Have You Heard of Tai Chi Light?

Just as I stumbled into practicing meditation, I became a Taichi/Qigong practitioner quite by accident. Almost 30 years ago, I did joint a taichi practicing group for a while, but was discouraged by its complexity and slow pace. Plus I had a quite busy job at that time and had very little time to spare. About 8 years ago, on a business trip to Shanghai, my brother asked me to look for a book about an exercise call "Taichi/Qigong in 18 forms." With some difficulty I did find this out-of-print booklet. As I read it on my flight back, I was fascinated by the simplicity of this form of taichi exercise. I thought it really makes sense.

Unlike the traditional Taichi and Qigong exercises which involve anywhere from 24 to 98 or even more consecutive moves that need to be memorized, this one has 18 rather simple moves to be performed six times each. I thought I could do that and reap similar benefit as from traditional taichi. In fact, I thought this form of taichi exercise would be perfect for the very busy people or people of advanced age since it is easy to learn, easy on the body, and takes only 15 minutes to practice.

Being a writer, I then spent a month or so to have the Chinese text rewritten into English while changing some of the archaic terms into more modern terms. With much difficulty, I followed the written description of the moves and learn the exercise. In the process, I also streamlined some of the moves and created transitions from one move to the next so the entire exercise flows fluently. I have been practicing this exercise regularly ever since. Two years ago, after numerous rewriting and incorporating my insight from my personal experience, I produced an instructional DVD for the exercise, which I call "Body-Mind Exercise" (BME) and nickname "Taichi Light."

In a future post I will describe the benefits of this exercise.