Tactics, Patience, and Tai Chi

Bill Waugh spent his life operating in environments where impatience got people killed.

Behind enemy lines, in surveillance, in tracking targets over months, he learned something most people miss.

Tactics are not about aggression.
They are about timing, listening, and restraint.

Waugh famously said:

“Heroes are men who have a plan, and who understand the plan is ever-changing and dependent on enemy action.”

That single line could be written on the wall of any Tai Chi school and still be correct.

Tai Chi, at its core, trains the same discipline. You enter a form with structure, but you never cling to it. The moment you force a movement, balance is lost. The moment you refuse to adjust, you’re already behind.

Waugh’s approach to tactics wasn’t speed or dominance. It was presence. He spent weeks watching before acting. He waited for patterns to reveal themselves. Listening came before movement.

Tai Chi calls this listening energy, but stripped of mysticism, it simply means this:
You don’t impose your will until the situation gives you information.

Another lesson from Waugh’s life is patience as an active state. He wasn’t waiting in a lazy way. He was constantly observing, calibrating, refining his understanding of terrain, behavior, and timing. That same patience shows up in Tai Chi when you settle your weight, regulate your breath, and feel for alignment instead of rushing to the next posture.

In both cases, stillness is not hesitation.
It is preparation.

Waugh adjusted constantly. Small shifts in position. Slight changes in routine. Nothing dramatic. Those micro-adjustments over time created survival.

Tai Chi does the same thing to the body and nervous system. Tiny corrections in posture and movement prevent collapse. Large, forced corrections create instability.

The overlap is simple and practical:

• Have a plan, but don’t worship it
• Listen longer than feels comfortable
• Move only when movement improves position
• Conserve energy
• Adjust early and quietly

Tai Chi doesn’t teach tactics in a military sense.
What it teaches is something more durable.

How to stay engaged without rushing.
How to act without panic.
How to wait without freezing.

Those are not philosophical ideas.
They are survival skills.

And they’re the same ones Bill Waugh trusted with his life.

Humans Need Something to Do With Their Hands

 

Depression and anxiety are often talked about as personal failures or chemical imbalances that need to be corrected. But I think there’s another layer that rarely gets enough attention. For nearly all of human history, people were occupied for most of their waking hours with physical, tangible work. We grew food. We hunted. We built shelters. We made tools. We repaired what broke. Our survival depended on daily engagement with the physical world.

That reality has changed radically in a very short span of time. In the last fifty years, large portions of the population no longer need to do much with their bodies or their hands to survive. Yet paradoxically, we are more mentally overstimulated and stressed than ever.

I notice this very clearly in my own life. When I am the most anxious or depressed, it is almost always when I am sitting still, mentally spinning. My mind starts running endless scenarios, what-ifs, regrets, and imagined futures. None of it is productive. None of it is grounded. It’s just noise.

The moment I pick up a craft, something changes.

When I start carving wood, cooking, fixing something, or engaging in physical movement, the mental clutter quiets down. My attention narrows. The hands take over. The mind no longer has the bandwidth to spiral. It isn’t forced into silence; it is occupied.

Occupation as Regulation

This isn’t about productivity or hustle. It’s about regulation. Humans evolved to regulate their nervous systems through physical engagement with the world. Making, moving, lifting, shaping, walking, tending. These activities give the mind a place to rest because attention has somewhere to go.

I often think about autoimmune disease as a loose metaphor here. In overly sterile environments, the immune system sometimes loses its appropriate targets and begins attacking the body itself. I am not saying all autoimmune disease works this way, or that everyone with autoimmune illness is idle. But I do think the pervasiveness of sterile, low-engagement environments has consequences for biological systems that evolved in a very different context.

The mind may not be that different.

When it has nothing meaningful to do, it often turns inward and begins attacking itself. Rumination, self-criticism, catastrophic thinking. Not because the person is weak, but because the system is under-used in the way it evolved to function.

A World That Doesn’t Need You, But Still Stresses You

We now live in a strange contradiction. The world does not require much from our bodies, yet it demands constant mental vigilance. Emails. Deadlines. News cycles. Financial anxiety. Abstract stress with no physical outlet.

Unless you have Zen-level mental discipline, this is a brutal setup.

I wish my mind were strong enough to simply will its way through this. I do believe that kind of training is possible, and I work toward it. But I also think it’s important to be honest about what humans actually need. For most of history, we didn’t meditate our way out of stress. We worked it out through physical engagement.

