Robert Tangora, Guest Instructor

Bio

“I really come at this from a different background,” says Robert Tangora. The draw of tai chi for him has had a lot to do with its “fusion” of two main interests-in athletics and meditation. Robert played semipro basketball in Oregon 35 years ago and is an avid cross-country skier and cyclist. In New Mexico, where he works as a lawyer for mostly appellate cases and runs his own tai chi and Taoist healing arts school, he can reach ski trails on his lunch break. He has been teaching tai chi (both Wu and Yang styles) as well as chi gung, Taoist meditation, push hands, and sparring-”the whole range”-for 20 years. This is someone who has done a lot of things-climbing in the Himalayas and studying meditation in Tibetan monasteries, a stint as a Sotheby antique conservator, and lineage training with five different lineage masters in Malaysia and Shanghai [details on p.5] as well as private training with Bruce Frantzis.

One of the main learning tools his teachers emphasized was “the martial stuff.” A healthy dose of push hands helps you to open up internally, he says. “It's too easy to get false reads in your system.” Interactive practice, used cooperatively not competitively, gets you to understand the energy in tai chi through feeling it.

“The methodology for becoming quiet in the middle of all the hormones and emotions that get generated” is what Robert finds so interesting about tai chi in contrast to most other martial arts. It's integral, he says, to not only the martial part of tai chi but also the meditation and health practices.

Good connections with students are one of the things he most loves about teaching tai chi. “Really wonderful people,” he says, of students who have become his closest friends. Four or five of his original ones, from 20 years ago, still study with him.