Saint Louis
T'ai Chi Ch'uan
Thomas M. Krapu, Ph.D.

Developing, Maintaining and
Enhancing Daily Practice

by Thomas M. Krapu, Ph.D.

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A Case Study

Changing Behavior.

Taijiquan practitioners of all levels face difficulties in practice, whether they are beginners developing a daily practice, or intermediate and advance players who find their practice waning after having maintained a steady practice level. For instance, I have had periods of practice where I was doing standing meditation daily in addition to my form practice. I found this practice very rewarding in a number of ways, but over time I got away from that practice. This consisted of standing in the "wuji" posture, the starting posture of the form. Doing so helps you relax, build your root, and gather qi.

In the following I will not be discussing taijiquan principles, but psychological principles that can be used to facilitate our learning taijiquan principles. Recently I decided I wanted to reintroduce standing meditation into my daily routine. Below, I will share some psychological principles that I used to try to make this behavioral change. Perhaps these ideas will be helpful to those who want to be inspired to develop or increase their practice.

Two Principles

The first principle is, “observation facilitates change”. If we can observe ourselves, it often helps us identify what we are trying to change and find sources of reinforcement. Behavioral psychologists have come to rely heavily on this principle to help promote behavioral change.

The second principle is that "positive reinforcement can result from the success of attaining a goal". Success, no matter how small the goal, is important. People trying to make behavioral changes sometimes set their goals so high that success becomes much less likely and positive reinforcement more elusive. For this reason, my initial goal in returning to daily standing meditation was simply to begin doing it every day, using the "minimal practice" concept. I decided to just observe it and see what happened.

Knowing this, I decided to keep track of my daily standing over time. Each day, I set a simple timer I carry to count how long I stood. I rounded the time to the nearest minute and kept track with a spreadsheet. What is interesting is that being able to look at your practice over time potentially does a number of things. First of all, it helps you see shortcomings from a larger perspective. For instance, for the first three weeks of my efforts I was teaching a class at a university on Tuesday and Thursday at 8:30 in the morning (my usual day goes from about 9 am into the evening). I immediately saw that Tuesday mornings in particular were very hard to practice my standing at all. As I looked at a pie chart of my first three weeks practice I saw that my practice on Tuesdays suffered. I saw how “life” intruded on my practice.

The early morning class I was teaching made it difficult to maintain my goal of daily standing meditation. But I was determined to not let two days in a row go by where I did not practice. I did not let these minor setbacks ruin the overall goal I was striving for. And in fact, what I found was that after this class ended, my charting showed that my life changed in a way that tend to "average out" these missed days.

While I continued my practice I kept an eye on my overall progress with a line graph (below) that charted my progress. I saw that overall, I was succeeding even though my behavior was not perfect. There were missed days, and even one instance where I missed two days in a row (days 54 and 55).

Click here to view this line graph in a separate browser window.

These missed days seemed "inevitable" as I looked back at them. For instance there was a morning that I was three minutes into my standing when my three-year-old son, Benjamin came up to me and said, “Daddy, I need to poop.” (Day 26). Needless to say, that turned out to be a three-minute morning. Someone once said, “Life is what happens after you make your plans.” But I also saw, that this one aspect of my life did not need to interfere with my overall practice and over time it tended to "average out". I was seeing my perseverance and realizing that the goal of restoring this practice in my daily life was being achieved.

As I looked at my practice over time, and from the distance of a spreadsheet that showed my practice numerically and visually, I began to have a greater appreciation for what I was doing, and found reinforcement in many aspects of this experience. These created more immediate results that helped me maintain my practice and persevere over time. For instance I watched the time add up and realized I was accomplishing HOURS of standing, just a little at a time (see totals in upper left corner of spreadsheet and example immediately below).

Click here to view this graph in a separate browser window.

Also, I knew that my standing meditation was beginning to become automatic when on December 23rd (Day 36) I forgot to set my stop watch and had to estimate my standing time that day. For people with Internet access, I have made this original data available through a web page, including the original Excel spreadsheet (if you have Microsoft Excel) to view my data and a template spreadsheet if you want to download it to experiment with this for yourself.

http://www.krapu4.com/taichi/practice.htm

It is my hope that some of the ideas in this article are helpful to both beginners and more advanced practitioners. I hope your reading this will inspire you to work toward a more consistent and enduring practice of this art. If even one person is able to apply some of what I have written here and enhance their practice through it, then the effort of having written this article will have been worth it. People have practiced taijiquan for at least a couple hundred years and more recently from all walks of life and from all different cultures. Through daily practice these people have found benefits from taijiquan that made them feel that every effort was worth it in the end.

Biography:

Dr. Tom Krapu () has studied Eastern philosophy, Western psychology and maintained (for the most part) a daily practice since 1972. He is a professional coach and licensed psychologist in Saint Louis, Missouri. He has practiced t’ai chi ch’uan since 1985 and is occasionally a t’ai chi ch’uan instructor. He provides various information to the t'ai chi community through a webpage he has developed (http://www.krapu4.com/taichi/). He has developed a t’ai chi weekend retreat format for silent meditative practice, developed a webpage summarizing research findings on t’ai chi ch’uan and is also the cofounder of a private listserv for the dissemination of information between practitioners of Cheng Man’Chings Yang Family Short Form.

Special thanks to Ms. Barbara Davis, the editor of Taijiquan Journal for her permission to reproduce this article on my webpage.

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