Taoist Yoga

Rarely taught in the West, Taoist Longevity Breathing Yoga^TM is Bruce Frantzis’ specific method for teaching Taoist yoga. Taoist Yoga is China’s soft yet powerful internal yoga system. The Taoists in China developed a complete yoga system based on the principles of flow and energy movement.

It involves stretching postures to develop the practitioner’s internal energy (also known as chi or qi) while making use of the relaxation principles of tai chi and qigong. Taoist yoga is a stress-reducing method for stimulating relaxed chi flow without using any force.

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8 Principles of Taoist Longevity Breathing Yoga

There are eight principles of Taoist Longevity Yoga:

Maintain the 70 Percent Rule
Breathe with Your Whole Body
When the Nerves Release, Chi Flows
Maintain Physical Alignments
Move in a Circular Manner
Put Your Mind inside Yourself
Balance the Energy Bodies
The Internal Release Causes the External Stretch

1. Maintain the 70 Percent Rule

Taoist Longevity Yoga never forces your body, breath or emotions, or demands that you do extreme stretching postures. Such postures can reinforce deeply embedded tensions, causing the nervous system to reflexively contract. Instead, principles of moderation are emphasized so that the nervous system never goes into overdrive. Habits of tension are replaced with habits of relaxation. The external look is not as important as what is happening inside the stretch. The key is stimulating chi flow to no more than 70 percent of your ability, whatever your current state of health.

2. Longevity Breathing: Use Your Breath to Relax

The primary emphasis in Taoist Longevity Yoga is to stimulate the flow of energy and free any blocked chi. Combining gentle postures and Taoist whole-body-breathing techniques (from the Longevity Breathingâ program) progressively opens the body’s energy channels, activating and strengthening the flow of chi. Taoist yoga has many gentle, seated postures, held from two to five minutes each. Because the postures require virtually no muscular effort, they enable you to “go internal” easily, to focus on feeling where the chi is blocked and to gently free it up. You quickly become aware of where chi is flowing and where it is not.

As you hold a posture or move to the next one, you are taught to breathe continuously and smoothly from the belly. The breath is never held or restricted; there is no forcing of the breath and no attempt to push or elongate the length of the inhale and exhale. Smooth, continuous breathing enables your nervous system to relax as you hold a posture or move to the next one. There is no activation of any physical, mental or emotional tension or contraction. Chi blockages therefore encounter progressively less resistance in the posture you are holding and are able to release until your chi eventually has a natural, free-flowing quality.

3. When the Nerves Release, Chi Flows

Your breath is a direct portal into your nervous system. Breath training is the easiest and most available tool for gaining access to the nerves and beginning to relax them into a state of clarity. So Taoist Longevity Yoga fosters relaxation, initially by focusing on the breath. The presence and peace of mind that you have created helps your nerves to release, which stimulates energy flow since chi runs through your nerves.

As your nerves let go, signals of tension to the muscles simultaneously become quiet. So taut tissue, ligaments and tendons can now open up and stretch further. Although the amount you stretch is not important, in time, you’re likely to find that your range of motion increases dramatically.

4. Physical Alignments

The basic postures in Taoist Longevity Yoga aim to open your body from the inside out, which allows your breath to fully enter every cavity of your body. Poor alignments close down the space inside your body, making it difficult for your breath to enter the body’s deeper interior folds and cavities.

Likewise, it is important that you do not collapse. Imagine you’re being gently held up by a string from the centerline of your body. Everything is gently lifted and not crushing anything else.

5. Circular Movement: Everything in Taoism Is a Circle

A fundamental principle of Taoism is that the body is a hologram. Every single part of your body is directly and energetically connected to every other part of your body. When practicing Taoist Longevity Yoga postures, it’s important to activate the body three-dimensionally.

If you feel something blocked anywhere in your body, you do not go further into the stretch. By applying the 70 percent rule, once you feel a blockage approaching you stop 30 percent before you get there. In the process of doing this, the energies in your body will link with each other and begin to become a hologram so that the flow between one part and every other either to the front, back or side part of the body is equal thereby greatly increasing the overall chi of your body.

6. Put Your Mind inside Yourself

Taoist Longevity Yoga aims to make everything inside your body conscious. It starts with training your mind to go inside yourself and become aware of what’s there. In the beginning, all you want to do is recognize what is present. When you go inside all you’re going to find is what’s there.

Once you develop your awareness, you will begin to notice that some places call out attention to themselves. These are places where chi is blocked and you’ll want to get them flowing smoothly again by using your mind’s intent. Without the use of force, you’ll simply see if you can get these areas to relax a little bit. You just have the willingness for them to relax—not a demand for them to.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. As you continue to practice, maybe even for just 15 minutes a day, you begin to transform deeply conditioned habits of tension in your body, mind and spirit into habits of relaxation. From this place, inner stillness and the calming of the mind can be achieved. The Taoists call it sung shin or “relaxing into your being.”

