Restore Health, Relieve Stress, and Develop Mindfulness
Looking for a place to practice Tai Chi in Portland, Oregon? Northwest Fighting Arts offers professional Tai Chi classes in Portland to help you:
- • Develop a supple strength and flexibility
- • Develop grace and balance through strengthening core support muscles
- • Gradually increase bone density
- • Release stress through breathing techniques
- • Learn how to maintain a calm center at all times
- • Increase your energy level
- • Clear your mind
Our Portland Tai Chi classes help you develop a responsive and healthy body, a clear mind, heightened energy, and an awareness of a spirit. You will also learn how to effectively handle an opponent of greater size and speed. With the right timing, you don’t need to be the fastest; high levels of awareness allow you to see all the opportunities in front of you. When you see the opportunities around you, there is no need to force things.
Our Approach
Though originally practiced as a Martial Art, Tai Chi can be considered a “lifestyle enhancing practice.” Your practice will be on a spectrum ranging from medical/therapeutic, martial and philosophical, to spiritual. While any practice will contain pieces of each, your chosen focus will determine the shape of your training.
Breaking down Tai Chi training:
13 Original Postures of Tai Chi
The slow, weight-bearing movements of the Tai Chi forms build ligament strength and bone density. They also promote a healthy free range of motion in every joint of the body. The practice of Qigong involves mindfulness meditation, which means training our minds to stay present and fully focused on our actions and environment. Simply put, when the mind wanders, you bring it back to what you’re doing. This improves our ability to focus and center ourselves while reducing stress.
Our Portland Tai Chi training involves deep breathing techniques that improve your health and overall energy levels. Stances and forms may be modified to accommodate previous injury and can actually help rebuild structural strength and quality of movement. We will also help relieve stress and enhance your immune system with through mindfulness training. We can tailor your practice to support external treatments such as acupressure or acupuncture and address specific issues. In essence, the goal of Tai Chi is to promote a vital and healthy life.
The Martial Art side of Tai Chi is a subtle yet effective approach to self-defense. It’s a close fighting style that utilizes softness and following movements to lock and disrupt an opponent. One of the key principles of Martial Tai Chi is yielding to an opponent’s force and redirecting it to a disadvantageous position. This technique is combined with Fa Jing (the explosive release of force with the whole body) to take advantage of the opponent’s inferior position and structure. Martial training involves intense posture training to develop strength and endurance, while Qigong builds a high level of clarity and energy while conditioning the muscles and tendons.
The spiritual approach to these arts means constantly striving towards enlightenment. Buddhist and Taoist monks use Qigong as a vehicle to find and maintain peace of mind. The goal of this kind of training is to live in perfect harmony with the world. For most of us, this approach to training is simply about being more at peace with ourselves and learning to quiet the mind.
The philosophical side of the training shares some similarities with the spiritual approach. This training emphasizes high levels of clarity and focus. We develop the ability to work free from distraction, our thoughts coming from an unfiltered source without being diminished by negative mental habits.
If you’re interested in signing up or learning more about our Portland Tai Chi classes, then please call us today at 503-235-3435.