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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.”

Sometimes the best way to learn the Chinese movement arts we teach is by not moving. Holding postures is a traditional method of teaching the tai chi form (‘ji’ shown to the left). Standing chi gung (shown to the right) is important to the “releasing tension and strength” that we talk about so much. Both train your body to feel alignments more deeply.

Here’s a way to put some fun into fundraising. Last year’s tai-chi-a-thon raised $6,000, drew a surprising crowd considering it was relatively unpublicized, and gave old and new students a chance to practice together for four hours (10am–2pm) as well as socialize. This year we’ve set the fundraising goal-post higher, at $10,000. Pledge request forms will be available as the date draws nearer.

You’re maintaining positions for long periods so you have to figure out how to do that in as relaxed a way as possible without hurting the body; alignments become enormously important.”

An interesting trend is happening at BTC. For the first time, we have almost as many chi gung as tai chi students. The tai chi program has from the beginning been Brookline Tai Chi’s backbone—hence our name. This rebalancing stems from the major shift in our chi gung program starting last September, when we opened Gods chi gung classes to all comers at the entry level instead of teaching it only as the culmination of all chi gung sets.

For each and every posture, concentrate your mind and consider the meaning.You will not get it without consciously expending a great deal of time and effort.” So says an ancient tai chi classic, Song of the 13 Postures. Here is a different dimension that most students who practice a tai chi form as continuous movement don’t take time to do.

If you have never gotten around to learning tai chi, here’s your chance. If you have been looking for a faster way to fine-tune your existing practice, it is also a good time to take a plunge. For the first time ever, BTC is hosting a week-long tai chi immersion training led by Frantzis Energy Arts senior instructors Eric Peters and Craig Barnes along with BTC senior instructor Alan Dougall. Each has decades of experience. We expect BTC to be a hub of activity for national and international tai chi students during the week between our early and late spring sessions.

Little known facts: BTC has been participating increasingly in various ways to promote awareness of tai chi’s health benefits, particularly in the medical community. They include having our students studied by Osher Institute, inviting guest lecturers such as Dr. Peter Wayne to build medical literacy in theBTC community, giving presentations in hospitals to physicians and medical students, working with EnergyArts to develop a ‘medical press kit,’ and taking part in a city-wide collaboration among tai chi schools (being fostered byDr.Wayne) to increase the cross-over with medical research.

Tai chi practitioners—of all ages—had better tactile sensitivity than nonpractitioners, according to a research study just reported by Harvard Medical School’s Osher Institute, the center for research and education in complementary and integrative med- ical therapies. The study compared 14 long-time BTC students and 14 “control” individuals for their ability to identify the vertical vs. horizontal orientation of the grating (spaced less than 1/16") on a thimble-sized dome. Why are we excited about this result?

New Tao yoga instructor Katie Keane stresses the simplicity of most of the postures that will be taught in BTC’s latest curriculum addition, following the B.K. Frantzis Tao yoga workshop in October—the first time he has agreed to teach the subject. “This doesn’t require an advanced level of flexibility,” she says, or previous experience with Hatha or other forms of yoga.