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Your Learning Journey with the Tai Chi Foundation
The Tai Chi Foundation’s (TCF) curriculum offers a carefully structured path for students who seek to develop deep skills in Tai Chi Chuan and potentially grow into teaching. Each level is designed to build on core Tai Chi principles, supporting students at every stage of their practice.
Why Choose TCF? Team-Teaching and Principle-Based Learning
At TCF, classes are team-taught, giving students access to multiple perspectives and enhancing the learning experience. This collaborative approach keeps the focus on delivering Tai Chi’s principles effectively, allowing students to progress at their own pace, free from any individual ego. From the very beginning, our curriculum emphasizes Tai Chi fundamentals, creating a clear, principle-based path to mastery.
Tai Chi Foundation Curriculum
Professor Cheng distilled the tai chi form into eight movements that are easy to learn and fun to practice, The Eight Ways. These eight exercises bring the essential health benefits of the full form into your everyday activities. Become stronger climbing stairs. Sit and get up from a chair with greater stability and less effort. Lift or reach for objects securely using tai chi principles.
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Roots & Branches 5 Element Qigong™ is energetic and healing as it condenses tai chi into standing postures, walks and shifting movements. By integrating principle, breath, and focus in the “tantien” with awareness of the Chinese Five Elements, this work generates, circulates and unblocks “qi” (vital energy) allowing it to nourish us at the deepest level.
The Beginning Level of Cheng Man-Ch’ing’s form is taught in approximately 30-36 one-hour classes, divided into three separate 10-12-hour courses called B1, B2 and B3. Each class hour provides teacher demonstrations, lots of practice repetitions, hands-on adjustments by teachers, and verbal guidance. Students are asked to practice what they know at home in the morning and the evening–and more, if they can. Practice is the heart and soul of learning the form.
In Fundamentals, we review the entire form from beginning to end, working to embody the tai chi principles at a deeper level. In particular, we bring our attention to the feet, legs and hips. As in any art, there are fundamental elements that provide a foundation for one’s practice and future growth.
At the Intermediate Level, we progress to a deeper and more internal understanding and practice of tai chi chuan. New concepts are introduced that enable us to integrate our form and push hands practice as one body of knowledge with all movement initiated and guided from our dantian. Intermediate Form is a 20-hour course.
“Push hands” (tui shou) practice might be better translated as “sensing hands.” In this partner exercise, we use postures and movements from the tai chi form to “listen” with our body for our partner’s balance, timing, and tension. Through push hands practice, we learn to play with another person’s energy and movements and develop relaxation and balance in our responses.
Offered at our summer trainings, this swimming technique, used by Hawaiian warriors from the Huna tradition, uses the tai chi principles of timing, balance and relaxation to propel you through the water with ease and comfort.
Tai Chi Sword is as different from Western swordsmanship as calligraphy is from typing. The embodiment of the Tai Chi Form and training in Sensing Hands are pre requisites for learning the Sword Form.