A TAI CHI STORY
"Thank You for Not Judging"
by Denise Kirshenbaum
All my life I've been an exercise class dropout, signing up for health clubs and fitness programs and almost immediately abandoning them. But something about my t'ai chi class keeps pulling me back.
I joined the class, which meets on the second floor of an ancient brick building, shortly after leaving a longtime career as a photography production manager. Back then I knew nothing about t'ai chi — a soft-style martial art that's also called "a moving meditation" — or qi gong, the ancient energy-gathering practice that our instructor, Arlene, teaches for the first half of the hour-long class. Yet, time and again, it's worked like a drug.
I went back again recently after a six-month hiatus. As I took my place in the back row, my heart pounded from the blaze of anger that had ignited as I swerved and swore my way through a barrage of construction barricades. Stressed out and hormonal, I was desperate for some of that qi gong bliss to calm the craziness.
"Imagine that your legs are rooted into the earth." From the front of the wide classroom, Arlene's voice projected a perfect calmness. I was so ready to follow her instructions. But the weight I gained since I last attended class had altered my center of gravity. Now I struggled to feel as rooted as I once did.
Together, we made triangles with our thumbs and index fingers framing the space just below our navels. This was the area of our bodies where we would be drawing in the earth's qi, or energy. I willed myself to ignore the tightness of my waistband as I mirrored Arlene's movements, raising my interlaced hands in front of me. While she encouraged us to "pull the earth's plentiful energy" — the qi —"deep within," I tried to focus on the brown ponytail of the woman in front of me, but my mind kept skittering to the folded "to do" list in my pocket.
I had started writing out these lists months earlier, sure that this was the antidote to the forgetfulness that left me overwhelmed and tense. But as they'd grown more elaborate, outlined with the tiniest of steps in carefully numbered sequences, instead, they made me feel like a freak. Just the day before in the grocery, I'd gone into a purse-dumping meltdown in the middle of the fruit section when I couldn't locate the current list. Was it because I felt I couldn't function without it? Or was it the sheer embarrassment of having another person find it, and then read the painstaking detail that it now took to keep me going?
Lately I felt embarrassed and panicked by everything. The weight gain and mood swings. The not-remembering. It was as if I didn't know myself anymore and that was scary. I shuddered to think of how I would handle life's bigger changes when they hit. Clueless, I looked to Arlene again, raising my interlaced hands above my head.
"I don't seem to be able to exhale as long as everyone else does," said Carolyn, the newest member of the class.
Had I felt that way, too, when I first started? No. It hadn't been the exhale that I'd found troubling, but rather, the inhale.
The first day I attended class the simple act of inhaling seemed to take everything I had. That year — in addition to leaving my career — my 63-year-old father had died suddenly. Shortly afterward, my husband and I discovered that our beloved young dog had cancer. Despite a multitude of treatments, four months later the battle to save his life was over. As I answered the phone the day after putting him to sleep, I felt as if all the life had been crushed out of me. Our sympathetic vet had called to tell me about a t'ai chi class which was to begin the following day. She knew the instructor — a woman named Arlene — from a recent workshop they'd both attended. Given my abysmal track record with organized exercise, I told her I couldn't imagine myself joining. "The story of how Arlene came to t'ai chi is an amazing one," was all she said.
And it was.
Slender, with the long graceful arms of a dancer, Arlene's sparkling dark eyes and Audrey Hepburn-pixie fooled you into thinking she was decades younger than her actual age, which I learned was closer to sixty. Watching her as she balanced on one foot, I'd been shocked when she said she'd been a multiple sclerosis sufferer for twenty years. When she'd been incapacitated by the progressive disease years earlier, she told us, her doctors had informed her that she had exhausted their arsenal of treatments. Instead of panicking, Arlene sought a holistic healer. That decision eventually led her to the doorway of a t'ai chi master. Walking with a cane, she'd been leaning against a wall for extra support as she watched the teacher and her class flowing through the graceful, often one-legged moves. "Will I ever really be able to do this?" she'd told us she wondered as she signed up for her first t'ai chi class. Yet now, it was Arlene who was leading our class.
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We began the energy ball exercise — long one of my favorites. I held an invisible ball of energy out in front of me that expanded and contracted with each breath. Soon, I knew from experience, the fear and frustration I was feeling would be giving way to the lightness of the qi as it buzzed effervescently through my arms and into my hands. But, halfway through, I was slammed with a jolt of self-rage instead.
Compared with Arlene's MS journey, my troubles suddenly seemed trivial. Ridiculous, even. Why couldn't I keep it together without all the drama? Not to mention the weight gain, now 20 pounds and counting. I tried to focus — let my arms move with my breath, like we were supposed to be doing — but instead, could think of nothing but the incriminating lists.
"Try to take note of what you might be feeling in your bodies without judging." Arlene's voice, steady as always, brought me up short. Each week she repeated this sentence at the close of the energy ball sequence which ended the first half of class. But sadly when I concentrated on my hands that morning, I felt none of the lovely energizing qi and the calmness it always brought.
The old floorboards creaked as we went through the movements of our t'ai chi form but my heart wasn't in it. When class ended, I left the room quickly without speaking to anyone.
Arlene's directive replayed like a stuck tape loop as I re-traced by way through the maze of orange traffic cones:
Try to take note of what you might be feeling in your body without judging.
That afternoon it came up again and again — out walking the dog…washing the dishes...on the phone with my mother-in-law as she dictated her grocery order.
In all the time I'd studied t'ai chi with Arlene, I'd assumed she'd been referring to the tingling qi that may or may not have been buzzing in our hands. But could it be possible that she meant the sentence in a more all-encompassing way?
Driving to the grocery, I took an inventory of all the things I'd been feeling: the too-tight clothing cutting into me and the out-of-nowhere mood swings. The anxious awakenings in the middle of the night, followed by the crushing overwhelm triggered by my less-than-perfect grasp of all the dates and details that filled my calendar.
Hadn't I been judging myself all along, and quite harshly?
It was true; I had gained twenty pounds. But hadn't at least a part of that come from the lavish dinners that my husband and I shared to celebrate our weekends together.
In spite of the mood swings, hadn't I held onto loving relationships? Bad moods or not, I was pretty sure I'd done all I could to help family and friends when they needed my assistance.
But what about those ultra-detailed lists that made me cringe?
As I pulled into a parking spot at the grocery, I was almost afraid to look at the current list that lay in the seat next to me. But when I forced myself I suddenly saw a multitude of other, long-forgotten lists — lists I had been well-paid to create when the planning and execution of complex photo shoots had been on the line. Were these lists I'd been making for myself really any different?
Outside in the sunshine — list in hand — I pictured myself among my t'ai chi classmates once again with Arlene calling out the shifts and turns and balances. "Can you feel it?" I heard her asking as I imagined us swinging one leg wide to face the opposite direction. "Can you feel the qi? It's all around you now!" In my mind, I watched us cross our rounded arms, one in front of the other — as if we were getting ready to hug ourselves — and this time I did, indeed, feel it. It was like a net there to catch us. Like a trampoline to launch us buoyantly above the day-to-day stresses. Buoyantly back up into the air, and into our ever-changing futures.
Denise Kirshenbaum lives in Wilmette, Illinois, with her husband and two dogs, and has studied t'ai chi with Arlene since 2001. Her writing has appeared in More magazine.
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