INSTRUCTIONS FOR T'AI CHI PRACTICE By Barbara Baker * Firstly, please don't panic when you look at the written instructions for Part One! If you use these instructions to try to work through sections you haven't already practised in class you will find it almost, if not totally, impossible and will become disheartened. The written instructions are really a back-up to the class, to help you if you get lost! In any case, I am attracted by the words of Chungliang AI Huang, author of 'Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain, founder of the Living Tao Foundation in the United States, an international cultural arts centre, and T'ai Chi instructor, whose approach is very much the antithesis of what you might hear from many of today's T'ai Chi instructors. He says: 'The essence of T'ai Chi is really to help you to get acquainted with your own sense of potential growth, the creative process of just being you. T'ai Chi helps you to be you and to let that sense of wonder and development and constant joy of changing happen in you. T'ai Chi is a discipline that you as a person, as a human being, can begin to dig into and practice, and it will serve you.' 'If you understand the principles of the movement, you will not get stuck in worrying about the irrelevant details - how large it should be, or exactly when to begin turning etc. If you only pay attention to details, you will feel awkward and confined. The minute you feel confined and you start to think, then the flow gets stagnant and polluted. Pretty soon your movement becomes dead and looks as if you are only trying to copy the master's instructions. If there is any rule in the learning process of T'ai Chi, it's the minute that you feel confined into anything, get out of it first, and then flow back into the form once more.' 'T'ai Chi has a particular flow and pattern. But if you pick up a T'ai Chi book, usually it has a series of poses and a lot of little footprints in the directions. It rem inds me of Arthur Murray's old dance manuals with footprints on the floor, for doing cha cha cha and tango. People never could learn to dance through the Arthur Murray dance books so finally they had to go to the dance school. You cannot learn movement that way because you try to fit yourself into that rigid, fragmented pattern. If I saw everybody go out on the deck and do the T'ai Chi form in unison, I wouldn't say 'Bravo!' I would say 'How sad'. So many people just go through the motions mechanically and that's the end of true creativity. T'ai chi may look from the outside like a pattern or structure, but what is happening inside the body must be very different . ' I hope Chungliang AI Huang's words inspire you to believe in yourself and recognise that 'knowing the steps' of the T'ai Chi form is only a tiny part of what T'ai Chi is about - which gets back to one of the first things I said to you about 'don't be in a rush - the journey is the destination' (I love that phrase!). This is all a very long-winded way to say that when you get home with 'the instructions' attached, don't paniC! In fact, you could do worse than chuck them straight in the bin and just move around your front room in a