During our morning coffee break at a nearby café I became aware of a pleasant tingling in my feet, a bit like pins and needles but not; it distracted me only slightly and I continued the conversation I was having with my Dutch classmates. I expected the tingling to subside when we returned to our T’ai Chi class, but to my surprise the sensation intensified and over the space of an hour or so a kind of effervescence spread throughout my body. The activity peaked some hours later and gave way to a generalised feeling of well-being which was even more curious than what had preceded it; this kept up for the rest of the day and, unexpectedly, continued into the evening. Though what I was experiencing was undeniably pleasurable, it was also extremely odd and I could conceive of no explanation for it. The following afternoon out walking in the city I took shelter from a thunderstorm under the arches of the Rijksmuseum; I stayed there contentedly for about an hour, sitting on a flight of steps and reading my book, and occasionally glancing up at the people running in from the rain; absorbed as I was by the enchantment which had settled on me, my damp perch felt like the most perfect place in the world to be.
I was intrigued: this euphoric state was totally involuntary, as if I was plugged into a power source and couldn’t disconnect from it. This energizing, for want of a better term, continued without cessation and there was no option but to succumb to it. All the same, I began to worry that I had no control of what was happening. I walked and walked – almost to the point of prostration – hoping that whatever was happening could be worn down, but to no avail. I visited a bar in the expectation that alcohol would abate, or at least ameliorate the peculiar, driving vitality I seemed to be in the hands of. I didn’t get drunk, but I wasn’t entirely sober when I called a halt to the drinking; the alcohol had had no effect and I returned to the street in an essentially unaltered state.
The next day a fellow student invited me to check out of my backstreet hotel and come and stay at her home. We had a pleasant enough evening, drank a few glasses of wine over a nice dinner and mostly listened to her husband talk about his sojourn in Laos as a Buddhist monk. Though we went to bed fairly late I woke up well before dawn and was totally awake the instant my eyes opened; I got up and made some coffee and sat in the living room, alternately gazing at the trees and shrubbery beneath the window and reading. When my hosts eventually appeared, the husband was very grumpy: he had been kept awake, he said, by the racket I’d been making during the night; this had been very inconsiderate of me and he was unable to tolerate such behaviour and thought it best it if I didn’t stay with them. A few minutes later I was on the street, surprisingly unperturbed by my ejection, and looking around for a café where I could get an early breakfast.
But as my intensive T’ai Chi training in Amsterdam neared its end it all went pear shaped. In class one afternoon, without warning my head began spinning and I was suddenly unmoored by nausea; my balance went and I was on the verge of toppling over. I tottered my way out to the street and began sucking in deep draughts of air; a teacher idling nearby noticed my discomfort and approached me and without speaking began massaging my neck and shoulders; this was helpful and after a few minutes of his ministrations my head cleared. In class the next afternoon there was a replay, but with added value: out of nowhere a whirlpool began swirling around the inside of my head in a kind of maelstrom effect, instantly tipping me off balance; I staggered, bumped into a chair, and reached out to grip the edge of the table in front of me for stability. Once again, when my neck muscles and shoulders were kneaded everything seemed to calm down; by the time the massage was over I had, mercifully, returned to normal. I felt sufficiently recovered to rejoin the class, but within the space of a few minutes the volatile eddying I thought had subsided boiled up and overwhelmed me again. My distress was sudden and obvious; one of my teachers helped me to my feet and walked me slowly up and down the room; I shuffled along, breathing as deeply as I could to improve oxygenation to my brain. Eventually I calmed down, but I was utterly bewildered. Walking back to my hotel after classes were over for the day I bumped into Richard, one of my instructors from London: after formulaic pleasantries I blurted out an explanation of what I’d been experiencing and asked him if he could offer any explanation for it; from the narrowing of his eyes and his reluctance to comment, it was obvious my description had been over colourful; I shut my trap and said goodbye.
