The theme of our practice and stay during the trip has been smoothness. It’s interesting how one can interpret this and interact with the energy around you. To the casual eye, the way things work out here might appear completely chaotic. To the Western conditioned mind of course, it IS chaotic.

One has to stay cool and smooth whilst driving around amongst a thick soup of vehicles, on wide sections of road with no lane markings, and with drivers who rarely use indicators. Things just flow naturally. Motorcycles glide around you laden with precious cargos – often an entire family with bare skinned baby and relaxed toddler perched in the middle of adults.  Sometimes a large cupboard of household supplies slides past, perfectly balanced on the back of a motorbike, in and out of the traffic, past massive trucks and buses. Energy just weaves around, this way and that and you go with the flow.

So our practice has been much the same. Joining tai chi groups doing forms we don’t know, form after form, Chen style, Yang Style, 81 step, 24 step, 48 step…. we go to the middle of a group (by invitation) and go with the flow. Tai chi teachers stand and watch and wander over to chat to us, sometimes pulling us out to demonstrate a section or give tips, or asking us to show them our qigong and tai chi and sometimes just making comments. One old Chinese teacher, whose name we never discovered  (the locals can be very slippery with information even when asked directly), occasionally popped up from behind bushes and  vanished just as smoothly. He was very helpful with both critical and constructive comments.  He also observed twice that although I couldn’t follow the movements of the different forms precisely, my tai chi was the best in the group because I really knew how to move my weight. So when you all wonder why we make such a big thing about really clean weight distribution, shift between full and empty and level hips, you know why.

A lot of times we heard about how you learn to move energy with your mind and it certainly triggered some interesting experiences. On a physical level, the analogy of moving like a cat is probably the most useful thing for our students to play around with. Again, it’s all about smoothness and flow. One exercise we were given (and you might like to try, but remember the 70% rule) was to see how long we could stand on one leg and move the other cleanly forward and back, just very, very lightly touching the ball of the foot to the ground beside the weighted foot then diagonally out in front of you. In and out, in and out…  all the usual alignments of course, opening and closing, and level hips ‘Do this like a cat’ was the instruction.  The day before, the same teacher had asked how long we could hold a particular posture and when we said ‘probably about one hour,’ he laughed and said three to four would be really good. I think we were supposed to be able to do the cat thing with our legs for an hour or two… but breakfast called after about 10 minutes and his senior students bought us coffee and char kway cheow instead! YUM… our waistlines have expanded so smoothly that it’s been barely noticeable.