No pain, no gain

What is pain?

Surely pain is a warning. Pain is your body suffering damage. In tai chi you do not ignore your body and impose force. If you are in pain, you are doing something incorrectly. If you damage your body through exercise, you may have to live with it for the rest of your life.

Competition

Tai chi is not concerned with competition. It advocates an different approach; whereby the student addresses their own wellbeing and is compassionate towards others. By focussing upon your own mind and body, you can become calm and relaxed. If somebody else wants to compete with you, so what? Winning and losing are concepts best applied to games or sport, not living. Competition causes suffering. Consider sport... Only the winner is happy at the end of a race.
What about the other competitors? They feel depressed, disheartened, frustrated, upset... but why? People become emotionally attached to the wrong things in life - 'winning' and 'losing' are no more real than any other form of measurement. Running around a track is not the same as finding the cure for cancer. Will videogame victories produce a better world? How many athletes suffer sports injuries from pushing their bodies too far? Imagine if the time, money and enthusiasm currently invested in sport was applied to real-world problems such as diet, education, homelessness, animal conservation and environmental concerns.

Self defence

Most martial arts classes involve a fair amount of brutality and pain. This is not unreasonable, since they are primarily concerned with violence. Yang Cheng Fu style tai chi is different - it offers an alternative to pain and potential injury. There seems little point in learning how to defend yourself if you get injured in the process. Tai chi is considered to be a soft martial art because the muscles remain soft and loose at all times. Dynamic Balancing Tai Chi encourages students to explore the way in which they are using their own body. Working in relationship with other people is mutually beneficial. Training tai chi for health & self defence is not a brutal process; there is no competition, no injury, no pain.