Tai Chi Fundamentals

Tai Chi’s slow, graceful weight-bearing movements provide moderate aerobic exercise that improves your balance, coordination, core strength, energy level, flexibility, mental focus, postural alignment, relaxation, and stamina – and each of these benefits apply broadly to the way we move through our days. Practice can teach us economy of effort and presence in our relationships. Medical research has found that it enhances immune function, lowers blood pressure, and reduces stress, anxiety, and the joint pain of arthritis. Sometimes described as moving meditation or choreographed qigong, tai chi is both a powerful health practice and an ancient Chinese martial art.

We begin with the tai chi basics: mindfulness, breath awareness, active relaxation, postural alignment, effective weight-bearing, and integrated functional movement, and are moving into a series of movement patterns or qigong exercises. We start class with a set of daily energizing stretches and a standing meditation. Over the summer, we’ll begin learning the choreographed tai chi fundamentals form, a contribution to the Yang Style Cheng Man Ch’ing Lineage T’ai Chi Ch’uan tradition made by Tricia Yu in the 1990’s. You will learn to be internally still as a mountain as you move like a great river.

Lynne Johnson has practiced Yang style tai chi forms and qigong for 25 years and taught for the past 10. She is fascinated by how basic tai chi principles can teach us to move through our every day lives with more clarity and effectiveness, both more relaxed and more energized. Having received and witnessed profound benefits as she learned and continues to learn from tai chi, she teaches it as an act of giving back in gratitude. She once read a tai chi master quoted as saying, “Every lesson is the first lesson, every time we dance, we do it for the first time.” She invites you to join in the dance.