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There's this joke by one of my Chinese colleague: "When I was at school, we had to choose between swimming and taiqi, but there was no swimmig pool..." So I thi
by gbog 10y ago
There's this joke by one of my Chinese colleague: "When I was at school, we had to choose between swimming and taiqi, but there was no swimmig pool..." So I think a big slice of Chinese people have praticed taiqi or some related "quan", but not many still do it regularly. I still some old guys or ladies practicing in the morning when I bike to work, but again not many. Yoga is kind of fashionable in China among the younger people, however, and anyway local traditions may well revive for some reason.
- agumonkey 10y agoI get the weight of enforced traditional practice. But if Tai Chi wasn't useful, elders wouldn't keep doing it don't you think ?
- Hydraulix989 10y agoMore bizarre useless rituals have been done before in the name of "health." The placebo effect is powerful.
- Florin_Andrei 10y agoOh, c'mon. It's not magic, sure. But it's low impact whole body exercise. Beats sitting on a couch any day now.
- hosh 10y agoAt some point, it's less about usefulness and more about whole body-mind-emotion integration. At the very least, there may be spontaneous feeling of rightness and perhaps, happiness and joy that arises. This is true of yoga as well. I am Taiwanese. Unlike my sister, I'm considered an oddball: Most of my friends are not Asian and I practice traditional martial arts. I tried to go and find the teacher myself, however, if I had not been so out of sorts with my mother, I probably would have gotten consistent training when I was young. I would have been the spoiled only grandson (so to speak), it's difficult to find any kid of Chinese ancestry eager for it. I also went in for all the wrong reasons though I thought I knew why I should get into this stuff. Now, in the middle age, with my body the way it is, I recognize a lot of the motivation I had were fantasies. My wife is of American descent. Her grandmother, also American, picked up Tai Chi a couple yeara ago. It was suggested to her as a pain management thing, and she did not want to take drugs for pain. She stuck out with it even though there wasn't a result. She said the first result came after a year: the pain went away. She could sleep. She told me she wished someone had told her about this when she was young. But I think we both knew: if someone told her about this when she was young, it's doubtful she would have listened. Pain management sounds useful, but the art goes deeper than that. Using a metric like "utility" to describe it's value asks the wrong question.
- agumonkey 10y agoSure youth is leaving in its own fantasy world. There's no better time for information. The time you get it is when you get it[1]. If your wife's mom saw results it's all what I was looking for. Thanks. [1] Sometimes you read the same thing many times for years, only 10 years later you realize the real meaning.
- bfuller 10y agoTai chi teaches balance and efficiency of movement. Young headstrong people (mostly) won't see the the benefits of these qualities. Older people (mostly) will.