We whittled. We cooked. We built. We repaired. I honestly don’t know if there has ever been a time when humans weren’t doing this, until now.

Keeping Your Head Together

This isn’t about the root cause of depression. It isn’t about dismissing therapy, medication, or deeper psychological work. It’s about something much more basic.

Keeping yourself occupied in a tangible way is a form of mental hygiene.

Using your hands calms the mind. Moving the body organizes attention. Making something creates feedback, satisfaction, and a sense of completion that abstract tasks rarely provide. Sometimes that turns into gifts. Sometimes it turns into skills. Occasionally, it even turns into a career. But that’s not the point.

The point is simpler.

Staying human in a world that increasingly asks you to be disembodied requires intention. Craft and physical activity are not hobbies in that context. They are stabilizers. They are ways of staying sane. They are ways of keeping your head together.

And for a species that evolved by doing, there might not be a better way to stay grounded.

A Small Epiphany about Animal Consciousness

Recently my wife mused aloud questioning what could be occupying our pet's minds. I quickly brushed it off saying that all they think about is food. Since it was a rainy weekend and I had time, I decided watch a few TED talks on animal consciousness. One talk was given by Carl Safina, a noted writer on animal ecology, who wrote a book entitled Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel. Here is a link to the video  Not too far into the video, he made me feel foolish about giving short shrift to my wife's question. I also watched a few others but for the sake of brevity and clarity I will just stick to the one video. So not only did I immediately feel foolish, I also decided to open my mind and that simple but difficult action was like the sun bursting through the clouds on a rainy day. This inspired me to take my dog, Chewie (Short for Chewbacca, my kids are Star Wars fans) out in the back yard and let him wander around, while I did some T'ai Chi. During the practice I felt a deeper level of awareness of my whole body, as I moved through the T'ai Chi form. I felt these physical epiphanies before but, this time I felt increased neural connectivity.

In addition to greater connectivity, I became poignantly aware of the tightrope walk between flight or fight responses and more graceful responses. This fertile place of true realization in the moment that doesn’t stick around too long is what T'ai Chi cultivates. T'ai chi in combination with some other more direct combative training is a great match for walking that tightrope. Some might and some have questioned why practice T'ai Chi at all. 

I still practice it for three reasons: one, it makes my mind and body feel connected and that feels great; two, the research says T'ai Chi is good for injury prevention and pain management; and thirdly, I believe T'ai Chi develops a deeper understanding of form and biomechanics and forces me to think about movement efficiency.

When my practice was done, I got a bow saw and cut a freshly downed branch of tulip poplar into smaller throwing size sticks, and threw one about 70 feet, so my dog could fetch it. He was in heaven, prancing about with that stick in his mouth. We just played and enjoyed the freedom of the moment. I am usually very critical, almost cynical about TED talks, but I have to admit watching that TED talk about animal consciousness really helped me become more aware of his sentience as well as my own.

What’s the Buzz about Mindfulness?

In America, mindfulness has been a buzz word since the 80’s and it is just as strong now as it was when it first appeared on the scene. Usually, a buzz word’s life span is pretty short. There is no doubt that mindfulness has staying power. Even though mindfulness has only been in the USA for a few decades, it has fascinated cultures around the world for thousands of years. Currently, there are a group of scientists who are trying to understand what exactly it is about mindfulness that makes people feel so good. The purpose of this essay is define and draw a distinction between mindfulness and meditation. 

Mindfulness is a good term because it implies that people can control their bodily drives by applying their mind in a particular way. It shares many qualities with self-regulation, and all people need that kind of reassurance. In fact, many human pursuits attempt to impose some type of regulatory principle over the body’s “evil” defaults of carelessness and selfishness. In Eastern mindfulness practices, there is a place for the mind to share in the internal regulation of bodily functions not just simply behavior modification. Unfortunately, many people confuse the terms mindfulness and meditation. They are often used synonymously but there are major differences. Mindfulness has been defined many ways. The most common definition is by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who defines mindfulness “as paying attention in a particular way on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.” Ellen Langer and Herbert Benson were some of the first people to explore this phenomenon. In her 1974 bestselling book “Mindfulness,” she gives us many related phrases like “being open to process.” Later in her 2000 paper on the construct of mindfulness, Langer states her definition this way: “The concept of mindfulness can be best understood as the process of drawing novel distinctions.” Herbert Benson went a different route. He looked at the physiological measures of meditation and found that meditation lowers the heart rate. He called this process the “relaxation response” (Benson & Wallace, 1972). Langer’s and Kabat-Zinn’s definitions make similar points. Langer’s “process of drawing novel distinctions” and Zinn’s “paying attention to things we ordinarily never give a moment’s notice to” propose that the mechanism of action within mindfulness is a cognitive one, while Benson relies more on physiological correlations. 

