Our Group
Based in Cambridge, MA, we make a serious effort to train the specific taiji neigong (inner cultivation) system taught by Patrick Kelly, a close "inner school" student of Huang Xingxian.
Our primary focus is inner development, which involves sustained effort to continually change and refine ourselves ever more deeply. Self defense and health benefits are positive, but only “side effects” to our main aim.
Our approach is usually a better fit for younger people who learn and change a bit more readily. It is possible but much more difficult for older beginners, who should only consider our group if prepared to make extraordinary effort to change familiar habits acquired over a lifetime.
People with previous taiji or related experience should only consider our group if willing to learn a completely different approach with fresh eyes, rather than simply reinforcing or supplementing what they already know.
Genuine taiji transmission is difficult under the best of circumstances, requiring deep, sincere, and sustained effort from both teacher and student. For the benefit of all involved, we ask that everyone watch a full class prior to joining, and then only join if able to commit to minimum attendance expectations as outlined here.
Training Curriculum
· Huang Xingxian's 5 loosening exercises
· Zheng Manqing's 37 posture short form
· Yang Chengfu's 108 posture long form
· 8 basic fixed pattern push hands
· guided meditation
Memorizing the general moves of the forms is not important or useful for our purposes; on the level of internal training there is zero difference between following a teacher in class or following one's own memory. Understanding specific details of the movements in depth and specifically recognizing and changing our individual movement patterns that we are comfortable with is much more difficult, and much more relevant for what we want to train. The traditional forms are just the framework we use to work on these movements because taiji is an intelligent system that has been highly refined over thousands of years.
Our push hands exercises are cooperative partner exercises to discover and refine subtle aspects of how we interact with and react to external pressures in specific ways. They are not an opportunity to compete or compare how “good at tai chi” you are. They do involve fairly extensive physical contact that should be gentle when trained properly, but the possibility of (briefly, before we have a chance to correct them or sometimes remove them from the class if too rough) occasionally encountering a rough partner is not completely avoidable.
Meditation is a key component of our practice. True meditation requires deep concentration beyond modern notions of "mindfulness" or simple quiet awareness (which we actually advise against), and its purpose is much higher and deeper than mere relief from the stresses of everyday life. One of the most important benefits of genuine taiji training is that it is an efficient way to bring the mind into a deeper state as one of the first prerequisite steps to a genuine meditation practice.
Instructor Bio
Our group was started in 2021 by Charlie Liu to develop a local community to seriously train with. Charlie has been exclusively training Patrick Kelly's approach since meeting PK in 2014, with particular support from Patrick’s students Tim Suh, Guillem Bernado, and Christine Schneider.
Prior to meeting PK, Charlie studied with Liam Comerford (a student of Zheng Manqing) from 2001-2007 and Ben Lo (Luo Bangzhen) from 2008-2010. During those periods, Charlie also took a few classes with Maggie Newman, Ed Young, and Mark Lord.
落魄红尘四十春，无为无事信天真
生涯只在乾坤鼎，活计惟凭日月轮
八卦气中潜至宝，五行光里隐元神
桑田改变依然在，永作人间出世人
-吕洞宾