walk if you don't have flexible strong hips you can't walk you start shuffling and also you need strong hips to balance yourself so you're always after this hip rotation so here the apron i'm sitting here i'm doing it the eight you reach out and if you wait if you study the way i believe an ape will grab it grabs like this you see so you're reaching out and you're grabbing and then you're pulling in this grabbing or turning motion is also has the effect if you believe in the theory of yin yang in chinese medicine and everything else that's going on here that this turning is balancing the union the yang in your arm your lower body becomes yang is hard these are the big muscles of the human body anyway there's too much emphasis on upper body exercise strength to function to get through the activities of daily life or what they call of functional fitness you need very strong hips and legs to walk to get off a chair to climb a flight of steps strong upper body is not going to help you especially as you get older i would know about that but i finish that thought about the turning yes so there's a perfect example for the crane you know they love the crane the crane is a beautiful bird and you have an exercise like this called the crane and yes they do copy nature also as you know i'm fond of seeing in class there is no right angle in nature right although people keep looking at trees branches and trees trying to find or the trunk of a tree that is perpendicular to the earth but no it has never actually be one perfectly perpendicular to the earth there's no right angle in nature and there's no right angle in type she everything is certain these are this is power you see the circle is controlling power this is no power you have no control so we're hoping is moving in circles again studying nature well you have got me going here you have the flight of a bird i see the flight of bird it looks like it's effortless but it's not that you have all these muscles and tendons working here but you want to create this feeling of weightlessness of i believe it's called the amount of muscular strength and there's another example of company cutting company nature studying the absolutely but i can't help but i'm going to share a poem that i read fled away in chinese poetry you also have a lot of nature yet the interest same thing very much more in contact with nature and the world around them and learning from it well i wrote this poem that was actually published on the first page of the fiction issue of u s one this year tha strums the guitar and gracefully repulses the bunkie well cars dance by drivers driving to distraction ears lips to cells then a momentary stare from s u v s at this woman who does tight she mornings on elmer as she stops a neighbor walking by is some pointing up calling good good and the voice of my teacher in my mind reminds me to embrace the tiger and return him to the mountain and i do on the road poetic their nature based and poetic and so that's how the poem actually evolved and if me of course because the taxi and i think the contrast also with the cars the distractions people's unfocused driving everywhere not focused at all and tight you something where we stayed quiet and focused yes you know you have to learn to come yourself down and i find life with all this technology  an interesting statistic is that we're exposed to more information in one day than a person in living in colonial america perhaps two hundred years ago was exposed to in their entire lifetime we're being bombarded with information and people don't have the time to relax just to calm themselves down and so you have to find this time to quietly find a nice place or take a nice tidy g class and calm yourself down and relax yourself and learn how to keep calm you know oh there's definitely a technique to that i want to talk about i had your house i want to talk a little bit about how you got into it in the first place because you did tell us in class that you worked in hong kong where yeah i worked in hong kong and that's where you discover that were founded in of course is the typically would see hundreds if not thousands of people doing the taiji formerly in the morning and it raised my curiosity and  again to study there and i was fortunate in being able to study it based on the ancient martial moves and i do not believe you can understand this and unless you understand the ancient martial movements and what the mean once you understand that the moos become very clear to you and you know exactly how to position your body and i believe that this is not taught for some tight she instructors don't know that what the moves mean or they're embarrassed to admit the origins of tight she then about like say a maybe four hundred years ago and it began to evolve from a martial art to a system for good health and strength because what they were discovering in teaching these monks how to defend themselves in going through these various moves they found that they were leading very long and healthy lives and they remained physically very active mentally calm and so they began to think about tight she not as a martial art but as a form of of exercise for good health there's no question that this is a great form of exercise for good health and i got off or i got off on a tangent but this is very important you know tight she is the only form of exercise that you