TCC for the New Year: Full Practice or Bust?

Looking back at my beginnings with T’ai Chi Chih in 1995, I appreciate that an important part of maturing in my practice has been coming to know the option to do TCC in the way that I intuit will benefit me most on a given day at that particular time. This is quite different from my first years of thinking that I had to do a full daily practice in order to get the benefit or to be an authentic disciple of the practice.

Having spent many years teaching various age groups of different abilities, I now find that user-friendly options in the practice appeal to my students, and I have more students in my ongoing classes than ever before. This has been a gradual transition in my understanding of how one can best get the benefits of TCC. It has required some letting go, as I tend to be a person of discipline and routine.

Justin Stone has written about practice options in the preface and general introduction of the photo text. He suggests doing 36 times on either side of any 6 movements, or practicing 10 or 15 minutes in the morning and again in late afternoon, or a “typical program” of about 10 suggested movements, some done 18 times, and so on. He went so far as to write, “the reader will probably want to make his or her own program” and “T’ai Chi Chih movements can be performed at any speed.”

I write this article just to say that I have found real value in knowing and teaching that the movements do not always have to be done in a particular order, and that every class I teach does not have to contain a formal or full practice. I now teach giving my students a simple but varied selection of movements from the start. I encourage them to take home and do whatever they can best remember comfortably. The important thing is to do movements hopefully at more than one time each day, without being concerned about a specific regimen. I always stress that it’s a matter of what works best for the individual, (and that it is okay if that is a more disciplined practice done the same way every day).

I know that I did benefit greatly in those early years from regular daily full practices, and especially so when preparing to become accredited and in my first years of teaching. But the “whole banana” is not the only way. My students have taught me that user-friendly is definitely a good thing. And thank you, Justin, for helping to spell this out for us.