I had night terrors in my teens and my early twenties. The dreams were always the same: they began in the basement of my family’s Victorian home and transitioned to a forest at night. Swordsmen chased me until they caught me and hacked me to pieces. I could feel every agonizing cut.
I told no one about this. I merely suffered for years. I tried to correlate it to some waking experience that might have triggered them, but what good would that do? How could I change my family, my relatives, or my life predicaments? I just gave up. I was helpless.
About two-weeks after I began learning Taijiquan, I turned around in my dreams and fought back. I still got painfully split apart. About three weeks after I started practicing, I drew even. One month after learning Taijiquan, I fought back—and won. The dreams vanished. They’ve never returned.
The prevailing thought is that Taijiquan heals. I’ve seen it happen to other people who take up a regular practice. Taiji improves balance, strengthens legs, and relieves tension. Since the system puts a great emphasis on relaxation, it helps with circulation, pulmonary problems, and the nervous system. A great many issues are matters of mind and body together, and Taijiquan’s long practice balances that connection.
The masters’ explanation is deceptively simple: qi heals everything. The body naturally seeks balance (homeostasis and smooth functioning). When there’s a problem, it’s because of imbalances (something is either deficient or excessive, thereby throwing the body’s function off), or because of stagnation (due to an invading pathogen, weather disturbance, physical damage, chronic stress, or mental difficulties). By using the entire system to restore equilibrium and clear away impediments, Taijiquan restores us to who we naturally are.
I eventually learned how this connects to deep Daoist thought. We are urged to be plain and simple because we are already good. We just need to let the body take care of itself. Medicine and therapy are assistive modalities, not “solutions” in themselves. Nonaction (wuwei) in this context means not to do anything that is incompatible with our natural health, and not to strain to do anything beyond our capacity or that isn’t positive. Taijiquan restores health—because it returns anyone who practices to the health that is their birthright.
I keep practicing because I want to stay as vital and healthy and for as long as possible. I am careful about diet, sleep, and stress. Yes, I’m older, but at the same time, I don’t have to struggle as much as when I was younger. Candidly, I am still recovering from decades of working for a living. I’m grateful that things are easier now, but that’s because I worked hard to make that happen. If you’ve ever been at a sad situation where a person is injured, you’ll probably hear someone cry out: “They aren’t moving!” Yes. To move is to be alive. To be healthy is to move.