Between the end of a summer that had been going on too long and the beginning of a too-warm autumn that would crank up my climate change anxiety to ten, I joined a tai chi class.

I had noticed a sign when I was out walking. Immediately, I went online, paid some money and put my name down for the first available session. Looking back, I wonder why I thought this evening class, held in a suburban community centre, might soothe the assorted anxieties I was carrying. Signing up was an impulsive act, prompted by some deep, yet inarticulate knowing that the way I was feeling would not be eased by words; something different was needed, something physical.

I’d had two big bereavements: first my mother, then a beloved aunt. They had been the two most important women in my life, and suddenly they were gone. Meanwhile, I was under ongoing surveillance following surgery for cancer, caught in that uneasy post-treatment period that tests one’s nerve – because there is nothing to be done but wait.

Carol Lefevre. Affirm Press

At certain moments, usually in the middle of the night, a niggling voice would whisper that the cancer might be gone but it could return, that even as I lay there in the dark trying to sleep, some small, festering body part might be plotting treason. Sometimes the voice was that of the naturopath I’d consulted, who’d warned since my body had made a cancer, I needed to avoid the conditions that had allowed that to happen. Which, of course, I would – if only I knew what they may have been.

It was a time when at least once a day I would find myself on the verge of crying; sometimes, inconveniently, the tears broke through. It could happen anywhere – when I was out walking, or in the supermarket; sometimes it happened when I was driving, and I’d have to pull over until I was able to quieten my thoughts enough to drive on.

Inconvenient weeping

I’d almost progressed to feeling tearful about being tearful, when I came across the first of Deborah Levy’s trilogy of autobiographical writings, Things I Don’t Want to Know. In it, Levy documents her bouts of inconvenient weeping. It was riding on escalators at train stations that set off Levy’s tears, especially the upward escalator. She writes: “By the time I got to the top and felt the wind rushing in, it took all my effort to stop myself from sobbing.”

I recognised that effortful feeling of trying to control the sobs. Like Levy, I also knew something had to change. Her solution had been to book a flight to Palma, Majorca, where she was met at the airport by a taxi driver with white clouds floating in both his eyes. On arrival, Levy had bought Spanish cigarettes with the intention of taking up smoking again and when the driver abandoned her on the road to her hotel, she sat on a rock and lit the first cigarette.

It was also somewhat comforting to read, in Joan Didion’s essay Goodbye to All That, how as a young woman in New York, she had found herself crying in elevators and taxis and Chinese laundries. There were certain parts of the city she had to avoid, including Times Square in the afternoons, or the New York Public Library at any time, for any reason.

Her solution was to get married. But I was sorry to learn her crying continued even after her marriage to fellow writer John Gregory Dunne. Didion cried, she writes, “until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not”. It was a year in which, she tells us, she understood the meaning of the word “despair”. A doctor expressed the opinion she appeared to be depressed. He wrote down the name and number of a psychiatrist for her, but Didion did not go.

A friend had given me the name of a psychologist who she said had helped her, but I had given up on psychology. Or at least, the psychologists I had consulted when things had been going badly in the past had left me poorer without improving matters.

Now, everything was conspiring to cast me low, including that ever since the cancer surgery, my hair had been shedding – hair I had patiently nurtured through the transition from chemical dyes to natural health, hair I had joyously grown halfway down my back for the first time since childhood. My hair was everywhere in the house and in the car; it even migrated into our food. I knew I had been fortunate to have avoided chemotherapy, with its side serve of hair loss, but now it appeared I was to lose it anyway, albeit more slowly.

I read that both surgery and stress can contribute to thinning hair, and concluded although I had been anaesthetised when surgeons re-sectioned my colon, my body had been present and remained deeply shocked.

In signing up for the tai chi class, I was throwing myself upon the mercy of the universe.

A kind of poetry

The only time I had ever actually seen tai chi involved one of those surreal moments that occasionally occur in life. About five years earlier, I had been driving along the southern terrace that borders Adelaide’s parklands and the car radio was playing a piece of classical music by a Japanese composer.

The sound was spare and melancholy, and when I glanced across to the park I saw a tai chi class in progress. That was not in itself unusual – people use the parklands all the time for various fitness activities. What made time swerve to a halt was that the slow movements of the tai chi people were perfectly in time with the music coming out of my radio.

I had stopped the car to watch. The group practising tai chi couldn’t hear the music, of course, but the synchronicity of movement and sound produced a kind of poetry. Perhaps, then, when I saw the sign advertising “tai chi for health and wellbeing” outside my local community centre, it was this memory of the unexpected beauty I’d witnessed that had nudged me over the hump of my inertia to join.