The next day I spoke to some of the Dutch and American instructors on the training about what had been happening, but none of them had anything enlightening to say. The only person who seemed to grasp the nature of the phenomena I had been experiencing was Patrick Watson, the founder of The School of T’ai Chi Chuan. He said, “You are letting the chi float around your body, it’s not focussed in the tan t’ien. The Tibetans would say you have ‘wind in the body.’” Wind, a concept peculiar to traditional Chinese and Tibetan medicine, indicates a pattern of excess and many of its symptoms when considered from the viewpoint of Western medicine would be considered neurological. He was right, but there was a further dimension to the situation which I was reluctant to divulge, but I will share it with you here.
For some years I’d been working as a carpenter and joiner in London, an occupation I once enjoyed, but had grown to hate. I specialized in the design, fabrication and installation of kitchens and other types of built-in furniture; I also did various kinds of property renovation and worked in construction; you name it, I turned my clever hands to it. I was a skilful and honest craftsman, but I was totally unsuited to the trade and was poorly equipped to deal with the serial drudgery that came with the territory. I don’t believe I was a misanthrope before I got caught up in this line of work, but I certainly became one. I came to loathe everybody I had any professional contact with, especially the clients; like the lawyer who chiselled me out of a part of my fee for some improvements I’d done on his house one Xmas when I had little work and less money: before I left the job I went to his drinks cupboard, removed a bottle of whisky, poured half the contents down the sink, unzipped my pants and emptied my bladder into the bottle and returned it to its spot in the cupboard. I worked with more pompous architects than I can recall, locked horns with dishonest plumbers, and encountered too many alcoholic labourers and sub-contractors chained to the same kind of daily grind as myself. I’d sold myself to a treadmill and I couldn’t get off because I needed the money. To cope with the tedium I smoked hashish regularly. English-style dope smoking consists of wrapping a few glued cigarette papers around a wad of tobacco spliced with the drug; in no time at all I’d developed a nicotine habit as well. The hash wasn’t difficult to get hold of as I lived just around the corner from a stretch of dealers’ real estate known as The Front Line. My drug use escalated to the point where I was unable to drive off to work in the morning without kick-starting the day with a joint for breakfast. The routine when I got home in the evening barely changed from one day to the next: wash and change, make a cup of tea, roll a joint, eat a near inedible dinner, roll another joint, slump in front of the TV, more dope, more TV, then sink into bed. The weekends were bad: I had one friend, from adolescence, but drink made him nasty and I only saw him occasionally, thus social activity, such as it was, I mostly engaged in alone and usually ended up leaving early from wherever I’d gone to seek entertainment, all the while wishing there was someone in my life I could love.
I was knitted to this pattern of behaviour for a more than a decade. It was a horrible, desolate time; it shocks me to think how low my spirits sank. Constant cannabis use drained my energy away; I was permanently depressed and mostly inert when I wasn’t working. In this enfeebled condition I couldn’t conceive of where change was going to come from. I was burned out, a shell. Such was my physical and mental condition when I attended my first intensive T’ai Chi training, in Amsterdam, Europe’s cannabis Mecca – but not for me, I desperately wanted to put some distance between myself and that stuff.
The restorative effects of practicing T’ai Chi for many hours a day were intensely invigorating – nearly drowning in a tsunami of chi, as it turned out. Professor Cheng Man-ch’ing, founder of the Short Form practiced in the school I attended, said his diligent practice of T’ai Chi was directly influential in his recovery from the serious illness he suffered as a young man. It worked in a similar way for me on that first training, initially at least, but unlike Professor Cheng I was a particularly clueless student. When Patrick Watson said I was letting the chi float around my body, he was, as they say in New York, “On the money”. I had no idea how to shift my awareness down into the tan t’ien, the body’s centre of gravity situated in the lower belly, and referred to on a more rarefied level as “The root of the tree of life”. In the two or three years I’d been practicing T’ai Chi, my soft drug use had blocked all progress in that direction.
