Tai Chi Philosophy and  Women’s Empowerment

© 2002 Susan A. Matthews

What can you achieve by practicing Tai Chi?
Tai Chi fosters creativity, intuition and self actualization. It increases sensitivity and awareness that can broaden your horizons. Women can use the principles of Tai Chi to empower themselves in ways that can benefit the whole world. Our feminine strength, Yin Power—the hidden force—so available through the practice of Tai Chi, forms a natural counterbalance to the masculine yang force in our world that breeds competition, war, domination, and control—leaving much of the world needy and suffering.
Women already have the power. We only need to learn how to direct it to rebalance the world. We are healers, cooperators, idea makers, artists. We can generate creative solutions to problems and trigger a global shift towards balancing yin and yang forces. All of this is possible when each woman feels herself to be empowered as an individual.

Tai Chi practice specifically addresses the most pressing women’s health issues. You can become physically stronger, with healthier tissues and more vitality. You can avoid being subjected to the medical system’s inherent neglect of women’s needs. Taking charge of your own health care means taking charge of your own life! You can even save money on health care. Aging, breast cancer, arthritis, osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s can be addressed in curative, holistic, preventive ways through the practice of Tai Chi and tapping into your Yin Power.
Understanding Yin Power includes searching for your inner self and allowing it to express itself. Spirituality, creativity, intuition, and inner wisdom give you the power to step out confidently. You can find strength in relationship with yourself, with others, with nature.

Success in my workshops and classes stems from combining western science with eastern energetics and movement. This very unique and effective approach is a mind-body-spirit training system made up of techniques that train individual parts of your body as well as their relationship to each other. In and out of class, women practitioners consistently experience profound benefits by employing the principles of Tai Chi in daily life. My students and I are all getting younger in body and wiser in mind and spirit.

Here’s How We Do It!
Tai Chi, as well as the closely related practice of Qigong, can be described in terms of physical biomechanical movement, visualization of movement of internal energy, and mental, or spiritual, intent. Practitioners integrate all of these to create effective whole-body movement, full of power and spiritual development—with a very real potential to heal.

1. Get More Energy
The first goal is bring health and energy to physical tissues, which eventually leads to a healthier, more energetic psyche and spirit. This requires a daily practice of self care and prevention, and learning about your anatomy and biological systems. Increased energy enables you to "see" the world in new ways. We use the following two techniques, among others, to gather energy.

Blood Circulation and Energy Gathering Qigong—In class, we learn simple, yet powerful, exercises that increase relaxation, health and longevity. Massage and movement are employed to improve the functioning of major physiological systems. Better blood and lymph circulation, and internal organ health, including the breasts, results. The nervous system is activated to work more efficiently. Blood pressure and heart rate are controlled, stress is reduced, and digestion improves. The endocrine and immune systems become balanced. Your joints become less painful and more flexible. You achieve peace of mind. The drain on your energy is reduced.

Grounding—Increase energy, consciousness, sensitivity and mind in the body by energetically grounding, filling, and connecting the three dantiens (head, heart, womb), and the zhong ding (central equilibrium) with the energy outside the body and moving with it, healing with it. Energy in the body, and blood and energy circulation to the brain sharpen awareness. We wake up in the moment in a state of peace.

2. Get Physical Power, Strength
The superior strength that can be generated using Tai Chi techniques is particularly suited to women’s bodies, because it teaches yin, or feminine, force rather than hard muscular force. A Tai Chi practitioner gets more strength out of being relaxed, loose, soft, yet extremely connected so that one learns how to use the body’s entire structure, especially bones, for strength. As a woman develops internal "core" strength she gains emotional strength and spiritual wealth. Core strength is important for a woman to heal, especially from old abuse. Even the women living with a "core" of fear can experience peace.

Biomechanics of Rooting—Obtain a strong "root" by understanding postural alignment in gravity, the mechanics of transferring weightedness to the feet, and lowering the center of balance.

Full body integration and connectivity—Chan SSu Chin practice, or the Biomechanics of Spiraling Bones, strengthens and connects joints and tendons into a continuous "snake." Physical strength is greatly increased through the use of integrated "bone" power rather than relying on muscular strength. Healthier bones and more flexible joints result.

3. Yin-Yang Theory Applied to Daily Life
Create balance, physical stability, and relaxation by learning how to first gather energy inward in order to project yourself outward. Take conscious control of minute aspects of your body and every aspect of the self by practicing exercises of looking inward and grounding to the earth both physically and energetically.

4. Understanding and Using Yin Force
Various Tai Chi exercises strengthen the mind’s connection to Yin Power, or the gathering and storing of energy. Yin is the flow of creativity—the manifestation of ideas, art, and intention. Yin is the current behind the outward flow of Yang, which is the expression of creativity and the qualities of higher self. Yin force uses power generated in the lower abdomen, the dantien, and is easier to cultivate in women, because they have a womb.

Dantien Energy Power—Dantien rotation exercises develop fluid movements which begin deep inside and move the extremities. Transmit energy from heaven and earth through the heart to the hands, as an individual, beautiful, wise and full of love.

Zhong Ding training cultivates awareness and energy in the spine, fostering a connection to intuition, higher consciousness and higher energy centers. Cultivating jin suspends the spine between Heaven and Earth.

5. Harmony and Nature
We all want to live on the planet in healthy ways. In the Taoist tradition, maintaining a balance of yin and yang manifests harmony with nature and with natural cycles. Tai Chi cultivates an inner harmony of movement and mental focus that expands outward into the world. Nature becomes self. Harmony with others becomes self.

Two-person exercises—Experience the power, joy and creativity released as we allow ourselves to experience a synergy of mind and heart with other individuals.

Broadsword training—Learn how to manifest expression of energy of the greater self through use of the sword.

About Susan A. Matthews, M.S.
Susan Matthews has practiced Tai Chi and Qigong for nearly two decades and has experienced the wisdom and benefits of integrated health care. Employing a method of assimilating human anatomy with ancient Chinese understanding of the internal workings of the human spirit, she has effectively taught students and patients in personal consultation. There are no real secrets in the remarkable stories of healing that many of her students and patients tell, and Sifu Matthews takes little credit for their achievements. But there is a trick. It is simply a trick of knowing human anatomy through her own experience as a long-time practitioner of Tai Chi and Qigong—this combined with her ability to quickly and accurately assess the patient’s physical condition and understanding it as a symptom or a manifestation of their emotional, mental, and spiritual state. She then shows them how to fix the problem themselves. If you stay with her long enough and develop a home practice, you continue to learn and discover techniques for building a stronger, more relaxed whole being.

Sifu Matthews has been teaching Tai Chi and has been involved in the psychology of personal growth for 20 years. Before that she spent 10 years in research in the biomedical sciences. She received a Master’s degree from the Univ. of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio Graduate School in Anatomy and Neuroscience. Her research was in the neuroendocrinology of the pineal gland. She also holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Fort Lewis and a B.S. in Molecular Biology from UT Dallas.
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