Tai Chi and IT

I count myself incredibly lucky that I can dedicate my time to teaching and learning tai chi. Before I became a full time instructor, I had a career in IT and computing for well over a decade.

Now, there aren’t many links between tai chi and IT but I do remember that as a part of several of my IT jobs I would have to take a look at computers that had started to run slowly.

Quite often it was because the hard drive (where all of the information is stored) needed tidying up and a process called defragmentation would usually do the trick.

Basically if you imagine a computer’s hard drive as a book shelf, when you save something like a document it could be split up and saved in several different locations on the hard drive. A bit like a book’s pages being saved in different locations on the shelf.

This isn’t too efficient and what you’d ideally like is for the whole document (or book) to be saved together, making it quicker to open again when you need to access it.

The process of defragmentation does exactly this, it organises your documents so that they are saved more efficiently.

I find that our brains can sometimes feel like a hard drive that needs to be defragmented!

Scattered thoughts, stresses, emotions, busy days… etc, these can be the root cause of many problems – a little bit like a computer that needs to be repaired!

For me, meditation is defragmentation for my brain. When I meditate regularly, I feel more organised, more connected, more efficient, more content, happier. It doesn’t take much, just a few minutes each day – but I really notice it if I haven’t practiced for a few days.

Meditation is a key part of tai chi practice and if you haven’t already, I recommend that you make it at least a small part of your practice also.

We have a free seated meditation on White Crane Online, you can follow along with it here.

It’s a very simple, yet effective, meditation that I learnt a Buddhist centre in Brighton, UK that I used to visit on my lunch break from work… when fixing computers had become a bit too much!

I hope you enjoy it. If you’d like more, you can always subscribe and follow along with many more meditations, qigong routines, learn tai chi… and much more!