Tai Chi is primarily about somatic transformation

 

Much of how we understand change is shaped by our beliefs, insights, intentions, and explanations, but a prerequisite for sustainable change begins in the body.

This is what I mean by somatic transformation: a lasting shift in how the body organizes itself in the world, how it breathes, balances, responds to stress, and moves through space. When this changes, thoughts and emotions follow naturally without force or self-management

For those who are not familiar with somatic, let’s break it down:

• Somatic = of the body (muscles, breath, posture, nervous system, sensations)
  
  

• Transformation = a durable shift, not a temporary technique or mood

So somatic transformation means:

Rewiring how your body experiences and responds to life, especially stress, emotion, and threat. Additionally, it is having your body open to deeper sensations that people who rush through life can’t feel. 

For me, Tai Chi is one of the most effective ways to cultivate this kind of transformation.

I believe that people who stick with Tai Chi don’t practice it as a hobby but as something that is fundamentally being addressed only at the level of the body.

In contrast, Buddhist meditation sharpens awareness and reveals how the mind creates suffering through clinging. These insights are valuable and necessary. Yet insight alone does not always change how the body reacts.

A person can understand non-clinging intellectually and still brace under stress. They can grasp emptiness conceptually and still live with chronic tension, shallow breathing, or a nervous system locked in fight or flight. This is not a failure of understanding. It is a limitation of cognition as the primary vehicle of change.

Tai Chi addresses this gap directly.

Rather than arguing with the mind, Tai Chi trains the body to experience stability without rigidity, power without force, and responsiveness without panic. Through slow, attentive movement, the nervous system learns, physically, what safety, balance, and adaptability feel like.

This learning does not require belief. It requires practice.

Movement as Embodied Wisdom

Tai Chi is often described as meditation in motion, but that description understates its depth. It is a method of reorganizing posture, weight transfer, and breath so that effort is distributed efficiently and excess tension is released.

Over time, practitioners stop forcing balance and begin allowing it. They stop bracing against gravity and begin working with it. The body learns to yield without collapsing and to issue power without aggression.

These are not metaphors. They are somatic facts.

This is why Tai Chi pairs so naturally with Buddhist principles. Where Buddhism clarifies the nature of the mind, Tai Chi trains the body to embody those insights. Non-attachment becomes the ability to let go of unnecessary muscular effort. Equanimity becomes a stable center under changing conditions. Presence becomes literally felt through the feet, the spine, and the breath.

Grounding Through Action

Somatic transformation deepens when movement is connected to activities that have grounded humans for millennia, walking long distances, working with the hands, preparing food, shaping materials, and spending time in natural environments.

These activities anchor awareness in necessity and consequence. They provide feedback that is immediate and honest. They prevent practice from drifting into abstraction or performance.

This is also where Tai Chi distinguishes itself from purely symbolic or ritualized systems. While any tradition can become decorative or performative, Tai Chi continually returns the practitioner to functional realities, balance, structure, timing, and adaptability. If these are absent, the practice simply does not work.

In this sense, Tai Chi is not about cultivating an identity or performing a role. It is about becoming more inhabitable, learning to live inside the body with less resistance and more coherence.

Somatic Transformation as the Point

Somatic transformation does not eliminate thought or philosophy. It integrates them. When the body changes, reflection becomes clearer and ethical action becomes less reactive. Decisions arise from grounded awareness rather than compulsion or avoidance.

This is why Tai Chi has endured not as a belief system but as a practice. It offers a way for the body to learn what the mind often understands too late, how to move through the world without unnecessary struggle.

In that sense, Tai Chi is not a supplement to insight. It is its embodiment. And for those drawn to it over a lifetime, the transformation it offers is no mere accident. It is the point.

Your Body Is Not Broken It Is Stuck in Survival Mode

In my line of work, community health promotion, I occasionally see people who work out hard but then end up in the hospital. It took me a long time to understand why health is much more than lifting heavy weights and running marathons. It is also how your nervous system responds to a hectic environment.

Your nervous system runs on autopilot. This is the autonomic nervous system, and it is always working in the background, whether you are aware of it or not. It has two primary modes. One is sympathetic, which most people know as the fight-or-flight response. The other is parasympathetic, which is largely regulated through the vagus nerve. Neither system is bad. Both are necessary. The problem shows up when one dominates for too long.

Fight or flight is designed for short bursts. It raises heart rate, tightens muscles, sharpens focus, and redirects energy away from digestion and long-term repair. This is precisely what you want when danger is real. The body is doing its job.

The issue is that modern life keeps triggering this response without ever letting it shut off. Work pressure, trauma, poor sleep, constant stimulation, and unresolved stress all send the same message to the body. Stay alert. Stay ready. Over time, the autonomic system gets stuck in survival mode. The body never receives the signal that it is safe to stand down. Eventually, survival becomes the default state.

The vagus nerve represents the opposite side of this equation. It is the main pathway of the parasympathetic system, and it connects the brain to the heart, lungs, and gut. At its core, it is always asking a straightforward question. Are we safe enough to relax?

