Turning Silk: A Diary of Chen Taiji Practice, the Quan of Change [Paperback]

Kinthissa's book offers a rare, and much needed, glimpse into a rigorous internal practice, a way of being aware of the body's inner landscape and the micro-movement that is the foundation of all movement. Through the pages of her book, Kinthissa guides the reader with patience and precision as she speaks about the most intimate and fundamental nature of the body, with the love and respect that comes from exhaustive involvement with its inner workings through meticulous observation.

We can follow step by step her thought processes as she tracks events and impressions throughout the daily-ness of her practice. Her writing is filled with beautifully articulate accounts of inner movement. Her use of image and metaphor gives elusive states an understandable materiality.

--Dance Research, the Journal of the Society for Dance Research, Edinburgh, Vol.28, No.2, November 2010

The world of TaijiQuan changed in the 1980s with the opening up of mainland China. Two barely known themes fundamental to the training began to emerge: ZhanZhuang, the standing qigong, and Chansigong, the technique of twining silk. This book documents an old-timer's plunge into this new world.

Kinthissa shares with the general reader and fellow practitioner her experiences of TaijiQuan at the heart of daily life. Her story sheds light on why people choose this complex and delicate art, what practice entails, and how to train so that Qi, nature's vital breath, may flow in the body.

The years of living with my old Yang form, doing it in all states of mind, whatever the circumstances of my life, gave me the strength to face the physical difficulties that had been waiting just beneath the surface. It was as if ZhanZhuang and Chansigong were the jingang, the temple guardians, whose pounding of giant mortars is evoked in the first movement of the form. Under their merciless gaze, I finally got down to serious practice.

Kinthissa was born in Rangoon in 1952. She studied Far Eastern art and philosophy at Vassar College, New York, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. In London she encountered the TaijiQuan she had glimpsed as a child on her way to school. She was apprenticed for 10 years to Gerda Geddes, pioneer teacher in the UK of Yang Style TaijiQuan. From 1977 to 1995, Kinthissa taught Yang Style 108 Form, mainly in London and Basel. Between 1982 and 1989 she worked with students at the London Contemporary Dance School to find ways for them to regenerate energy and maintain awareness during strenuous training. In 1995, she met Chen XiaoWang, the leading exponent of Chen Style TaijiQuan. The years of study with him have given her a lifetime's practice to deepen the meaning of TaijiQuan. She teaches in England, Greece, Iceland, Italy and Spain.

Now I think the reason this lesson in London touched me deeply was not because it was my initiation in Chen Style TaijiQuan, but because it was my first encounter with a way of teaching hitherto unknown to me. I had been growing restless. At that time I was teaching both the older Yang Style long form and some of the composite short forms from mainland China. Undoubtedly I was looking for a new way of doing TaijiQuan. I had sought out a variety of teachers. Some of them brought attention to the function of the moves - here you block, there you deflect; this is a knee thrust, that is an elbow strike. Lessons like that were fun, enlivening the contact with others in the class. Gerda Geddes would remark sometimes on how I was getting into `kicking and punching'. That had saddened one of her students, a man with a brave history as a conscientious objector in the warring 1940s. He had admired my serene form, and it was a disappointment to him that I would countenance the ruin of T'aiChi's harmony. But my martial artistic excursions were merely diverting, they had no profound influence on my life.

I ask myself now what it was in 1995 that gave me an unerring sense of the direction to follow in the coming years. I think it was the experience of witnessing a step by step transformation of wonkiness into rightness. I was being urged to shed years of unclear motivation in the body. Every adjustment that Chen XiaoWang made had the effect of relating the arms and the legs back to the centre.