It's really nice having a roving reporter sending articles home! Often people come from other countries to our Academy in Bethnal Green,  so it's nice having one of our own visit elsewhere and report back. This article is by Karen Dabrowski, who is rapidly becoming a regular contributor here. I hope you enjoy her article about her experiences as much as I did:

Tai Chi in Vancouver: It’s better not to speak Mandarin!

Around half the population of Vancouver is Chinese. They have a lot to do...

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I'm very happy to introduce a guest blog by Karen Dabrowski, who has very useful words of advice from her experience of pain. Becoming aware of the tai chi principles of posture and putting these into practise can make a huge difference, as she explains below:

Master Pain: Lessons You Can’t Ignore

Perhaps more by good luck than good management I was relatively pain free when I started learning tai chi. There was a slight discomfort in my back but it was soon cured by sliding my back down t...

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Talking at the club tonight, my brother came up with a wonderful analogy, which I am shamelessly stealing: He said that your natural talent at whatever may not be obvious, but may become clear later "like you may not be the best at calligraphy, but later you could turn out to be a wonderful author".

This is a wonderful thought - instead of looking for instant natural talent at whatever, just keep doing stuff, so that eventually you will be in a position for your talent to manifest itself. 

I k...
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In one of my recent blogs, I said that differences weren't obvious to the untrained eye. Which implies that eyes can indeed be trained. When I first started tai chi, I was very unobservant, as most people are. Over time, with training from my tai chi teacher, I have become better at systematically looking at people and actually seeing specific things, which previously I would have been oblivious to.

This reminded me of one guy's book, where he wrote that he had been trained in mainland China, ...
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One of my clients recently said to me "After 7 years you must be technically perfect". I was so taken aback by this, that I didn't know how to answer it at the time, but it's been on my mind ever since.

I  think it's the difference between doing an internal art and doing external exercise. The Chinese divide martial arts into external and internal. External are things that involve strength and muscle and what you can see. Internal arts actually are internal. For a long time, I didn't understan...
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I've been thinking about this since one guy asked me if what I did at MIND was the same as what I do at the Wu's Tai Chi Chuan Academy, in Bethnal Green...

Depending on where I am, or who I'm teaching, there are definite differences in my lesson structure.

Sometimes this is very obvious - for instance, one group I teach want to sit on chairs to do all their exercises. These are a more mature group, with some having various physical disabilities. For them, I do a variety of exercises and chi ku...
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Many people discover things that need put right, when they start tai chi. This is due to us getting into habits over decades and not noticing, then as soon as you start on posture training, you start to notice what those habits may have led you into...

In my own case, I noticed that I was crunched up in the neck like a vulture and had odd grating moments in the neck. Tai chi is not a substitute for professional treatment, so I went to see a chiropracter - I chose my tai chi teacher's son, as I...
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Everyday wear for me is logo tshirt and training trousers, so it's nice to dress up once in a while. Dressing up was certainly required last night, when I went to an art book launch in a swanky tower block in Canary Wharf.... on the 30th floor, with stunning viewsin every direction.

My tai chi teacher, Sifu Gary Wragg, was having his book launched - it's a retrospective on the past decades of his art, with fantastic pictures all through it.

There were large (and I mean wall-sized large) painti...
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