The Changing Face of BTC: What Draws People Here, What Keeps Them Here-- September 2008

These practices hold the same satisfaction for me at 28 as they did at 18,” says BTC director Dan Kleiman, focusing on the long-range appeal of “feeling more whole,” “the sense of integration” he gets from doing tai chi. Commenting on the increasing generational mix visible at BTC (especially as the new Gods program draws a wider enrollment), he speculated: “What makes energy arts significant to someone younger or older may be exactly the same thing.”

We test drove this assumption by talking to three of BTC’s newer community members, all in their 20’s, and informally proved Dan’s point by comparison to the experience of one of BTC’s longest-standing students, Yvonne. The ages differ; the spirit is much the same. Finding “something more” seems to be one thread that runs through the reasoning that holds people here. “I started off treating this as just a series of relaxing motions,” says Eli, “with no idea of the sort of physical and energetic and philosophical world that actually existed.” A standing chi gung workshop withBruce Frantzis brought home that “it wasn’t all monkey business” when he started feeling things inside his body that he hadn’t previously been able to.
“Yes, there’s something going on here,” Yvonne figured after three days doing tai chi when she started back in 1992. Her energy felt up despite her “not knowing what I was doing,” though it took another four years to realize “this is one of the excellent things in my life.” She calls this practice her best contact with her body and the world and thinks a lot of others feel the same. “I’m 83,” she says. “I should be going downhill but I’m not.”

Cultivating something internal is another way to describe the draw of Chinese movement arts. “Feeling awareness” is what BTC calls the practice of finding new patterns in the body and allowing time for new skills to get wired into the neurological pathways. Nate and Elizabeth, both yoga practitioners who are schooled in philosophy, found their way to BTC following chronic injuries that had eluded healing. With chi gung, Nate is “actively learning how to let go” and balancing out the left/right sides of his body on a more subtle level than he has been able to with yoga. The training intersects well with his Zen practice. Elizabeth, an energy worker, arrived following a stint in India studying yoga and ayurveda but finds Chinese movement arts “more cohesive as a system.” In her studies before, she says, “I’d push my body and get results for awhile but they wouldn’t stick.”

One preconception that students say they have to unlearn is about the speed of learning. “This is the benefit of the gentleness of the Water Way,” says Elizabeth, “the mind slowing down to meet the speed of the body.” She is finding, through chi gung alignments, that her injury is more receptive to healing than she had thought. BTC is the only large U.S. tai chi school teaching the Taoist Water Method, defined by the principle that in practice you only ever go to 70 percent of your total capacity. “Learning how to learn,” Eli calls this growing-at-your-own-pace paradigm Yvonne concurs on the attraction of the long-term growth principle. “If you’ve ever watched a plant growing, with the stem thickening and branching out, that’s the feeling I have about BTC.”