Meditation in Motion

I had earmarked Tai Chi lessons as the most important part of a family vacation to Gulin, which is in the Guangxi Province of China. While Guilin itself is on the World Protection List for natural landscapes and was an experience in itself, it was the need to understand and to some degree sustain the balance that Tai Chi promises that excited me. We live in turbulent times; unpredictable days roll through our lives and vice versa. To maintain a mind-body-soul equilibrium, assuming that was what Tai Chi imparts, is what I was looking for.

Not knowing what to expect, we traveled higher up into the Yangshuo hills one cloudy morning. Rice paddy fields cradled the narrow road, further embraced by Guilin’s iconic mountains that rose like sacred mounds all over the region. It was lush green as far as the eye could see; the greenness broken only by the bright blue sky that promised sunshine even as the clouds let down a soft drizzle. This was the balance of nature, splendid and breath taking.

Eventually we arrived at the Yangshuo Traditional Tai Chi School, an ancient institute that doubled as a hostel for foreigners who wished to spend time here. It’s difficult to think of peace when you’re living the nightmare known as ‘life’ day and night but there was unbelievable serenity to the place, a silence broken only by the talking mynah birds that cooed us a welcome “nee hao” in Chinese. Or the sound of water that flowed around the school, water that was speckled with colourful carp. Tai Chi is commonly translated to ‘meditation in motion’ and just being there was lesson one in how man and nature had the power to coexist in perfect harmony.

Our limited exposure to martial arts or Tai Chi was Kung Fu Panda (I’m ashamed to admit) and we had joked about it, hoping that our instructor would be someone like Master Shifu. Master Wu YuPing, however, was a lot younger and surprisingly bespectacled, which made him look like a reader more than a martial arts expert. But the award winning practitioner had 20 years of Tai Chi on him and exercises that we had assumed would be a piece of cake (we had pompously felt Tai Chi was ‘old peoples’ exercise) turned out to be quite challenging. Our minds, thoughts and bodies are so rigidly set in routine, even the routine of the kind physical exercise we get in our day-to-day schedules, that balancing energies through movement was extremely tricky. But once he managed to set us in motion it felt as if we were balancing energies as harmoniously as a symphony balances musical notes.