exercise

The speaker discusses the importance of wellness and how different practices like yoga, Tai Chi, and meditation can improve posture and overall health. They also mention the benefits of gentle exercises like Qi Gong and the importance of finding suitable exercises as one gets older. The speaker also mentions their experience with martial arts and the difference between hard and soft styles of movement. They conclude by emphasizing the importance of exercise and staying fit. Hi, I hope everyone is well, as well as can be expected. People have different levels of wellness, interior, external, and we all approach wellness according to our own needs. So this morning I needed a break, I started off as a monkey, walking, that's the walking in a sort of crouched position, and years ago I went on a retreat, this was a yoga retreat for the weekend, and after the first session in the morning I went outside and my whole back had straightened up and I wasn't walking like a monkey, which I obviously was previously, my whole spine had been uncurved through doing yoga. That's how powerful it can be in changing our posture and improving our posture. So anyway, this morning I went for a walk, started as a monkey, and gradually straightened up. It's just a question of bringing the hips forward and the shoulders back a bit, and just balancing the head on top of the neck properly. I think they do this sort of thing, it's not something I know much about, but the postural systems like chiropractitioners, and there's another one which I forget the name of, but I've done it mostly through yoga and through Tai Chi, and also through meditation, specifically Zen meditation, where you learn to sit and you learn to straighten the back and be pulled up by the straightness. I think it's the Hare Krishna people, they talk about the little top knot, and some of them shave all their hair off and they just have a top knot, and you imagine that Krishna is pulling you up by the hair to straighten you up. So this is the equivalent of that. Anyway, so I went for a walk and saw some Mandarin, quite nice to see somebody feeding the Mandarin duck, just one, but it was the male and the female together, so that was good to see. And then came back, I've been doing a bit of, just a few minutes of the warm-up, Qi Gong, part of Tai Chi Chuan, and that was very useful. It's very useful, again, to straighten and just to do the very gentle exercises. One of the problems with Western styles of exercises, they're far too intense and far too strenuous as you get older. As you get older you need to find what you've done previously, whatever that may be, it may be swimming, if you can still go swimming, it may just be walking, if you've walked all your life, some people have done running, there's all different ways of improving the health. And I know some of you are not able to even do those things, so you have to learn to do tension, isometric tension exercises are very good in a supine position. So there's all sorts of things. If you're younger you can do things like the plank, press-ups, the dog, the downward dog, the salutation to the sun, all these kinds of more intense forms of exercise. Anyway, so the Tai Chi went well. It's always good to remember how internal or how soft the movements appear because they're all about relaxation, they're not about tension. My natural inclination is to use some of the techniques I learnt in Wushin Tao which was a Buddhist style of fighting and it was very circular but it was also based upon relaxation and tension, the power sort of came from this tension at the end of a strike. This is typical of karate styles and hard styles of martial art. They're hard in the sense that they use physical strength, so we did a lot of strengthening exercises and that in itself is a very useful thing to do and some people do it for their whole life. Anyway, so I've ended up talking about exercise and keeping fit and all the rest of it. I hope that's of some use to you. All right, that's all from me today. Bye now.