Tai Chi this morning took me a little bit more than a half-hour. I was able to slow down quite a bit with my practice, largely by taking a great deal of care to move on each inward breath, and to pause on the outward breath. There’s a visual image going around on some of the social media boards of a series of polygons opening up from triangle to square, from square to pentagon, and so on up to an octagon. Hang on. I should find it.
Yep. This is the speed at which I was trying to breathe each breath. I don’t know if the animation is going to work yet; it’s pretty clunky at the moment, but maybe that will improve once the page is saved and published. Is it helping that I’m using the memory of this image to improve my breathwork in the tai chi form? I hope so. It’s been valuable so far, and I’ve gained quite a bit of extra time on each performance of the tai chi form while using this to time my breathwork.
Holy crap, that animation is making my brain all kaleidoscopey. It’s magical, perfect, even better than that leg lamp from “A Christmas Story.” Seriously though, what you are saying about the breathing resonates with me. When stress strikes, when things go sideways (on or off the training mat) the chicken-or-the-egg accompaniment sloppy breathing. You are very thought provoking today sir.