Contemporary Activities: T’ai Chi Chuan I
An intercultural Approach for Counseling
By Bahieh Habibi Wilkinson
The intercultural approach of T’ai Chi Ch’uan was an interesting and quite helpful book. It began by describing Therapy, a healing, an attempt to gain, return and maintain the body and mind to a natural state of equilibrium. I think this is very necessary especially in our day and Age; we tend to do a lot and rest less. This might be a problem later on in one’s life with complication mostly health wise.
In the East, T’ai Chi Ch’uan, yoga and other forms of kinetic therapy have been used for thousand of years and what this book tries to examine is T’ai Chi Ch’uan an effective and valid intercultural approach for counseling and therapy .It can contribute to and enhance the therapeutic process if humans can break through or destroy their often impregnable wall of prejudice and ignorance.
According to the book, becoming aware of one’s body and using this established Chinese body movement of T’ai Chi to the best advantage can be effective and positive system of kinetic therapy. It also states that Eastern body-oriented techniques have often been neglected issues in therapy. This is a good point because some may like to talk about their problems and other may prefer not to share. The T’ai chi approach may be very helpful technique to the private types like myself. After my experience in this class and what I read from the book, these Slow movements don’t only help you with stress but prepare your muscle memory for the fast actions required in day to day life I can see the forms developing balance, possibly a bit of muscle and flexibility, and definitely body awareness, but there are more efficient ways of doing this and that these skills aren't the same as getting ready for a fight. Yoga will give you all these things but it's not the best way to prepare to defend yourself. Sure, it definitely helps to