Hello friends,

I’ve just opened registration for the spring installment of the Five Animal Frolics qigong series: Tiger, on Wednesday April 22nd, 5:30-7pm.

It’s a little while since I’ve given an overview of this series, so here’s a quick introduction. Qìgōng literally means “energy work”, and is a very broad category of movement exercises rooted in Traditional Chinese Medicine ideas about how energy moves through the body. Tàijíquán can be thought of as one type of qigong, and I practice a few others.

Five Animal Frolics is a particularly ancient set based on observing the tiger, monkey, bear, crane, and deer. Each animal has a pair of movements and a set of associations with a season, an emotion, an element, and specific organs. Any one animal’s pair of movements makes a more complete practice than one or two steps of a taiji form, so I offer stand-alone classes that focus on one animal in its season.

Back to spring and tigers. As well as the season, the tiger movements are associated with the emotion of anger. I tend to think of spring as a happy time, as the days get longer, flowers bloom, the weather gets milder, and so on. So I was confused by this association at first. My teacher explained it in terms of rising energy: all those happy things go with energy rising as we come out of winter sluggishness, but the energy doesn’t always manifest as sunshine and rainbows. It’s easy for that rising energy to misfire into impatience—especially in our region with its very long spring—or outright anger, especially right now when every glimpse of the outside world is filled with visions of cruelty, violence, and pointless suffering.

The movements themselves fit this picture. The yīn movement, “tiger stretches claws” looks (and I suppose feels) like a cat stretching as it wakes up. The yáng piece, meanwhile, mimes pouncing on something and digging those claws in. There’s a moment of tension, and then we let it go. Much like the sadness of the crane and the fear of the deer, this movement is an exercise in expressing anger without holding on to it, letting the emotion be and letting it leave.

Both movements are also a deep stretch for the forearms. I find them useful when I’ve spent too long at a keyboard, for how they stretch the tendons that get tired from typing, and how the tense-and-release helps with physically letting go of stuck tension.

I hope you can join me to play through these and talk about them.

Details:

• Wednesday April 22nd, 5:30-7pm

• At theDock, 722 Cormorant Street

• $16.50 / person including fees

• Beginners always welcome, no prior experience is expected

• Registration online at https://eldan-goldenberg.bloomtickets.ca/event/640

And finally a quick announcement: registration is now open for the spring taiji session, details at https://taijiwitheldan.ca/classes.html#taiji