Hi – if you are not able to join us at the Diggswell Park/STMA practice then you may be interested in our online resources – please see here for loosening exercises plus of course any that you remember from more recent classes. Also see here for the first part of the form – obviously if you know more then please practice what you can remember.

You could also take a look at Chen Bing here

or look at Chen Xaowang here

or see Chen Yu here

Now all the halls are closed I am going to give it a try with some personal outdoor training, weather permitting – if you would like to join me there will be no charge and you will be welcome on your own responsibility – which includes “social distancing”.

There are a couple of possible areas at Diggswell Park which is the large grass park adjacent to the STMA in Shefford – one is next to the picnic tables which is convenient and another  a bit more remote/secluded –  if you look from the car park to the left across the field on the left is the picnic area and beyond is a line of trees – at the end is another nice spot.

I will be there on Sunday at 3.00pm and again on Monday at 2.30pm probably for an hour each time – although if I feel like it I may stay longer – or leave earlier if the weather determines! I am thinking of wearing layers and taking a flask for myself as it may well be cold.

I will just be doing usual exercises and form, much as I have experienced in the parks of China.

Unfortunately indoor venues are now closed – all are concerned quite rightly about their duty of care. I am therefore considering the possibility of running one or two outdoor classes – weather permitting of course – maybe adjacent to the Shefford STMA where there is a quiet area which I have used in the past.

Perhaps a class on Sunday afternoon and a class on Monday afternoon. Failing that I could run small classes outside my house.

No charge.

It is a question of mindset – I have noticed that society seems split 50/50 between those with one mindset and the rest. One mindset says I am happy to manage risk myself and to take responsibility for my personal choices – the other seems different.

Please e-mail me if you are interested to attend [email protected]

Paying attention is probably the single most important aspect of learning Tai Chi at any level. Paying attention on a forensic level is vital but extremely difficult and something few in present society are comfortable with – it is a skill in it’s own right, from observing the teacher to observing ourselves and then to observing others. Tai Chi is the most sophisticated thing I have ever come across, also the most paradoxical and it just may be that attention is the most paradoxical part – it may be that the whole point of all Tai Chi practice is to encourage and channel us into paying attention to reality.

I am sorry to have to cancel the Tai Chi Festival on April 25 due to the present Corona virus situation. I appologise for any inconvenience but hope to run it later in the year once the situation clears.

In the meantime best wishes to you all and please watch this space for other news.

Seen world-wide it is observable that special interest groups have their own mores, practices, language (jargon) and social norms which are often quite foreign to outsiders who occasionally enter them, either out of need or curiosity. We see this in our interactions with the professions of medicine, teaching, law and so forth – when visited at need these micro-cultural schools of expertise justify high fees often sustained by this very separateness and the enforced barriers to understanding which they promote.

Elsewhere, we see a similar situation with areas of personal interest – clearly the one considered here is that of martial arts.

Once we understand Tai Chi/martial arts as a specialist niche culture like the professions, then we can begin to expect some challenging issues in comparison to mainstream culture. Certain practices for example, or ways of perceiving human interaction are just as “foreign” as any medical training (complete with dissections, intimate examinations, drug ingestion, etc) or legal conversation replete with tortuous thought experiments and Latin notation.

Compare for example with dance and its suppressed sexuality (a vertical expression of a horizontal desire), its intellectualised definition of physical expression and its pre-linguistic emotional expression through wholly committed physical action. Consider also the physical, psychological and linguistic worth of sports.

So, when you join a Tai Chi class consider that you have entered a very old sub-culture based on millennia-old ideas and practices, many once common but today lost except to some specialist areas. Perhaps consider what it means to join such a group and allow for the fact that you are the (albeit welcome) outsider who needs to make allowances for the conflicts which may come about from your own expectations. Even for those of us with many years as part of this sub-culture we continue to find that the thinking and habits we were brought up with continue to hold us back in developing our Tai Chi skill set.

So we are all beginners and all seeking to find our place in this world of multiple sub-cultures.

Tai Chi is a bit like one of those online computer games where you start in a small world and need to work out what it is all about so as to open up another level after level on an apparently infinite journey. But this is real and you need to find and to learn to use all aspects of your body, mind and emotional spirituality. The exercises and a teacher offer tools for you to explore and to motivate.
Or perhaps like buying a jigsaw puzzle with a vague picture on the box and only a few pieces. Once you have assembled these you gain some more pieces, gradually you find gaps without pieces, you have to make pieces which fit and make sense of the picture. But the fit of each piece depends not just on the shape or image, matching other elements like texture, smell, squiginess and attitude are just as important.
At no point is it ever what you think it is, it is never the same, everybody experiences it differently, new doors open frequently. Age enables the integration of beneficial experience and learning – you get better as you get older.

Struggle is important to the personal learning process – if something is too easy we don’t bother to learn any more. If we have a sat nav we do not bother to remember routes. Like many fulfilling activities martial arts are challenging requiring a great deal of practice to achieve. As human beings we respond to long term repetitive action. Over time the cumulative effort and repetitive patterns are assimilated by our subconscious presenting as change. The physical effort leads our bodies to grow, develop and adapt. The emotional and intellectual effort has a similar effect in those areas leading to an overall evolution of integrated skill in the whole person.

Tai Chi seems to be unique in the way this synthesis enables individuals to create change in themselves and to balance themselves in the world.

We now recognise that a little “good” stress is beneficial for us – enhancing long term cognition for example – whereas too much “bad” stress leads to unhealthy long term inflammation – the aim of Tai Chi is to learn how to find our own balance and to maintain it in the chaotic environment of life.

Tai Chi has much to teach us about life and caring for others, for example:

1. Intention – in caring for others we seek to support them when they are about to fall, to help them get up and to heal. In conflict we become destructive and seek to unbalance the other with a view to disabling them so they are not able to harm us.
2. Communication is vital – physical communication is vital. The physical aspects of communication are more than two times as important as the words – it is also much faster and since our bodies rarely lie it is much more honest.
3. I both cases we seek to be strong, well balanced, resilient and sensitive – so that we can act appropriately to help others – especially our loved ones, defend them and ourselves and not be hurt too much in the process.
4. Like Yin and Yang these aspects of life are integral, it is important to recognise which sort of relationship we are in since they can sometimes become confused. Relationships outside of our caring circle can easily polarise into disproportionately aggressive defensiveness – like “road rage”.