The Dragon's Head Blog: First Beginner’s Weekend of 2016 in Edinburgh

The weekend of 16-17 January saw three Beginner Weekends, all at the same time, at three different Centres around Great Britain.

In Edinburgh, 18 completely new students enrolled as members, and joined with 28 current members (some of whom were still fairly new) for a weekend of Taoist Tai Chi practice.

In their matching orange ‘Grand Opening’ shirts, the models for the weekend showed the first few moves three times, and everyone joined in.

Philomena and Elizabeth, leaders for the weekend, demonstrated a section of the sequence to illustrate some basic principles.

In the ‘walk the walls’ segment, we learned about some of the significant items that hang on the walls of our centre; and in another segment we shared some of the rich testimonial material from our ‘Fung Loy Kok Taoist Tai Chi’ YouTube channel.

Back on the floor, we continued the instruction in the usual way – the models demonstrate three times, then we all practice together three times. It works! – everyone picked up the sequence very quickly.

Before long we were able to perform the whole sequence together.

Best of all, for the new members, they hadn’t just enrolled for a weekend course – they’d made a charitable donation entitling them to four months of membership of the Taoist Tai Chi Society, with access to over a dozen classes a week at the Edinburgh Centre alone, and many more around GB and worldwide. How good is that?!