improve as you get older it's very distressing if you're a tennis player or you like baseball that as you get were run or as bicyclists as you get older you find that despite your best efforts your ability to perform these exercises or sports is reduced with age but your ability to do tight she improves with age and you just keep getting better and better like in the tight she movement you are deflecting so too in your mind you have to get mind control so that if you're angry or hostile or you're getting into an argument you have to learn to deflect calm yourself down and to let the argument just go by you know just like the movement you let someone's punch or someone's attempt to grab you you let it fly by you turn or you move and so too you have to have that mind control to get control so that you're not stressing yourself out all these arguments and nowhere anyway and just yeah i have to time w in five minutes it's gone it's out of your mind yes you know it is good for the health that is and you're not taking drugs or other i mean you know people used to to lower stress and we know that stress is what makes us all yeah well this is wonderful i don't i really enjoy your class i've been going to achieve for at least twenty years as far as i can remember and you're the most interesting teacher i've ever had for a lot of reasons and people really like your class and it's very kind of you to say no no i really do like it and we are going to see arthur to demonstrate a few of the moves that he's talked about and we're watching that and in the meantime i guess i want to say thank you so much for coming here today and being willing to share your thoughts in your and he said this story and by the way he doesn't want to go there right now because it's yet like many talented people they have many dimensions to them and arthur is also not only historian but an author of books and history and yet that may be for another time to talk about but maybe that's why he's so interesting when he talks about it because he has this historical context that he puts into it that you don't always find the lefkowitz thank you so much thank you joel for having me i enjoyed it ok joan and one of my best students were going to demonstrate the opening moves of classical young style eighty five movements ok we'll talk about what's going on and again unless you can understand the ancient martial application it's just a lot of flinging your hands and feet around once you understand what you're doing it all makes ense and precision mate doing the move correctly is important so the first thing is i'm putting all the weight on my right leg emptying the left leg and then getting up on my left toe we always move from the toe i've unlocked to my knee you see i'm balance and balance i'm working my hip and strengthening it and i feel my balance i don't move unless i'm balanced and i'm going to lift my left leg just an inch or two off the ground i'm going to demonstrate and standing perfectly straight in there is the move ok i've separated i'm going to drop on my heel now i'm rooted this is the only point in the entire form in which both feet are equally balanced weighted on the ground my knees are on lock i've dropped and now i'm going to lift shoulders down elbows down for relaxation moving very close to my body i'm never throwing my hands out and i'm never covering my eyes shoulders down elbow down for relaxation this stressful whizzes relaxation i lift below my eyes and separate and i do this with do it again i separate jonah doing beautifully not the nice thing separate you see now what am i doing if you're trying to grab me punch me i can't hold you because i'm frail and i can't use yang we talked about this i can only defeat you or control you with you in with softness so i  and i push away your arms your attempt to grab me your punch i mean using softness against your hardness my shoulders hinge this is the second standing in front of me to get into the horse stance the strongest position i could put the human body ok and i'm making a ball this is basic to tai ji it's a ball but the ancient martial application is yang is facing out in the my arm is protecting the vital organs of my chest i've raised my right hand from touching me there and i'm standing like this you see and i can move i can watch i'm not moving it's all defensive but in the form of let's get into it again ok ok here we go we'll separate separate the live separate make the ball here comes your attempt to punch me i grab your wrists there's the weakness and i pull you down i grass the sparrows tail and i can turn my head while i'm doing this ok turn my head and room move quickly and i can pivot on my left foot and now i'm back into hips again i'm going to try three times to throw the i'm going to grab you and i'm going to pull you with my lower body i'm going to come back in here you have the idea of moving key of energy i can my back legs fold my front legs for my back leg is full my front leg is empty and i move the energy from my back leg to my front leg and i'm trying to hit you here in the sternum and then i come down and i push this series of exercises or movements is believed to align and massage and exercise the organs of the body in this movement grass the sparrow's tail is repeated constantly in the young style tide she formed when you did a great job joe thank you so much for having me o