At home I tried, sometimes half-heartedly, not to smoke any pot on the day of a class, but nicotine is worse than heroin, it’s impossible to do without – it owns you. I clung to the delusion that because I didn’t smoke cigarettes I was a non-smoker; this absurd self-deception continued for longer than I care to admit. I never did succeed in breaking my habit of rolling an anesthetizing spliff at breakfast, but I tried to smarten up on the day of my T’ai Chi class and resist the temptation to have a smoke before I went off to it in the evening, though the first thing I’d do when I got home afterwards was roll up – nicotine craving will do that to you. If I did cave and go to class stoned, I wouldn’t be able to remember the instructor’s indications from one minute to the next as pot smoking adversely affects short-term memory; the following day I would be able to recall only a very little of what I’d been taught the evening before. No doubt I qualified as the stupidest student ever. But somewhere in the torpid mass masquerading as a brain, a healthy pulse willed my rear end to my weekly class, straight or stoned; only illness kept me away. I may not deserve marks for style, but I deserve some for effort; the reason for my dogged persistence was that, against the odds, I enjoyed a very particular benefit. I will explain.
In the mid 70’s I underwent surgery on both my knees to remove disintegrated cartilage. I can’t remember what had caused this to happen (football and yoga may have been the culprits) but I recall very clearly the heart stopping agony of a knee joint suddenly locking and the ferocious pain that came with it. It was fortunate that my double misfortune occurred around the time innovative surgical techniques were being used to address the kind of problem I was afflicted with: laparoscopic, or keyhole, surgery was superseding the traditional method for dealing with issues like mine, which was to slice open the knee, poke around inside in a search for bits of cartilage, and when found scrape them out; in tandem with this brutal intervention was a six-week post-op convalescence to help the patient learn how to walk again. I had two separate operations at Addenbrookes teaching hospital in Cambridge and each time I was in and out on the same day, a little fragile it must be said, but able to drive myself back to London.
The physiotherapy I was advised to do to get the knees back into shape was simple and not particularly time consuming, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get a routine going and managed it only spasmodically; eventually sheer laziness won out and I stopped doing it all together. Over a period of three or four years the muscles around my knee joints began wasting away and I became extremely cautious about doing anything which I thought might threaten the stability of my legs, which is when I began to worry about the condition they’d be in when I reached old age; I had to connect with some kind of discipline to help rebuild my weakened leg muscles. When I searched the Yellow Pages for a venue where T’ai Chi was taught I found the East West Centre in Hoxton, East London, a venue just a short distance from where I lived.
One weekday evening I attended a free introductory class there given by two instructors from The School of T’ai Chi Chuan. They began with a silent demonstration of what they would be teaching in one of their programmes. Along with several other prospective students I sat and watched them in action: in apparently perfect accord, their bodies moved through the choreography of the T’ai Chi form with seamless skill and balance; the qualities of clarity and calm I witnessed as their presentation unfolded were powerfully appealing; “I want that,” I thought; my seduction had taken just a few minutes and I had no hesitation at the end of the class in registering for a course. But however compelling the brief introduction to T’ai Chi had been it was also intimidating: in a more sobering coda to the evening’s entertainment I could see that the recondite art I’d spent an hour sampling existed in a universe far removed from the restricted world I inhabited. I didn’t know anybody who measured up to the two sanitized creatures who’d taught the class: their poise and composure were tantamount to alien life forms and I doubted what I’d signed up to do with them was achievable. From the perspective of a shuttered life revolving around drugs and self-contempt I was sure I was about to embark on an impossible task; but I was doing it for my knees, and as the proverb says: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step”: despite my qualms, I took the first tentative steps on the road ahead.
I went to a class once a week and every morning did a single round of T’ai Chi in the living room of my cramped apartment. Two years after I signed up for classes I took time off work to spend a few months on an extended vacation in Asia. Wherever I happened to be I tried to spend a bit of time at a beach to soak up some sunshine, but also to take the opportunity of assessing the condition of my legs by jogging in an environment as far from traffic congestion and pollution I could get. An island I visited in the Philippines, Borokay, was particularly suited to this purpose: one of its beaches had a foreshore four kilometres long. Each late afternoon I ran bare foot from one end of the white sand shoreline to the other, upping my speed a notch when I turned around to head back to my starting point; by the end of my stay I was running the final few hundred metres flat out, then at the finish line plunging giddily into the ocean as the sun was going down. I was very happy: my legs were in excellent shape, and I gave the credit for that to the aliens at the East West Centre.
Endless Buddhas 
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