Tai chi involves the cultivation of moment-by-moment awareness, paying attention to what is taking place as it is taking place.
Unlike mainstream meditation, this does not involve sitting. It is an active process, involving your body as well as your mind.
The physicality of the art enables you to take the skills immediately and directly into everyday life.
An article from The Journal of Asian Martial Arts was talking about 'Learning how to learn'. This was most interesting.
It spoke of how students come to tai chi classes in the hope of improving balance, health, lowering stress etc, and usually desire to move with grace and power. The student is quickly faced with their own limitations: stiffness, poor attention span, coordination, etc and must come to terms with the actually reality of themselves. And most people don't like this, and so they quit.
Only a few people are prepared to acknowledge that they need to improve their minds, emotions and their bodies, and that tai chi offers a terrific vehicle to accomplish this goal.
The author said that tai chi's meditation lies in this process of growing self-awareness, of seeing what is really there, and learning to work with the body - rather than remain locked in the mind, engulfed by unhelpful thoughts.
The sheer physicality of tai chi grounds the individual in the here and now. There is no pretending to be something or someone that you are not, since everything is revealed in how you move and how your body operates.