7. Balancing the Energy Bodies

Physical Balance

As with all chi practices, Taoist Longevity Yoga is about balancing all aspects of your being (i.e. all eight energy bodies). In the beginning, it’s about maintaining physical balance in the body. For example, you want to stretch left and right sides equally. If you can stretch all the way to the floor on one side of your body in a posture, but only a quarter of the way down on the other side of your body (the weaker side), you must release the resistance on the weaker side first before going any lower on either side. Not doing so will create imbalances that could lead to injury and other complications. We’re only as strong as our weakest link.

Energetic Balance

Pay attention to and observe any energetic imbalances in your body as you practice the postures. According to the Water tradition of Taoism, challenges such as injury, illness and emotional or physical issues are characterized by blockages. You want to actively wait for any blockages you discover to release as you practice Taoist yoga. As you go into a posture, you want to stop wherever you feel a blockage and actively wait there to see if you can relax it. Use your breath, your awareness and your intent and wait for the blockage to go of its own accord.

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8. Internal Release Causes External Stretch

We live in such a hurry-up-and-wait, exhausted, sleep-deprived society because people hold on to their tension. Most people don’t know how to let go even when they want to. Whatever we hold on to that isn’t real or necessary has a tendency to make us miserable. This is why letting go has such a powerful effect on human beings.

So how do you let go of your nerves? How do you get the energy flowing so your body can work properly and your muscles and nerves can relax? How do you go into the depths of your mind and discover the energy that powers your emotions? When your energy flows freely, everything else in your body can let go along with it. The internal release causes the external stretch in Taoist Longevity Yoga. You relax—from the inside out.

Why Practice Taoist Longevity Yoga?
When I was living in Tokyo at the age of 19, I studied Hatha yoga with Perr Wynter, a Norwegian man. His first teacher was an Indian yogi who lived up the fjord from him. When he was in his 20s, Perr went to India to study at the Shivananda Ashram and became an exceptional Hatha yogi. When he took some time to travel in Malaysia, his money and passport were stolen. So, in order to earn money, he worked for a circus and eventually became well known for folding himself into a suitcase. What was interesting was that Perr could do virtually any Hatha yoga posture that existed. He was the yoga teacher of Yamaguchi Gogen, the legendary founder of Goju Kai Karateⁱ Do.

Since we both also studied aikido and tai chi together, I came to understand that Perr’s chi did not really flow. He had a kind of semi-spastic quality to his movements and he was known as a rather poor student of the martial arts even after years of practicing.

Despite being extremely healthy and strong, he was relatively uncoordinated. How could this human rubber band not have energy flowing in his body? It wasn’t until I trained in the internal martial arts, qigong and static Taoist postures (which I refer to and teach as Taoist Longevity Yoga), all of which powerfully developed my own chi, that I was able to figure out Perr’s perplexing situation. Perr had stretched his muscle fibers to the extent that he became extremely flexible. He had precise mechanical control of his body, but he was not a relaxed person. He did not have the fluidity and ease that tai chi and aikido can give you. He was not relaxed in the sound of his voice or the way in which he moved.

The lesson I learned is that people can do yoga, be super stretched and flexible and yet still be incredibly tense with chi bound inside them. Perr’s nerves were taut and so was the energy that ran through him.
--Bruce Frantzis

Taoist Longevity Yoga: Nobody Goes to the Hospital for a Relaxation Attack

Taoist Longevity Yoga can be practiced by people of any age or body type. Because the emphasis is not on the stretch or on developing complex postures, there is no feeling of competition to “look good in the posture.” Injuries are also a rare occurrence.

Although many of the postures in Taoist yoga resemble the beginning and intermediate postures of Hatha yoga, Taoist yoga never forces your body or asks you to do extreme stretches. Instead of focusing on the external qualities of a given posture, as in most forms of yoga, Taoist yoga is meant to help you put your awareness into your body. There is little concern about how far you can lengthen tissue, muscles, ligaments and tendons. Rather, you put your attention on releasing chi blockages from within the body.

When your efforts are directed at holding difficult postures or on stretching the muscles, the nervous system typically reacts by closing down the energy channels. A negative feedback loop is created. Although you can force the muscles to stretch, your body can become incredibly tense and shut down.

Using the internal relaxation techniques of Taoist Longevity yoga allows your body to open more naturally, which also allows you to stretch further over time. The key to unlock the body is progressively relaxing more deeply into your being without straining or pushing.

A Bridge to Meditation

The more you let go, the more you relax, the more smoothly your chi flows and the more open and present you become. It’s a synergistic process that leads you to a point of stillness inside yourself. Reaching a profound, relaxed stillness is the stable foundation necessary for allowing your spiritual path to unfold. Taoist Longevity Yoga helps you form the seat needed for deeper and deeper meditation work.

Taoist yoga, which incorporates all 16 neigongⁱ, serves as a bridge to meditation because it’s so effective at calming the monkey mind. As you focus on the circularity of your breath and chi from one posture to another, it becomes easier to let go of your thoughts and emotions. You locate blockages in your body and attend to them without all the internal dialogue that wants to fight or control them.

Taoist yoga allows you to begin the journey to enter deep stages of meditation. This goes back to the ultimate goal of yoga, which is meditation for spiritual enlightenment. To get there, you have to be able to penetrate your consciousness and make the shift from an external to an internal orientation.

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