My Journey - Part 6

At the end of 3 tumultuous years with dismal school leaders, I thought about other things I had not done in New York. I hadn't danced for a while, so I thought I might try something different. I looked around on the Internet and became interested in martial arts - but after reading a few magazine issues of Inside Kung Fu, I was a little wary of the idea of sparring, being hit, or thrown across the room. There certainly were some excellent places to study in every imaginable style. It was New York City after all! Then, I learned on the Internet that tai chi was considered a martial art with movement that resembled dance. Tai Chi, I soon discovered, was a super way to de-stress and do something good for my body. I studied with an experienced teacher Sifu H. Won Gim at the H. Won Tai Chi Institute, a small studio near Korea Town in Midtown Manhattan. The training took incredible patience as a I spent a year learning, reviewing, and refining my 20-25 minute long Yang Style Long Form with a group of like-minded office workers and businessmen. Some of the more advanced students performed beautiful sword forms, and all of us had to do push hands. Push hands was grunt work as you literally had to stand and do resistance training with a partner pushing your wrist against a partner's wrist. In this position, Sifu Gim could inexplicably sent anyone flying across the room just by flexing the muscles in his wrist!

Public Tai Chi demonstration at an Annual Korean Day Parade -
I am in the back on the right wearing glasses. 

Performing excerpts from the Classical Yang Family Style Tai Chi Chuan - Long Form

at the Fall 2011 Kagoshima Daiichi High School Cultural Festival in Kirishima, Japan.

I spoke to some teachers at work about my tai chi training, and some colleagues were quite interested in what they heard. A few weeks later, we started a staff-only early morning "yoga-lates" class at my school a few mornings a week before work. The class went very well for about a year, and we all had the opportunity to teach parts of the class including a little tai chi. Unfortunately, there was a terrible bedbugs scare across the entire Department of Education, and staff began to find bedbugs in our school. We all sadly decided that we had to end the class shortly after. The demands of work also began to draw me away from tai chi, and I was attending tai chi class less and less often. At work and outside of work, I was once again - stopping moving.