Ten Principles Tai Chi

Unfortunately, I’ve had to cancel my Summer Term classes, but classes will resume in September :)

My knee was damaged in a car accident last summer. I’m going into hospital on Tuesday 27th April for surgery on the knee, which is expected to resolve the problem. Fingers crossed I’ll have the summer to complete my rehabilitation in time for September’s classes and the new academic year.

Over the past two years, I’ve been working on a set of notes for my Beginners’ class. With the help of feedback from my students, the notes have been polished, tried and tested, and I’m now happy enough with them to share them online for anyone else who is interested in reading them.

To make my notes easy to find, I’ve added a new Class Notes page to the website which lists all of the notes I’ve uploaded. I still need to finish off and publish my T’ai Chi for Improvers notes, plus the notes I’m scribbling away about my own practice!

And, to make my notes as free as possible, I’m licensing them under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 (UK) license. This license allows you to re-use my notes, and to make your own version of these notes, provided you give the original author (me) credit and that you also distribute your own version of the notes under the same license.

This makes our T’ai Chi notes a Free Cultural Work.

Why am I doing this?

• Our art has a tradition going back at least to Yang Cheng’fu in the 1930’s of sharing everything we know. This means you don’t have to take any modern teacher’s word on T’ai Chi; you can go and track down a translation of Yang Cheng’fu’s book and see for yourself.
• When my teacher died, his surviving family chose to withdraw the two instructional aids he had made during his lifetime (videos of both himself and his teacher playing the form). This sadly means that my students (and, in time, their students) cannot compare their own understanding and practice to that of the teachers who went before me. My own work, such as it is, is now a Free Cultural Work and can never be withdrawn from my students when I die.

I hope you find these notes helpful, and I’m always keen to receive feedback to help me improve them still further.

If you live in Cardiff, the Vale of Glamorgan or the surrounding area and would like to learn Tai Chi, why not come along to one of our enrolment events in September?

• Saturday 5th September 2009: 10am to 1pm, at Palmerston Adult Education Centre, Barry.
• Wednesday 9th September 2009: 6:30pm to 8:30pm, at Barry Comprehensive.

I’ll be there to answer any of your questions about Tai Chi or the course, and hopefully to convince you to join our classes. The classes themselves start later in September, and will be on Thursday nights at the Barry Island Community Centre.

Just a quick note to tell everyone that there will be a class on Tuesday night (25th August), 7pm, Barry Island Community Centre as previously arranged.

My banged-up knee came through my first full practice on Saturday, so I’m up for testing it for a full two-hour class on Tuesday. Hope to see all my students there!

I’m planning to be back down the Knapp on Saturday 22nd August as normal. I’ve got some ligament damage in my knee from the car accident, so I’ve got to take it a bit easy, but I’m looking forward getting back to training :)