My tai chi instructor is retirement age and got aggressive martial arts out of their system at a young age. We were taught that the enemy we are most likely to fight is the environment, not some assailant. And for me that’s been truer than for most[1]. I’ve taken a few bad spills off of steps or curbs that might have put me into a cast or on crutches, and in almost all of them I didn’t even end up with a limp due to reflexes I trained in tai chi.

If you have ever tried meditation and found it physically too painful, I highly recommend you try a tai chi class. I found it quite easy to turn the warmups into standing meditation, having failed many times before.

1. As a child I drew bad attention regularly, but genes and life choices have put me into a privileged place. It took walking to lunch with coworkers through a “bad” neighborhood for this to really hit home. Nobody was going to bother me, but I’d seen other people get bothered, and it hit me that nobody bothered them only because I was walking in front of them. It certainly could be the case that tai chi helps you with such things, but that was not so for most of my fellow students, and certainly not for some of the bigger guys.