When the vagus nerve is engaged, heart rate slows, breathing deepens, digestion resumes, inflammation lowers, and the body can finally shift into repair mode. Stored stress and tension can begin to unwind. This transition cannot be forced through thought or willpower. The body has to feel safety before it will allow relaxation.

This is where Tai Chi becomes especially powerful. Tai Chi works because it speaks directly to the autonomic nervous system rather than trying to override it. Slow continuous movement reduces threat signals. Upright posture improves breathing and circulation. Rhythmic motion steadies the nervous system and supports healthy heart rate variability. Attention stays in the body instead of spiraling through anxious thought loops.

Unlike intense exercise, Tai Chi does not keep pushing the body deeper into fight or flight. Unlike passive relaxation, it does not lead to collapse or spacing out. It teaches the body how to move out of survival mode and into vagal regulation smoothly, repeatedly, and safely.

Healing does not happen while the body is braced for impact. Trauma, inflammation, digestive issues, and chronic pain tend to persist when the nervous system believes danger is ongoing. Tai Chi creates a controlled environment where the body can relearn safety through movement, not by forcing calm, but by restoring balance.

Fight or flight keeps you alive. The vagus nerve teaches you how to recover. Tai Chi is one of the most practical ways to retrain the autonomic nervous system by using slow, intentional movement to signal safety, restore rhythm, and allow healing to happen naturally.

 

Karma, and Choosing The Path That Brings Growth

There is a real romance attached to special forces, especially when filtered through books and movies. Discipline, brotherhood, mastery under pressure, mythic testing of the self. But that romance usually edits out the moral residue. Carrying acts that do not align with your inner compass, wars that later reveal themselves as incoherent or unjust, and the long psychic aftermath. For someone wired like me, that dissonance would not have worked for where I needed to grow. It would have been a weight. This is not a critique of the warrior path, but a way of looking at paths and trends that society puts forth. 

The artist's path does not get the same cinematic glow, but it has its own rigor. Watching Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop is not about rebellion for its own sake. It is about pushing the limits of embodiment, expression, and presence. They are not escaping discipline. They are channeling it through a different nervous system. The same is true of great guitar players, dancers, and writers. They are testing how much truth a human body and mind can carry and still stay alive.

That is the parallel with special forces that does not get named often enough. Both are about capacity. One is romanticized because it serves power structures. The other is tolerated because it does not.

Karma matters here. Karma is not about what looks noble from the outside. It is about what pulls you and what will not leave you alone. It is about what you have to do in order to become whole. A soul does not choose the path society applauds. It selects the terrain where its work actually is.

I was born to hippie parents and exposed early to art, music, and Asian philosophy. That was both a gift and a destabilization. I was not handed a single narrative and told to stay inside it. That freedom came with existential vertigo. Other kids had rails, religion, culture, and certainty. I had openness, and openness without grounding can feel like falling.

Punk rock mattered because it gave me a reset. Not truth exactly, but a refusal of false certainty. A clearing of the table. From there, it made sense to look for something older than ideology. Primitive art, early human mark-making forms that emerged from survival and meaning-making rather than doctrine.

Wood carving held that truth. The material does not care what you believe. Grain runs where it runs. Cut against it, and you pay. Follow it, and the form emerges. Every carver anywhere in the world learns the same lessons. That is an embodied truth. That is also why Tai Chi found me. The body reveals what the mind endlessly argues about.

So when I chose art because it offered the most freedom, I would adjust that slightly. It provided the most honest constraints. Freedom inside reality, not fantasy. Wood. Breath. Movement. Health. Writing. None of these lets you delude yourself for long.

Seen from that angle, my life makes a quiet, but precise sense. Carving, health promotion, Tai Chi, writing, and community work in Taos help me translate ancient nonverbal truths into modern contexts where people are profoundly disconnected from their bodies and from meaning. I did not join the army, but I still serve. I did not go to war, but I work with suffering, discipline, and repair.

The question of where the best place for me is might not be geographic at all. It might be this. Standing at the intersection of art, movement, health, and meaning, doing the work that will not leave me alone. From a karma perspective, that is not indecision. That is alignment in motion.

It isn't romantic, but it is necessary.

The Most Overlooked Wilderness Survival Skill: Tai Chi

Outdoor skills are usually framed around the same familiar categories: navigation, fire building, first aid, layering, risk management, and physical conditioning. We talk endlessly about gear, preparation, and the right tools to carry into the backcountry. But there is a missing category that rarely makes it into the conversation, even though it directly shapes how we move, think, and make decisions when the terrain changes or the unexpected happens. It has nothing to do with equipment and everything to do with the person carrying it.

That missing category is our internal skill set—our ability to regulate stress, stay composed under uncertainty, perceive subtle environmental cues, and move with stability even when tired or cold. These qualities often determine whether a situation remains manageable or begins sliding toward trouble. And one of the best ways to train them, though almost no one in the outdoor world talks about it, is Tai Chi.

