University student finds her mental focus and bodily awareness increase during gym credit TCC class

Dear Sharon,

Though I have stayed after class several times to thank you for the help in focus and grounding that your T’ai Chi Chih class has been to me, I wanted to take some time to mention the rest of the story. I have been a highly disassociative person for as long as I can remember. My childhood, while never physically abusive, was still worth trying to ignore. Explaining in detail, to me, feels like I’m playing a blame game, so I’ll leave it at that. Considering the atmosphere I grew up in, disassociating was basically a very good defense mechanism to separate my consciousness from all that was going on around me. It eventually became my usual state of being as I continued to remove myself from situations internally to escape smaller and smaller issues in my life. While it helped me deal with things on a surface level, internally I have been a bit of a mess. I simply accepted my usual state of completely scatterbrained, inattentive, disconnected and flighty and thought little more about it. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even realize how much of a problem it was until I began talking with my boyfriend about a year ago regarding how I must make lists of everything and actively try to pay attention to anything in the world around me or become totally lost and forget the simplest tasks. I had been trying to work with these issues on my own, and was achieving at least some small success. And then I fell into your class.

I was looking for a gym class to take over the summer semester, and many of the ones that I wished to take were full. Being interested in Reiki and martial arts, I decided that a T’ai Chi Chih class would be at the very least a physically non-strenuous class, and at the most, very interesting. In no way was I expecting my outlook on the world to change so much in six weeks as it has, and especially not because of a gym class.

I have found it much easier to concentrate since I began in your T’ai Chi Chih class in the middle of the summer. I still have to make lists for myself, but the sheer act of writing them keeps them in my memory, and I do not race around trying to get everything on my lists done… somehow things just get themselves done when they need to. While I often get lost in the movements while practicing the T’ai Chi Chih discipline and “space out” like I used to, I am spacing out in a different way; I am now feeling the flow of movements of my body rather than my own internal landscape. This means, in turn, that I am actually feeling my body in any way other than the detached manner I am used to. And when I walk home from class, I can feel my feet. Broken toe or not, I can feel the weight shift in each step as I walk back to my apartment from T’ai Chi Chih class. The more I practice, the more in my body I actually am, even when I am dealing with the situations at home that I used to drift off to escape. They’re not pleasant, but I’m actually dealing with them internally for once. And it may seem like a silly small thing, but it’s really the first time in my life that I’ve been able to pay attention to something so fundamental as the feel of the grass beneath my feet. Thank you.

– Tessa Bogar
Student of Sharon Sirkis