Reintroducing Ba Gua Basics

First Chance since 2004 to Learn Circle Walking

One of the great benefits of ba gua’s continuous circle walking with “palm changes” (or sudden
reversals of direction), says teacher Ken Burrell, is that “it allows you to manage rapid change.” In daily life applications that can mean, for instance, “not reacting if someone screams at you but knowing how to slow things down and work around them. You stay conscious.”

For your energy arts practice, “ba gua activates the twisting, pumping, and stretching capacities of the body like no other piece of the energy arts puzzle,” says BTC director Dan Kleiman, who will co-teach the new three-day-a-week ba gua foundations course starting in September.

With chi gung and tai chi, ba gua is BTC’s third major internal energy arts practice. Its high performance, aerobically vigorous pace can be challenging for students with physical limitations, but it need not be at the intro level. Over time, you learn how to stay internally connected and practice safely. Students find that ba gua encompasses familiar principles from chi gung and tai chi ... sinking, twisting, pulsing, lengthening—think Energy Gates, Gods, Heaven & Earth, and more rolled into a single container and a moving framework.

Basics classes will cover circle walking techniques, sound body alignments and mechanics, and ba gua’s special calming, grounding focus. The ba gua lineage taught by Bruce Frantzis has its origins as a 4,000-year-old meditation practice of Taoist priests in monasteries and a manifestation of the I Ching, Book of Changes. It shares these goals with other energy arts practices—to move in a way that allows you to be internally present, retaining stillness in motion. “When you walk the circle, you are literally creating change, in both body and mind,” Ken Burrell says. Ken has studied ba gua since 2000 with Frantzis and Frank Allen, and all other tai chi and chi gung that BTC teaches since the mid-’90s. He leads the advanced ba gua practice group and is just back from Frantzis’ first ever ba gua instructor certification.

Follow the link below for schedule and registration information:

Ba Gua Basics (Tues, Thurs 7:30-8:30pm, Sat 12-1pm)