Last year I took my physical well-being, and it ended up that I had enrolled in tai chi. Going into the class, I had not really know what tai chi was, but I learned more about the Chinese culture and movement than I had expected. Throughout the semester one of the topics we talked about was yin and yang and how it was related to the Chinese culture. In class we defined yin as being soft, yielding, and empty while yang was the more stressed and harder parts of life. Tai chi is spent mostly in the yin, being soft and empty, because in most of our day-to-day life we are in the yang, and are clenched or stressed out. My professor believed that if we learned how to be more in the yin side of life during class, it would help us to better balance our life when we were out of class. Tai chi can be described as a “‘meditation of motion’ and promotes serenity and inner peace”. In class we practiced this through meditation and slowing our breathing before each class began. If you would like to see an example of the forms of tai chi we did in class watch this video.
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Did you have Professor Heinz? He was my FYS professor for a course about Chinese philosophy and encouraged all of us to take his Tai Chi class. From what you said, we too talked greatly about how soft things can be incredibly strong, such as water, and thus how yielding can have greater impact than brute force alone. And no lie, the eyes-closed mediation before every class was nice.
Yeah, I did have Professor Heinz! I loved the eyes-closed mediation and he had many interesting stories about Chinese culture.