This is not how Americans usually exercise. Where are the machines? The banks of TVs? Where are the people in headphones trying to get from point A to point B as fast as they can? Instead, seven people stand on a patch of downtown lawn, doing very little, very slowly. So slowly it looks like bodies moving through water.
Arms slowly up. Push out. Pull back. Slowly. Shift your weight. Hold still for 30 minutes in a standing qigong meditation.
"Your thoughts are like cars passing," Don Stringham instructs the people on the lawn, who are dressed for work in ties and dress shoes and ID badges. Stringham's voice rises gently above the real traffic passing by on State Street. "Eventually your thoughts will settle like dirt in a glass of water." In this way, he tells them, they are beginning to cultivate their chi.
Every day, somewhere along the Wasatch Front, people are following instructions to cultivate their chi, redirect their chi, move the chi of the universe through their bodies. People in their 70s and 80s, including Flo Wineriter in his suspenders, are doing tai chi at senior citizens centers. On Tuesday mornings, Eva Goodfellow does tai chi sitting in a chair, her oxygen tank at her side.
People are doing tai chi and qigong not only at the Red Lotus School of Movement and Master Lu's studio, but at the library. Football players take tai chi classes at the University of Utah. People do tai chi at Sugarhouse Park, sometimes with swords. World War II veteran Marvin K. Gardner does qigong at the Veterans Administration hospital on Thursdays.
Both qigong and tai chi hinge on a notion that is radical to Western medicine: chi (pronounced chee), sometimes spelled qi (but also pronounced chee), moves through our bodies, and when the chi gets blocked we get sick. We can heal what ails us, this theory of Chinese medicine says, if we get the chi moving again.
Chi is usually described as energy flow, but that's really a poor description, says Brent Ottley, a Salt Lake City acupuncturist and qigong teacher, who teaches at the Yoga Center in Holladay. "The best definition of chi I know of is one paragraph long," he says, offering this as a possible shorthand version: "If you take a live person and a dead person and do the math, it's the difference."
In the United States, the words "tai chi" are more well-known than "qigong," though it is qigong that is the more inclusive term. Tai chi (the full name is tai chi chuan, literally "supreme ultimate fist") is actually the martial arts version of qigong, but many people who do tai chi in America do it for the health benefits rather than as self-defense. Qigong (literally, "energy work") — a slow-motion, more compact version of tai chi — is used as solely a healing practice.
There are now 10 million Americans and hundreds of millions of people worldwide who do tai chi and qigong, according to Bill Douglas, author of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi and QiGong" and founder of World T'ai Chi and QiGong Day. "We believe that in the next decade up to 50 percent of the world will be doing it, as the medical research extolling profound health benefits continues to pour forth from major health institutions worldwide," wrote Douglas in a recent e-mail from his home in Kansas City.
The health claims for tai chi and qigong range from "improves balance" to "recovery from incurable diseases." Qigong, the more subtly rigorous of the two exercise forms, is practiced for its healing benefits and makes the bigger claims.
Most of the Western studies have been on tai chi and have focused on the exercise's benefits to the elderly. The initial American study that made people sit up and take notice was undertaken at Emory University in Atlanta and was published in 1996 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The study compared the effectiveness of tai chi vs. a balance training machine. The conclusion, notes Bill Parkinson, who teaches tai chi at the University of Utah, was that tai chi works as well as the machine and is "safer, cheaper and more accessible."
Because tai chi emphasizes trunk rotation, an ability people often lose as they get older, it allows people to shift their weight gradually, thus helping them prevent falls, according to Steven Wolf, the study's lead author.
Other studies have found that tai chi can lower blood pressure almost as effectively as moderate aerobic exercise and that it helps increase joint mobility and bone density. The national Multiple Sclerosis Society recommends tai chi as a way of increasing flexibility without taxing the immune system.
Tai chi can be distilled down to five basic principles:
Relax.
Separate the yin and yang in the body (for example by putting all the weight on one leg while having the other completely relaxed).
