THE TORUS: The Shape of Tai Chi’s Energy

What is it that we live in and work with everyday and without which we would be unable to do anything? Of course, I am referring to energy. But do we know what is the shape of this energy?

Anyone who is involved with the energy arts, whether external or internal, needs to be aware of the Torus, the shape of energy. This is especially true for Tai Chi, which involves movements that trace circular patterns which suggest a continuous, harmonious energy flow.

The torus, a donut-like shape where energy flows in a continuous loop around and through a central channel, is a concept that has gained traction in modern physics and metaphysics, often linked to energy fields like those around the heart, the planets, and galaxies, yes, and even the Universe itself. While Ancient sages didn’t have the scientific tools to define this shape mathematically, their cosmological, philosophical, and mystical frameworks often suggest an awareness of similar principles of spirals and self-sustaining flows.

In ancient Greece, for instance, philosophers like Heraclitus emphasized the idea of constant flux and transformation in the universe. His famous saying, “You cannot step into the same river twice,” reflects a view of reality as a dynamic, ever-flowing process. Pythagoras and his followers explored the harmony of the cosmos through geometry and numbers. They were fascinated by circular and spherical forms, seeing them as perfect expressions of divine order.

In Eastern traditions, Fibonacci spirals are based on a sequence of numbers, first described in Indian mathematics as early as 200 BC in work by Pingala on enumerating possible patterns of Sanskrit poetry formed from syllables of two lengths. Nearly 1400 years later, the Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci, introduced the sequence to Western European mathematics in 1202.
In early Daoism the interplay of yin and yang—opposites that circulate and sustain each other—mirrored the dual poles of a torus, where energy moves inward and outward in a balanced loop. However, unless they delve into quantum physics and mathematics, few contemporaryTai Chi teachers ever mention the torus or the toroidal field. I only know of two.

So, why do I bring up the subject? Well, I guess I just like to complicate things as my wife is fond of reminding me. But actually how we induce and maintain Song could disturb the toroidal field and not only unbalance our energy but our system as well. Even more importantly, by plugging into this toroidal structure we can avail ourselves of its vast power. Then let us begin.

In Daoism, when the Wuji split, the Yin energy and Yang energy were separated as illustrated in the Tai Chi symbol, but they are not distinct. Instead, like a split photon in a quantum experiment, their two energies remain entangled.

Now let’s place these two “separated” energies in the center of a toroidal field, one ascending, the other descending with 12 bands of surrounding energies feeding into this central channel. Picture the Michelin Man standing in the center of 12 huge tires stacked on top of one another, each 12 feet in diameter. Now remove the Michelin Man and insert a barber’s pole in the center with those red and white stripes spiraling up and down, the red Yin ascending and the white Yang descending, entangled with one another.

The toroid’s multiple outer layers in the human body are not smooth but form these 12 bands spiraling in Fibonaccii fashion into this central channel of descending Yang from above and ascending Yin from below and extending out six feet around the body. Furthermore, each band consists of 12 strands of electromagnetic energy. Picture fiber optic lights. Altogether there are 144 lines of electrical force that spiral through our central channel, intersecting the physical body at 144 points. These are the energy gates. I told you that I tend to complicate things.

When we plug in our awareness to this system which is somewhat similar to the idea of 144-strand DNA, we avail ourselves to the potential power that is present. So, how do we do this?

There are two ways: becoming “Song” and breathing.

However, we must not try to become Song or force Song because it is vital to maintain the integrity of our central channel, which is not only the Zhong Ding but includes our entire skeleton. Any sort of force that causes the skeleton to drop will disturb the entire torus.

Thus, in the process of dropping our heaviness, we must make certain that we are not dropping our bones. The rule here is ‘bones up, flesh down.’ We must maintain an upward skeleton while the external flesh and the visceral fat around the organs sink into the ground. Allow gravity to do the work. Think of the fat dripping off the open ribs of a pig roasting on a spit over a hot fire.

Acceptance and surrender work well here. Accept yourself and your body as you are. Ask your body to let go, let go of the need to be in control and simply surrender to the support of the surface below you. Allow your feet to anchor there if they so wish.