Most people think of Tai Chi as a gentle meditative practice, something done slowly in a park or community center. But Tai Chi is also practical conditioning for the nervous system and the body’s mechanics. It teaches you to interrupt panic before it snowballs. It teaches your breath to stay long when adrenaline wants to shorten it. It teaches smooth, efficient movement that reduces unnecessary strain and lowers the risk of slips or missteps. And it sharpens awareness so that details in the landscape become clearer instead of fading under stress.

I was reminded of all this on a recent winter hike in the Rio Grande Gorge. It’s a trail I’ve done many times, a descent into the canyon and a climb out along a steep and rugged slope. But with a fresh layer of snow, the trail vanished. The familiar markers were gone, and the terrain suddenly felt foreign. Even though I had the right gear, water, a knife, fire starter, and layers, there was still a moment where my stomach tightened and that subtle, disorienting whisper crept in: “You might be lost.” It wasn’t a dangerous situation yet, but it was enough to trigger the early stages of poor decision-making—the very thing most survival incidents are built on.

Instead of pushing forward blindly, I stopped. I found a patch of sunlight, took a moment to warm my hands, and settled my breath. Then, almost instinctively, I began moving through a few Tai Chi patterns. Slow rotations. Shifting weight. Feeling the ground beneath me instead of fighting it. The more I moved, the more the anxiety dissolved. The land stopped feeling like an adversary. My senses widened. I began noticing small landmarks I had overlooked a few minutes earlier—the way a cluster of rocks opened in one direction, the faint rise of a ridge I recognized, the subtle indentation of the path beneath the snow. Within minutes, the terrain reorganized itself in my mind and the trail appeared again, almost effortlessly.

It struck me afterward how natural that sequence felt. Tai Chi wasn’t something extra I added to the hike; it was a built-in reset button. It prevented me from compounding a small problem into a real one. The practice didn’t “save me”—the situation wasn’t extreme enough for that—but it absolutely corrected the direction of my thinking before it slid into unnecessary risk. And that is the essence of internal survival skill.

When adrenaline hits outdoors, people tend to move faster, breathe shallower, and narrow their awareness. Tai Chi trains the opposite pattern. It teaches you to slow down just enough to see clearly again. It reminds the body how to generate warmth without burning energy, using rotation and breath to bring circulation back into your hands and feet. It keeps your joints soft instead of rigid, which dramatically reduces the likelihood of small but consequential injuries. And it cultivates a wide, open form of attention that lets you read terrain instead of fight it.

None of this requires mystical thinking. These are practical, testable qualities. They translate directly onto icy trails, steep scrambles, loose scree, snow-covered switchbacks, and long climbs. Anyone who spends time outdoors knows that panic, rushing, and missteps cause far more emergencies than rare dramatic events. Tai Chi is one of the few practices that directly conditions the internal mechanics behind those mistakes.

And perhaps most importantly, it’s accessible. You don’t need to be flexible or athletic. You don’t need equipment. You don’t need decades of training. A handful of simple motions can help you breathe deeper, move smarter, and reset your nervous system when the environment becomes challenging. You can practice it at a trailhead, during a rest break, or in the middle of a canyon when the snow makes the world look unfamiliar.

Outdoor participation is higher than ever, and so are preventable incidents caused by panic, poor footing, cold, and decision fatigue. At the same time, athletes across disciplines are embracing breathwork, somatic awareness, and mobility training. Tai Chi exists right at the intersection of these trends, yet it’s rarely discussed in the outdoor community.

It should be. Because ultimately, survival is not just about what you carry in your pack. It’s about the clarity, stability, and awareness you bring to the moment things don’t go as planned. Tai Chi strengthens those qualities. It makes the outdoors feel not just safer, but more alive. It changes how you read the land, how you move through it, and how you respond when the unexpected happens.

It’s not simply a practice—it’s a skill. And for anyone who spends time in wild places, it’s one worth learning.

Don’t Die With Your Sword in Its Sheath

 

One of the saddest truths we face in life is unused potential. We feel it when we see a young person lose themselves to addiction, or worse, when a life ends before it even begins. What hurts isn’t only the event itself — it’s the weight of all that could have been. The paths not taken. The possibilities never lived out.

This ties directly into one of my favorite teachings from Miyamoto Musashi:
“You should never die on the battlefield with your sword in its sheath.”

Musashi wasn’t talking only about combat. He was speaking to the idea that each of us carries a unique weapon — talent, strength, purpose, creativity, spirit — and the real tragedy is leaving this world without ever drawing it. Not using what we were given. Not stepping into the fight that is uniquely ours.

To “die with your sword in its sheath” is to go through life never expressing your potential, never taking your shot, never revealing your true capability. It isn’t about winning or losing — it’s about showing up fully.

Life is unpredictable. Time moves fast. And none of us know how many chapters we have left. But we do know this:
Your gift doesn’t serve anyone if it stays unused.

So whatever your “sword” is — your creativity, your discipline, your voice, your compassion, your wisdom, your strength — draw it. Use it. Let it leave a mark.

The real tragedy isn’t failure.
The real tragedy is the potential that never sees the light of day.