As you can see, there is still a lot of confusion surrounding the definition of mindfulness. It is a relatively new concept to the West and there are many components to mindfulness. In fact, mindfulness is such a broad term that it maybe impossible to truly define. One important point to bring up is that there are two meanings to mindfulness. First and foremost, it refers to a state of being in which one is being very careful and focusing attention on the task at hand while still keeping the mind open to new possibilities (my definition). Secondly, when many people use the term they actually mean meditation. Meditation is defined as a technique for self-induced manipulation of awareness. When the definition says, “technique,” it is referring to any activity such as, walking, sitting, moving, doing the dishes, and even lying down; really any action that requires intense focus with the intended purpose of altering consciousness.  So when athletes mention “being in the zone” they are talking about a special moment when then are deeply focused and all actions seem effortless and coordinated. My definition of meditation is a category of techniques that build self regulatory awareness over the mind and body, while maintaining a mind open to new possibilities.   

While teaching Tai Chi for the past 7 years, I became interested in how Tai Chi could develop a type of control over the body’s movements. One could control the distribution of weight from one part of their body to another. This more subtle level of control is a skill and it takes time to develop which is rather useful when one has an injury. If the front of one’s knee has a strain, that person could redistribute the weight towards the muscles in back of their knee and avoid re-injuring the front. The interesting element here is that people can intentionally regulate which part of the body received the majority of force or weight. Based on my experience and research in mindfulness meditation, it appears to me that meditation is the same technique of dispersion that is done with the body, only applied to the mind. It has been demonstrated in psychology that people often focus on a small portion of reality when speaking about it in the past tense. That theory is called, focalism. If mindfulness allows a person the ability to shift the attention to other aspects and broaden or enrich the person’s perception of reality in the present moment, then it is a similar tool as Tai Chi. 

I believe that shifting attention happens because of the sensory systems of the brain. Humans have five sensory systems, an optical, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and finally, somatosensory or touch. It is here in the very order that these senses are listed in every scientific text published, is also where our problem begins. Our culture is so visually and auditorily oriented that we suppress or ignore the other senses. When we have a problem we deal with it in our limited ways. This happens so many times we develop a repetitive motion injury of the mind. Our thinking becomes fixated on a narrow set of information and then we have trouble seeing beyond our problem or obstacle. We remain inside a small box. Mindfulness allows an opportunity for the other senses to contribute to our perception of the moment. We feel things emotionally and physically, we also hear things from outside this narrow margin of reality that our cognitive resources confine us to. Mindfulness opens up that door to other possibilities. It brings us outside that proverbial box. Also, we have to mention other possible senses that are not yet recognized scientifically. Although, this might make some scientists wince it is important to understand that things like, x-rays and wireless were science fiction, not too long ago. So that wince could slow the advancement of science. We must remain open to the possibility of other senses if we are to discover them. 

Finally, we could sum up that mindfulness is a large umbrella term that entails many components—for example, some type of “special awareness,” an internal sensory awareness with an external cognitive lens that allows out-of-the-box thinking. There is also a relaxation component and some physiological skills as well, such as posture and breathing; these components of mindfulness work together to assist in regulating these powerful biological determinants. Meditations have a different focus, referring to a specific means, where as mindfulness is a general state of being; a tactics vs. strategy kind of thing, meditation being the tactic and mindfulness being the overall strategy. With meditation, one could be more cognitive in nature while another is more physical. There are many components of a meditation practice, such as breathing, posture, relaxation, and usually a lecture giving instructions on how to deal with thoughts, especially emotionally-charged ones but they are focused. In mindfulness anything could be done mindfully from throwing out the garbage to painting a wall to sitting in a temple in front of a statue of the Buddha. The meditation would be called throwing out the garbage meditation, or painting wall meditation if of course they were performed mindfully. So here we are, meditation is the vehicle with the aim of achieving a state of being called mindfulness.