Tai Chi and the Resilience of Silk

- A reflective prose inspired by nature

Silkworms spin cocoons to protect themselves before they hatch into moths. The cocoons are made of a single continuous silk thread. Incredibly strong and resilient, silk can withstand significant stretches without breaking. When considered as strength-to-weight ratio, silk is stronger than steel!

Tai Chi is a practice featuring slow and intentional movements coupled with breath and awareness. To practice Tai Chi is to practice “silky awareness”, threading awareness through each movement, step, turn and breath. Through practice, our awareness becomes strong and resilient and as smooth and soft as silk.

One chapter of the Tao Te Ching says, the soft overcomes hard. The slow overcomes fast. This seems counterintuitive to the modern mind fixated on being harder and faster. But being fixated on being harder and faster will eventually break us, or bind us to a dead-end, exhausting competition that saps vitality out of life. Time is always on the side of slow and soft. That is how a little tender seedling can split huge rock. 

Silk is soft, but it can overcome steel.

Turtle is slow, but it can outrun the hare.

In eastern Asian traditions of martial arts, Tai Chi, and similar practices like Aikido, are hailed as higher expressions of a more mature form of the art, which can overcome a more overt display of force. When one reaches the highest realm of this art, one realizes that all enemies are projections from the inner, secretive chambers of one’s own psyche.

To practice Tai Chi is to cultivate our awareness as resilient and as smooth as silk. For Tai Chi class with Spring, please click here.