Proper Preparation Important to T’ai Chi Chih

The objective of Teachers’ Training Courses is to show students how to become teachers — it is not to teach them T’ai Chi Chih. Supposedly, candidates’ teachers have taught them how to do TCC well and have screened them for their potential capability to be teachers.

From this it is obvious that the candidates coming to a Course must do proper T’ai Chi Chih; to have various candidates doing different versions of the form would invalidate the Course. Not only are the correct movements all-important, but TEH (power of Inner Sincerity) must be stressed and this cannot be done where there is confusion and disagreement.

Today there are any number of different schools of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, which originally had 108 movements. There are teachers compressing this form into 37 movements, and others teaching 17 movements. This is one reason why T’ai Chi Ch’uan has made little progress in the West. Teaching it in different ways may make money, but it hardly benefits the beautiful Form and does not work for expanding its following — there is no TEH and no uniformity.

Any thinking person will realize that those coming to Courses must be well-prepared. Politics and misplaced emotion (based on false information) have no part in preparing future teachers. Fortunately, on my June swing thru the East I was able to straighten matters out in several places, and graduates coming out of the nine Teachers’ Courses since mid-March have been well-prepared to be good teachers. T’ai Chi Chih is on the upswing and will fulfill its destiny to help people.