Despite what Taichi Grandmasters from the old country continue to lecture, Taichi done poorly will have beneficial effects. There are so many people who have proved this it’s irrefutable. However, if you take to Taichi as part of a process to rid yourself of meds, you will need to meet a reasonable level with your Taichi.
That standard will focus on alignment, relaxation and connection. In a way the Grandmasters are right. Although it seems to me they were talking about Taichi as a martial art. As a health and wellness art the standard is clearly not as high. Which is not to say that aiming for the standards of the martial artist grandmasters should not be the goal after a few years of leaning into your practice of Taichi as an art of recovery and healing.
By recovery I refer to the mental illness definition where it means a recovery of personhood, not the curing of the illness. What we also think of as healing. Because if you have a chronic invisible condition you are likely to have suffered wounds to your personhood in your workplace or community, and more than likely your family and friends to.
The sense of personhood you had before your illness is likely to have suffered a number of blows if you used medication for any length of time. And lets face it, all Western medicine has to offer is surgery or long years of medication when it comes to chronic conditions.
My own experience with the amitriptyline technology is a case in point. More than 10 years after I stopped taking it the issues that arose after going off it remain. Luckily for me I had a twenty month period of solid Taichi practice before starting a medication reduction program for the other meds the specialist and GPs had prescribed. Taichi first thing every morning and last thing every night for more than two years played a significant role helping me overcome the usual mental issues so common with anti-depressant withdrawal.
I use to think the key difference between me and my late sister was my preparedness to work with specialists and GP’s. Which is code for doing what they say for my chronic condition, regardless of how it sounded. That, as it turns out was simply a fantasy. It seems much more likely that being able to reduce and then eliminate my prescription drug intake was down to Taichi, an option she never had long before her life expectancy started diminishing under a tsunami of polypharmacy for chronic pain and a proliferation of complications that flowed from an ever-expanding catalogue of pharmaceutical ‘treatments’.
In the old country apparently half of all the people doing Taichi didn’t start until they were fifty. For those of us who have been prescribed the not very effective medications of twenty-first century Western medicine for a chronic condition, we would do well to start not long after 25. And after leaning in and developing the basic skills of a set, the sooner we move to doing it daily the better our quality of life is likely to be.
A sense of Personhood you are comfortable with is important. But so too is healing the damage caused by years if not decades of Western meds. In a later post I will explore how daily Taichi is an integrative technology that can re-regulate systems made dysfunctional by the long term use of meds.