Tai chi is a form of mind-body exercise that originated in China. Its history is somewhat shadowy, with contributions attributed to various monks and masters reaching back as far as the 12th century, and possibly beyond. In T’ai Chi Ch’uan and I Ching: a choreography of body and mind, Da Liu, a tai chi master, credits the most complete foundations of tai chi to a famous Taoist, Chang San-feng, an ardent follower of Confucius who was known as “The Immortal”.

Da Liu writes that Chang San-feng famously observed a fight between a crane and a snake, and from the way the two animals moved he realised “the value of yielding in the face of strength”. He studied the behaviour of wild animals, clouds, water and trees moving in the wind and “codified these natural movements into a system of exercise”. Da Liu concedes: “We owe the present forms of T’ai Chi to numerous masters […] over many centuries.”

Tai chi has been influenced by Confucian thought, and by traditional Chinese medicine, but its roots lie deep in the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism, which emphasises the natural balance in all things. In Taoist thinking, everything is composed of two opposite but complementary elements: yin and yang. The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote eloquently of the principles of yin and yang in his famous work the Tao Te Ching.

In tai chi, the polarities of yin and yang are expressed through the form’s shifts of weight and balance, through hardness yielding to softness, tension releasing to relaxation, and moving the body in ways that expand and contract. Gentler and more meditative than the Chinese martial arts it evolved from, its slow, dance-like postures flow into one another, combining concentration, physical balance, stretching and relaxation, with natural, peaceful breathing.

Chang San-feng codified the natural movements of wild animals, clouds, water and trees moving in the wind into a system of exercise, in the 12th century. Gisling/Wikipedia, CC BY

There are different schools of tai chi. Chen, Yang, Wu and Sun styles are named after the Chinese families who developed them, and the skills are passed orally through the generations.

The form I was learning had been developed by a Taoist monk, Master Moy Lin Shin. The tai chi he brought to the West is a modified version of Yang style’s 108-move set. Its elements are borrowed from the Chinese internal arts of XingYi (a bare-handed fighting form), Bagua (a complex system of eight trigrams, which in tai chi relate to movement and body parts), and Liuhebafa, or “water boxing”, a form characterised by its flowing, fluid movements.

Taoist tai chi has been criticised for these modifications, which are sometimes seen as a dilution of classical tai chi. Criticism focuses on the fact Master Moy removed the “fighting” aspects from his form in favour of emphasising its health benefits. His decision was most likely influenced by the health difficulties of his own early years, as well as by the needs of the people he trained after he emigrated to Canada.

Lou Reed, legendary musician, songwriter and founding member of rock band the Velvet Underground, credits tai chi with saving him after years of self-destructive substance abuse. Reed began a martial arts practice in the 1980s; he came to love the fighting aspect of Chen style, but he was also in awe of tai chi’s power to heal. In a letter published by The New York Times in 2010, Reed wrote:

I wish I could convince you to change your life and save your body and soul. I know it sounds too good. But truly: Tai Chi – why not?“

A lesson in humility

My first class was a lesson in humility. Never a sporty type, never even an adequate dancer, awkward hardly does justice to the feeling of finding myself in the centre of a group of people who, at the instructor’s command, began a series of complex moves they seemed to know by heart. Later, I would learn ushering beginners into the middle is a kindness; it means when they turn, there is someone they can follow.

At the halfway point of that first class, Chinese pu’erh tea was served in tiny porcelain cups. Brewed from the leaves of a variety of tea plant native to Yunnan Province, pu’erh tea goes through a complex fermentation process and is reputed to have many health benefits. After the tea break, it was back to the centre of the floor for more repetitions of the move we’d been working on.

That night, we were practising move 18: Carry Tiger to Mountain. It evolves out of move 17, Cross Hands, which even I could manage. The body turns with the arms bent as if cradling a heavy bundle. Yes, I thought, this sorrow and anxiety I’d been holding was my tiger; a creature burning bright with memories that had become too painful, a body darkly striped with grief.

It felt as wild and dangerous in its way as a real live tiger, but if I could only master the correct way to carry it to the mountain, perhaps I would be able to leave it there and move on.

Tai chi requires complete focus, making it almost impossible to think about anything else. So when I came across American beat poet Alan Ginsberg’s poem about tai chi, it struck me as a somewhat inaccurate portrayal of what happens during tai chi practice. Ginsberg is in his kitchen in New York, the only place in his apartment with enough space to do tai chi, but his moves are interspersed with domestic concerns:

the Crane spreads its wings have I paid the electric bill?

White Crane Spreads its Wings is one of tai chi’s most subtly exhilarating moves. It involves a simultaneous rising and turning, a spine-expanding stretch that, for me, somehow generates a feeling of hope. What it doesn’t do is allow any room for thoughts of "the electric bill”. What was Ginsberg up to, I wonder, as his white crane spread its wings in his kitchen? I can only conclude his electricity bill was a pressing matter in his life at that particular moment.

