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For over 40 years, Rising Sun School has been nestled in the Toronto Annex neighborhood, offering small classes and personal coaching in Tai Chi. Our instructors are classically-trained, dedicated practitioners. We focus on you and your individual needs as a student.
Tai Chi form changes with you, day to day and year to year. There are changes that come from injuries and illness, and there are changes that come from life itself. The beauty is in having a companion in the form, a practice that moves through your life with you, every step of the way.
You want to practice your Tai Chi form, but Toronto is covered in snow and your place is cramped. What do you do??
Tai Chi takes space. This is one of its best qualities, and also one of its challenges for us city-dwellers.
In Toronto, meditation means sitting in silence on a cushion. But in Tai Chi practice, meditation is very different.
The Breath Set at Rising Sun beautifully lays out the basic principles of our work. In the third round, we hear the instructions, “Mind and breath to center; eyes to hands”. When Sifu taught this to me as an instructor, he explained that this brings focused intention to the interior (mind and breath to center) and then to the exterior (eyes to hands).
Back and forth. Interior. Breath in. Exterior. Follow hands.
There is a collection of sayings from Mr. Lee Shiu Pak nestled into the narrative tradition of our Tai Chi work. Mr. Lee was a renaissance man. He was a martial artist, a journalist, a scholar, a painter, and—as these sayings reveal—also something of a philosopher. In my early days at Rising Sun, Sifu used these sayings a lot. Probably the first I ever heard was: “Return with kindly accuracy. Not away from your centre.”
Tai Chi Chuan, more often known simply as Tai Chi, is a Chinese discipline whose origins date back to the thirteenth century. T'ai Chi was developed from older martial arts forms by Taoist monks who followed a path of balance and harmony called T'ai Chi and wished to employ these same principles in their martial practice.
Our lives are more separate than ever. We find ourselves in bubbles that are much smaller than we would like. The weaving of tradition and individual created by Tai Chi practice is a balm. It can help us connect to something bigger than ourselves, outside of space and time, while at the same time providing a solitary activity that supports individual physical and mental health.