When a class participant asked me if doing tai chi brought me in touch with my higher powers, I wasn’t sure how to answer her. But before I thought too much about it, my words came out: “No. It actually brings me in touch with my LOWER powers.” Here’s what I meant: Tai Chi is philosphically related to taoism, the ancient Chinese system that is based on finding your “way”–your way to balance the negative and positive forces in your life, whether physical problems, environmental concerns, political issues, artistic efforts (the yin and yang of it all). We move through space and time, trying to find that balance, that way. And your body (which, of course, includes your brain) is the instrument with which you find your way.
Tai chi can bring us a new, deeper sense of the world around us and within us. When we do tai chi, breathing in and out deeply, we exchange the air inside us with the air outside, and all that air contains. It’s constant give and take.
Likewise, our tai chi movements with their shifts forward and back, sideways and sometimes diagonally, put us in touch with the space around us. And everything in that space is made up of the same stuff as we contain–rocks, trees, tables, glasses of water. We all become cousins through our atoms and molecules, right?
Then too, as we move, slowly and continuously, we sometimes feel like time stretches or that it flies by. And perhaps we become aware of all those before us who’ve done tai chi. Plus–for those of us who teach–we take joy in knowing our class participants will have tai chi in their futures.
All of these factors add up to what I and some others call “embodied spirituality.”
I love the “embodied spirituality”, because it captures the sense fo how the practice of tai chi changes us at many levels: physically, emotionally, mentally even etherically. This happens whether we are aware of it or not and whatever our spiritual or non spiritual orientation might be.
Thanks, Molly–“embodied spirituality” is a phrase also used by Peter Wayne in his Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi. Yes, I think you’re right–tai chi and the whole learning process changes folks even when they know little about it. And as you know now, teaching it brings a whole new level of understanding–at all levels! Anne