Studies have shown tai chi can modulate the regions and networks in the brain associated with depression, with mood regulation and processing emotions, and with stress and distress.

A focus on life force

Of the Chinese martial arts, tai chi belongs to the internal arts known collectively as neijia. The focus is on mental, spiritual and “qi” (chi) – or life-force – aspects, rather than the physiological nature of the external martial arts.

The Eight Methods are qi, bone, shape, follow, rise, return, retain, conceal. At this early stage of my study of tai chi, they remain a mystery. But the principles of the Six Harmonies are evident in a muted way in the class teachings, where emphasis is placed on movement with intent, and on developing an awareness of what one is feeling during the moves – internally as well as externally.

For those of us who lose touch with what our bodies are doing and feeling, neglecting to pay attention until they threaten our wellbeing, or even our lives, this fusing of mind and body, spirit and movement, intent and qi, feels like an important survival skill.

For example, every year almost 7,000 women in Australia are diagnosed with a gynaecological cancer. These cancers are characterised by low survival rates and are notoriously difficult to detect. Something like ovarian cancer can show up in many different ways and spread quite widely before being correctly diagnosed.

Increased awareness of our bodies could help us bring the information to our doctors that might assist in earlier diagnoses and better outcomes for these and many other conditions.

In 2020, tai chi was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. There have been claims for the practice’s beneficial effects on people living with Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis: conditions that come with a debilitating loss of coordination and balance.

One year-long study of women with MS, carried out between 2019 and 2020, showed measurable improvements in the areas of their balance, gait, mood, cognition – and also in their quality of life.

Tai chi brings increased awareness of our bodies – which could help us bring important information to our doctors. Khan Do/Unsplash

Cancer as betrayal

My experience of cancer has been that it feels like a betrayal. For decades, my body has carried me through every kind of weather, both actual and emotional. It has reliably bounced back from every health breakdown. No words can adequately describe the sense of loss engendered by a cancer diagnosis, even one that is not yet deemed terminal.

I was fortunate to be diagnosed early, but I was still blindsided by my body’s deceitfulness, its silent treachery; even after surgery, it was a shock to realise the bounce-back appeared provisional. Was this payback for all the times I’d wished for a different physiology – longer legs, straighter hair, slimmer hips? Or for the times I’d just plain hated the way I looked, hated my own clumsiness in the world so much I’d mistreated my closest ally?

Tai chi asks us to turn our awareness to the body with gentleness and precision; to become better at hearing what it has to say. I have felt let down, so when tai chi’s difficult “separations” sequence requires the whole of my weight to be supported by one ankle, one foot, five toes, I ask my body: Will you hold me? Will you keep me from falling? Can I count on you effortlessly as I once did, as a child, as a young woman?

And each time I do not wobble, or have to save myself from falling, it feels like a baby step in a gradual rebuilding of trust, perhaps even of finding forgiveness for the betrayal, a re-bonding with the self at a profound level.

The Taoist Tai Chi logo is the circular yin and yang symbol, with the light and dark sections reversed. It is said to symbolise tai chi’s ability to reverse bad habits and the ageing process, and thus to promote good health. During practice, I hope to reverse the conditions, whatever they may have been, that prompted my body to turn against itself.

But I understand it is a gradual process, as slow and continuous as the movement and pace of tai chi itself, sometimes compared to pulling a silk thread from a cocoon. Pull it too quickly and it breaks; pull it too slowly and it won’t unwind. Slow and gentle doesn’t equate to “weak” or “ineffectual”. Fundamental to tai chi is the concept of “effortless effort”, in which relaxation enables the important inner work to take place.

In tai chi, relaxation helps important inner work to take place. Monica Leonardi/Unsplash

Less inclined to tears

For me, two months into the practice, my emotions felt more under control; I was less inclined to tears. Week by week, I was discovering that grief and loss are not only held in the heart and mind, but also in the body; muscles and tendons, all the complex systems of nerves and blood and lymph that circulate our distress, are open to being soothed by the language of movement.

As winter set in, I began taking extra classes, going two or three times a week. Pitching up at draughty memorial halls in outlying townships where huge stages were framed by crimson curtains, and where in one case, rows of two-bar electric heaters high up on the walls appeared to be the only heating.

Physically, I found the constant shifting of weight, the expansion and contraction of parts of the body, the striving for a sense of flow, the need to focus, all generated a tangible feeling of wellbeing – though I still felt like an awkward beginner.

In Taoist Tai Chi’s 108-move “set”, some moves – like White Crane Spreads Wings, and Hands Like Clouds – occur multiple times. Learning involves sharpening one’s observational skills, as each move is demonstrated three times by the instructor.

