I have been practicing tai chi and qigong for 22 years at your school.
I also teach, but I continue to teach at the school with Lydia and Master Alex Dong. Tai chi has helped me physically in flexibility, agility, balance. I feel the part of building internal strength like building a ship. A very strong building, a sense of rooting. I feel a calm alertness. Tai chi is something I liked. It brought me so many good things, that later it became my job, it became my occupation. I thank my teacher very much for all of this. Regarding qigong, I think that tai chi without qigong is missing something. These two are an ideal combination, and it is good to do them together. With qi gong you develop a lot on an energetic level, you feel a sense of well-being and vitality and energy and this suits tai chi. On a mental level it has helped me a lot in everyday life. If a difficulty once seemed like a mountain to me, now it is like a hill or a small hill. The physical and the mental are communicating vessels, because calm also enters the psyche and you face things as if you were in the center of the storm. When there is chaos around, there is calm. This is the most essential thing for me. This helps me with everything else. At some point in my life I had an accident. Nevertheless, I came back and was able to continue. I think it is the only four months that I missed. These arts helped me a lot there so that I could come back relatively faster, that is, the recovery was quick. And I didn’t give up – even when they couldn’t walk, I did the exercise sitting down.
Of course I did other rehabilitation exercises, but especially qigong helped me a lot.
If I were to say in one word one main thing that changed in my life is that there was a restart in my life. A restart.
I used to work in an IT company as a translator, as a project manager for European Union translation projects and as a software developer.
Just the fact that I left one sector and entered another, that says a lot. So little by little I changed completely. In my life, there was a huge change. I did some other things for a living and then something else happened.
The orientation changed completely. An attitude towards life was strengthened. Thank you very much.
Panagiotis..
