My journey with Tai Chi began in Cardiff in 1997 when I joined a class to learn the short form. Feeling lost in my life and myself, I was seeking something and was drawn to the slow, graceful movements and meditative quality of the form which seemed to hold within it a mystery that I wanted to discover.
Several years of unsettled moving from place to place followed and saw me trying out various classes. Although I always loved the movements, there was always something missing for me in these classes; unsure of exactly what it was, I only knew I still felt lost.
In the early 2000’s, living in Bristol, I struck upon a class from the Rising Dragon School of Tai Chi. This offered, not only a clear and systematic approach to learning the short form, but spoke to my yearning to find a sense of belonging. For me, the martial aspect of Tai Chi had never held any relevance. After all, the last time I had actually been involved in a physical fight was at 7 years old with my younger brother. What the Rising Dragon School offered was a way of using Tai Chi and its principles as a tool to support me in facing the daily challenges in my life. This was what I needed and through the rooting and centre-ing of the practice, I began to experience a sense of coming home to myself. I look back now and see that I had been seeking a sense of belonging in my external world and never finding it; the mystery that I had seen in Tai Chi was, for me, this embodied sense of belonging that already existed within me, I just needed to uncover it.