Another subtle aspect of the art is being helped by following those around you who are more skilled, and by their patience in “treading water” for a time while beginners settle in. In this way, tai chi becomes both an individual and a communal endeavour: expressing, through effortless effort, the Taoist ideal of service to others.

To practise the set outside class, the moves must be memorised. It requires patience, persistence and possibly years-long commitment, but studies show the benefits are well worth the effort, especially as we age. Even a tai chi practice of only 24 weeks has demonstrated improved cognitive function in older adults with mild cognitive impairment.

‘I don’t want to seem mystical …’

Lou Reed’s book The Art of the Straight Line: My Tai Chi, edited by his wife, artist Laurie Anderson, was published after Reed’s death. It contains his writings on tai chi and conversations with fellow musicians, artists and tai chi practitioners.

“I have often thought of tai chi as some kind of physical unity to the universe itself, some strange ancient methodology that could link us to the basic energy wave of existence,” he writes. “I don’t want to seem mystical, but something does happen to you when you practice this ancient art.”

Lou Reed credits tai chi with saving him.

Reed became a devotee of Master Ren Guangyi, practising Chen style tai chi for up to two hours a day, and for six or seven days a week. He took Ren on a world tour with him, eventually putting him on stage to do a tai chi set while improvising music to complement the form. The two performed together and engaged in tai chi with the public at Sydney’s 2010 Vivid Festival, which was curated by Reed and Anderson.

In The Art of the Straight Line, in a transcribed conversation between Laurie Anderson and Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (with whom Reed had studied meditation), Anderson movingly recounts how

as Lou died, he was completely conscious. And he was doing Cloud Hands, a tai chi movement, while he died.

Reed had had cancer of the liver and hepatitis, and had undergone a liver transplant six months earlier.

In Things I Do Not Want to Know, Deborah Levy concludes it was the past, specifically her childhood in Africa, that had returned to her when she was sobbing on escalators. After weighing things up in Majorca, she settles down to write. In Goodbye to All That, Joan Didion leaves New York and returns to California. After a time, the moon over the Pacific Ocean and the pervasive scent of jasmine make her tears in New York seem “a long time ago”.

Even so, after the death of her mother, Didion wrote: “There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.” For a long time I had shared that view, but now, as I progressed with tai chi, I was beginning to think there might be ways.

For me, grief for the past has been as much a factor in my tears as my anxiety about the future. Helplessly poised between the two, I found in tai chi a way to manage this position – not by looking back, nor forward, but expanding and contracting into the present moment, shutting out the world’s noise and finding peace within myself through movement and mindfulness. If this sounds too mystical, I can only agree with Lou Reed: “Something does happen to you when you practice this ancient art.”

What is the “something” that happens? It’s difficult to define, and I suspect you feel it almost immediately if you’re going to feel it at all. I’ve noticed that people who’ve never done tai chi come to a first class and they either never return or, like me, embrace it with the zeal of missionaries. In searching for a way to explain the “something”, I can’t find a better place to start than the opening move.

‘I’m confident it’s happening’

The opening to tai chi appears the simplest of movements. The hands, from hanging at the sides with the palms open, rise in front of the body and then slowly float down. It’s the motion one uses when flinging a sheet over a mattress to make a bed, but so much slower. With the upward lifting of the hands, the body contracts; as the hands descend, the body expands and rises.

It is surprising how soothing this motion can be, how almost at once the mind and body calm. The upward lift is driven by pushing up from the floor, with the hands rising as if on puppet strings, but the downward drift comes from dropping the elbows. They are such subtle adjustments, yet the body responds with a palpable quietening.

There is a sense of return in this move, even though it is a beginning. It’s the feeling I get at the end of a long walk when I open the gate from the street and step into our garden. Or when I close the front door behind me and breathe in: home.

In The Art of the Straight Line, Anderson writes that after more than 25 years of practising tai chi, Lou Reed “could actually feel chi. He could pinpoint it, describe it, and trace the way it moved through his body”. She describes how Reed would demonstrate chi by passing one hand over the other.

When I felt that for the first time, I was electrified. I was holding a ball of unbelievably powerful energy and realizing that it could move through me and that this is also what I was made of.

I have not felt the chi moving through me, but it is early days yet. Eight months in, I remember to straighten my spine as I go about my day; I am calmer and have better balance. While I can’t actually see the new neural pathways forming in my brain, I’m confident it is happening.

I continue each week to carry my tiger to the mountain. In the kitchen, while I wait for the kettle or the oven, my white crane spreads its wings. At night, visualising the first 17 moves sends me to sleep. When I practice the difficult cloud hands, I am reminded of Lou Reed: the way he brought his art and his capacity for devotion to tai chi, and was rewarded.

I approach each class with beginner’s mind, and am hopeful of one day experiencing chi’s electrifying energy.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Carol Lefevre, University of Adelaide

Read more:

Carol Lefevre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.