We can add ‘Breath’ to the phrase ‘bones up, flesh and breath down.’ We breathe into the belly or lower dantien and exhale either out the tail bone or down the legs into the earth. This not only mimicks the toroidal pattern, more importantly it opens the Earth Star about a foot to 18 inches beneath our feet, so the ascending Yin can flow unimpeded.

You can add external movement to the breathing by inhaling your hands up the center line to shoulder-level then exhaling as you raise them overhead. As you inhale, turn the hands out and lower them to the shoulders. Then exhale lowering them to your thighs. You can reverse the direction if you like Though the arms are alternating up and down, the breath remains downward throughout the process.

To open the Sun star point above our crown, negative emotions and memories should not be suppressed but rather allowed to emerge and play themselves out. Opening an imagined trap door above the Atlas (C1) bone will facilitate their release.

By plugging our awareness into the powerful toroidal field as we stand in Wuji or Zhan Zhuang, we dial up and amplify the full energy of the Source and bring it into our Tai Chi. Now you are ready to move.

Practice postures and exercises that spiral, spin and undulate, that open and close, move up and down. Watch this short video and fill your forms and exercises with these powerful toroidal movements.

Free your body and your mind. Let them go. Free them from those restrictive linear movements that we often see in carefully choreographed Tai Chi groups. Rotate, spin like a top, spiral like a snake. Swirl your fingers, wrist and arms. Undulate your shoulders and hips. Move…Move…MOVE!

By bringing that powerful toroidal quality into our Tai Chi, we bring it into our hearts, into our daily lives and into our planet.

The best of luck with your practice.

BONUS VIDEO

Learn how your voice, words and its sound waves could affect the entire Universe and all of creation through the Toroidal Field and Scalar Waves. Have you ever heard a Karate Master affect his opponent with a booming KIAI? Or Boxers, UFC fighters, football players and other sports pros taunt their opponents with deriding barbs. The power of sound and the human voice is very real. But how real?

Speech, as sound waves, starts as a macroscopic phenomenon, but its vibrations could, in theory, cascade down to the quantum scale. The harmonics of vowels—those resonant, sustained tones—might interact with the zero-point energy field, the buzzing sea of virtual particles that fills all space. Some theories suggest that coherent vibrations from intentional sound could amplify or organize this field into structured patterns, such as toroids.

Unlike typical electromagnetic waves with oscillating polarity, scalar waves are hypothetical non-Hertzian waves—pure energy potentials without direction or polarity. They’re often imagined as longitudinal waves that compress and expand space itself, moving faster than light or even instantaneously. Could toroidal fields from speech morph into scalar waves? Possibly, if the toroid acts as a kind of “vortex generator.” Picture the spiraling energy of a spoken vowel collapsing inward, shedding its wavy nature, and emerging as a scalar pulse.

If scalar waves can traverse space instantaneously, they might bypass the 3D limitations of distance and time, hinting at 4D spacetime—where time becomes a navigable dimension. In quantum terms, this could tie into entanglement, where particles linked across vast distances “communicate” instantly, or to the holographic principle, where all information in the universe is encoded on a boundary surface. A scalar wave, free of polarity, might act as a carrier signal, slipping through the fabric of spacetime into higher dimensions—5D, where parallel realities branch, or beyond, into realms we can barely conceptualize.

This concept is a fascinating one. Watch this video based on the research of Michael Tellinger who shows how this theory might work…

If speech-generated scalar waves can pierce the veil of 3D spacetime, they might touch parallel universes—alternate timelines or realities stacked alongside ours in a multiverse. Imagine a vowel’s toroidal field collapsing into a scalar burst, tunneling through the quantum foam of spacetime at the Planck scale, and popping out in a dimension where the rules differ. Some esoteric traditions claim that sacred sounds—like mantras—do exactly this, aligning the speaker with higher planes or parallel existences. Think God SAID, ” Let there be light.” Or the Incarnation of Christ: “And the WORD was made flesh.” Ancient scriptures from Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek and Hebrew are replete with reference to the spoken word and energy manipulation that launched Creation and human development. Could it be that the ancients knew more than we give them credit for, maybe even more than Darwin. After all, even many quantum physicists believe it was sound – the Big Bang! – that created the Universe and Life as we know it.