Turn from the waist rather than just move the limbs.
Keep the body upright.
Keep the wrist straight.
All of which sounds pretty easy until you try it.
Relaxation is the key. Not the kind of relaxation where you sit back on the couch and watch TV but a relaxation in which even the blood vessels are soft, says Kayo Robertson, who teaches at the Bear River Tai Chi Chuan Society in Cache Valley. Even your internal organs are relaxed. "You cannot permit even a little tension. This is known as 'a soft waist that can fold a hundred times as if it had no bones.' " It's a sinking down rather than a floating, says Robertson, who has studied tai chi for 25 years.
"Relaxed means ready to do anything. An alertness," adds Salt Lake tai chi teacher Michael Berry. "If a muscle is tense, it's already doing something. That's the idea for the whole tai chi body — by not carrying a lot of doing around with it, it's ready to do."
Four-year-olds, unless they've been stressed, naturally have perfect tai chi bodies, says Robertson. "With tai chi you have a chance, if you're being trained in the principles, to regain that, at least in part. "
The claims for qigong are more dramatic. A few years ago, Dr. Rutian Huang of the Beijing College of Traditional Chinese Medicine lectured to a group of medical students at the University of Utah. After perching on the table, his body wrapped up like a pretzel, he unwrapped himself and told the students about his study of 10,544 patients, ages 11 to 93, suffering from maladies ranging from sciatica to cancer.
Half of the patients received qigong treatments and did qigong exercises (between eight to 10 hours a day for three to six months) but received no other treatment; the other half were in a control group, receiving Western-style care. According to Huang, 78.3 percent of the qigong group "completely recovered," compared to 25.1 percent of the control group. Tumors disappeared, as did evidence of heart disease, he said.
In the Chinese city of Qinhuangdao, the Huaxia Zhineng Qigong Clinic and Training Center — described as "the world's largest medicineless hospital" — claims that its patients have recovered from cancer, diabetes, heart disease, paralysis and systemic lupus by doing a type of qigong called Chi-Lel for eight hours a day. A Web site for Chi-Lel Qigong advertises a videotape called "101 Miracles of Natural Healing," which includes exercises and "a bladder cancer being removed in real-time using chi."
Don Glover, manager of mental health clinical services at the VA Hospital in Salt Lake, teaches Chi-Lel to outpatients once a week at the hospital. "It's not a magic bullet," says Glover. "You need to practice over time to move the energy in your body."
"It's not like presto-chango," adds Ottley, who practices a type of qigong called Soaring Crane. Still, he has seen miracles, he says. "I've seen people who have given up, who were supposed to be dead in three months, and years later they're disease-free. But it's not a panacea."
It's pretty tough to learn tai chi from a video, says Stringham, who teaches tai chi through Davis County community education, plus that free class twice a week in a downtown park. "You can learn the form and look pretty and not be increasing your balance or your chi," he says. To do tai chi without learning the essence of real relaxation first would mean just doing a pretty dance, he says.
"It's's not a matter of just waving your arms around in a certain way," Ottley adds. "For every movement there's a mental correlate. A visualization."
The correct stance is crucial for the chi to flow, says Jack Livingston, who last summer taught a free tai chi class at Sugarhouse Park. He had his students stand with left feet pointing toward 1300 East and right feet toward 2100 South, then instructed them to swivel at the hips toward the south. When a student winced, Livingston told the story of a master who made one student hold this stance for hours a week for two years straight.
How do you tell if your teacher is teaching you correctly? Ask who your teacher's teacher was, Robertson says. And look at your teacher's character. "Tai chi is about meeting the world with some measure of soft listening. So it should translate at some level to your character. Is there a sense of humility? Honesty?"
There is so much to learn from tai chi, beyond even balance and health, says Robertson. In the tai chi practice known as "push hands," there are lessons about handling conflict, he says. "There are other solutions besides force. You have to be willing to give up everything but your balance and your standing. I use it in all my relationships," he says. "You have to listen with your heart."
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com