( Caution: please be advised that the following article do not serve as medical advice. It only serves as information for your own education. When you have a medical problem please seek a doctor.)

Knee pains from over exertion, injury, aging or incorrect Taiji practice are common signs in many Taiji practitioners.

A simple way of reducing the knee pain is by trying to do the form a bit higher and not bending down so low. If the pain does not goes away even when you practice the Taiji form higher than it is time to check the knee with your doctor and take a look at the cause of the problem. If the pain goes away after you modify your Taiji practice then it is a good bet that you over exerted your knees by having the knee bending beyond your big toes. Simply by refraining from letting your knees goes beyond your big toes will solve the problem.

Lower back pain is another common sign of aging, kidney weakness from Traditional Chinese medicine principle or incorrect Taiji practice. Lower back pain is really difficult because it tends to linger and comes back like an old unwelcome friend. A simple way of working with lower back pain is to practice ground Taiji Quan. That is right, practice the form on the floor. It will take away the pressure on the back and allow you to move freely. Just 5 minutes a day of floor Taiji does wonder for the back. Now, if persistence back pain remains, it can be indication of many other internal organ problem such as kidney infection, infection of the uterus... seek out your doctor right away.

The practice of Taiji Quan is supposed to take away pains and if you get them from the Taiji practice then you have either practice incorrectly or in some rare cases, your teacher is teaching you incorrect practice. A good rule of thumb is to notice whether the teacher him/herself is free of pain.

One last word about pain. Pain is so real that yet in science we do not have a definite understanding of pain. The use of acupuncture to reduce pain is almost like magic when a needle insert from a distal place from the pain source can block the pain.

What at one moment is pain becomes in another moment pleasure. So in some aspect pain is how we relate to the perception and the sensation of the physical stimulation. When we are gripe with fear of the pain, the pain is worst. Where else if one have an open relax awareness of the physical sensation, the pain becomes soften and even some time disappears completely.

When I was doing my internship in China at the Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, I witnessed some of the cancer patients there.  They would be taught a walking Qigong to deal with their pain without the use of any other pain killers.  Practicing acupuncture there the patients will sometime complaint that my needles did not go deep enough.  Their pain tolerance was much higher than most western patients.  It seemed to me that when one have a active relationships of managing one's pain then the pain is not so scary and one can actually reduces the intensity of the pain to a different kind of sensation.

I remembered vividly how in a seven day Chan Buddhist meditation retreat where we sat for one to two hours session for the whole day.  At one point, I felt that my knees were on fire and I knew then that I would never able to walk again.  When the bell rang, after a few moments, I was able to walk again.  My teacher Abbot Ming Kuan explained to me that such pain is actually a reflection of one's discursive mind, as the mind become more peaceful the pain will also disappeared.  So I learned to sit with the pain and not try to run away from it.  And the pain did go away once my mind becomes transparent.  But when another woman complain about the intense pain, Abbot Ming Kuan reminded her, " whose leg is it?"  we all laughed and realized all the time we tried to hold our leg still it was really unnecessary when we could have just moved a little to ease the pain.  That was another great lesson.

So when in pain, you have a choice to ease your own pain.  Pain is a signal that tells you something about yourself and your body.  In my case, my knee pain was the mind, the ego projected barrier of fear of looking into my own self.
In that other case, the woman's pain was self induced to feel a need to fit within the structure.

I asked my teacher Abbot Ming Kuan, " What is the fruit of all this pain while in meditation?"
" Bitter fruit!" He answered instantaneously.

And I realized that somehow, we all want our pain to bear some sort of sweet fruit, some lesson of life.  The old wrong saying of " no pain no gain" merely gets us bitter tasting fruit. Pain is just pain with its bitter fruit.

I have encountered this types of frontier mentality in Martial art training where the practitioners boast how long they can maintain a low squatting Horse stance or how they can break bricks on their heads.  The later head breaker suffered brain stroke at a later age.

So for our Dan Tao School we have a motto about pain too.
" Pain no Gain."
There is no gain in pain.  Pain is just a message.
 

home page | email to Dan Tao School |Related reading & Books
Thanks to Donald White for his correction May 26, 2000