Why Taichi Light?

The reasons why I am so fascinated with this new, simplified Taichi exercise are these: I had always known the health benefits of Taichi and Qigong exercises. In fact about 30 years ago I had taking some classes but I felt at the time that, as a go-go young man with a family to care for, it took too much time to learn and to practice. Now that I am retired and have more time and even a greater urgency to maintain good health, it's time to seriously going for it.

Secondly, this exercise is very simple compared to the traditional exercises. It has 18 movements, each repeated six times, and can be completed in 15 minutes. It is also much less strenuous. This is something I can learn to do at home instead of going to a studio somewhere to take lessons. This is a god-sent to older peoples. In any case, right there reading the booklet on the plane, I decided to learn it myself as soon as I got home. Since the booklet is in Chinese, I was also thinking about all the people who can't read Chinese. In the next several months, I rewrote the booklet in English and rewrote it several times as I learned the movements. In the process, I also slightly changed some of the movements and fashion the transition from one movement to next so that the entire exercise flows smoothly from beginning to end.

Every time I practiced in the morning, I try to imagine how other people could follow my writing and learn the movements correctly since I had a lot of trouble learning them myself. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that it would take a very determined and disciplined person to learn from written descriptions. So I came up with the idea of producing a DVD or VHS tape for the exercise, and I plunged into the work of writing the script. Being a major in radio/television reporting from a journalism school, this is a natural for me and a lot of fun to do. I hired a production company in Metuchen, NJ to do the job and have the DVD done in 2006. I name the exercise "Body-Mind Exercise" and nickname it "Taichi Light."

In the next posting, I will describe Taichi Light in details.