The Courtyard 练功
The pharmacy has drawers, but the tradition always insisted the best medicine is taken standing up. In this courtyard live the movement arts — tai chi, qigong, the Eight Brocades — practiced at dawn by a hundred million people, and unusual among everything on this site for how kindly the modern evidence treats them. Grandfather watches from the bench; his granddaughter Xiao Xing leads the forms.
太极拳
Grandfather calls it meditation that forgot to sit down. An hour of it looks like nothing is happening — which is exactly the part your balance, knees, and nerves are grateful for.
气功
If tai chi is a river, qigong is the well it draws from — breath, posture, and attention, repeated until they agree with each other. Anyone can start; the crane never stopped.
八段锦
Eight movements, a thousand years old, and I still do them every morning before grandfather finishes his first tea. By the third brocade the crane joins in.
太极
Grandfather says tai chi is the only exercise that improves with the practitioner's age. The research on falls agrees with him, which he mentions more often than strictly necessary.
招式
Everyone wants the flowing sequence; grandfather makes everyone learn to stand still first. These are the eight movements I teach in the courtyard, in the order the tiger failed them.
站桩
The practice that looks like nothing and feels like everything — you stand still, hugging an invisible tree, while your legs discover what the word "effort" has meant all along.
