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After years of Taichi practicing, my life have been gigantically benefited by Taichi ideology, not only in the physical growth, but also in the spiritual development Nevertheless, when encountering the bottleneck, I had never imagined that it would be a 60-year old people from occident country to help me out of that circumstance.
Half of a year ago, I suddenly realized that the effort I spent on the improvement of skills and attitude was in vain. No matter how struggling I practiced, it was seemingly meaningless. I even considered quit practicing Taichi. Coincidentally, Professor David………from Columbia University was on a one-month visiting to Camford Royal School. The acquaintance between with him not only promoted me to another stage of Taichi, but also provided me a wonderful change to delve the combination of orient and occident culture.
One morning, when I was teaching Taichi to my classmates, I noticed a foreigner was observing us quietly and thoughtfully aside. From his eyes, I could see that he was so obsessive to this orient culture. Thus, we invited him to participate in our training course. At first, his action tended to be rigid all the time. After several times of leading by myself, the situation still did not change. Thus, I realized the problem was rooted in his way of understanding Taichi. After the conversation with him, I figured out that he regard Taichi as pure Kongfu and believed that “pure strength solves problems”, which is a typical misunderstanding. Therefore, in addition to the training course, I decided to share some stories, such as Chinese value and the background of Taichi with him. For example, I told him how the ancestors created Taichi, based on the significant of two ideologies: Yin and Yang. Happily, he achieved an obvious improvement before he left China. It was so admirable for a people in his age from a completely different culture to make the change. One day, I enquired to him about my confusion: “although I had already integrated the ideology of Taichi into my actions, I had made no further progress in my skills for some time. Is keeping practice worthwhile?” After a moment, he replied: “Combining Taichi ideology with you actions is a good way to improve your health. However, have you ever tried to combine the ideas of Taichi with your daily life? As for me, the Taichi thoughts helped me to control my emotion and overcome arrogance. You can work on that aspect as well.” His words suddenly enlightened me and I realized that Taichi is a treasure that I had not fully discovered. Later, I seriously considered about the concept of ‘soft on the outside and tough on the inside’, which is a very important part of Taichi ideology. I think of the “internal firmness” as the basic belief or the aim, which never changes and regard the external softness as various ways to achieve my goals. The interior firmness helps me to overcome the temptation and become more concentrated, while the exterior softness enables me to tolerate the differences and be open-minded. Mutually, my Taichi technical really have a huge growth, like my teacher said to me that form person’s movement, you can read something about his character. And now, you absorb the taichi ideology into your life, your movement also