H aving read perhaps a dozen of Mantak Chia’s books five years ago, attended his retreat in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and sought to apply many of the teachings within my grasp, I approached The Inner Structure of Tai Chi with a touch of complacency. I could not have been more mistaken.
      The Inner Structure of Tai Chi, written together with Juan Li, immediately captures a reader’s attention with a series of simple, penetrating insights. These both display a mastery of the best of Eastern and Western understanding and promise to transform daily habits in easy but life transforming ways.
      The quality of the writing captures perceptions about the manner in which our bodies, minds and spirits function that escape most people in the West for whole lifetimes.
      An early section titled Chi: The Source of All Movement uses the following words:
      “In the same way that electricity is the foundation of modern civilisation, chi, or life force, is the foundation of all the Taoist practices…. Chi can be defined as bioelectricity, life force, vitality or simply energy. Chi is all of these but none of them exclusively. Just as electricity is still incomprehensible to scientists in its total breadth and depth, chi is beyond intellectual understanding.”
      This type of teaching serves a number of functions that can easily escape the reader initially. These include:
an introduction to a Chinese world of perception, understanding, discipline and action that has long been unknown in the West
a revelation of the severely limited intellectual and spiritual character of aspects of the Western tradition
an extra dimension of interpretation for the cutting edge science of those like Bruce Lipton who explore the character of the more than fifty trillion individual, independent but interacting cells that make up each living human body
a reminder of the profound Taoist insight that all human words, concepts, rational structures and scientific theories are but conveniences for the human mind and often poor reflections of the reality of the natural world
an invitation to reflection on the benefits bestowed on a civilisation that has close to a three millennia head-start on most others in cultivating a disciplined sensitivity to the energies of organic life
      Other areas that are illuminated in the first chapter include the Taoist primordial void (or wu chi), the Chinese five elements and fundamentals of Mantak Chia’s Universal Tao System like the Microcosmic Orbit, the Inner Smile, the Six Healing Sounds, Iron Shirt Chi Kung, Healing Love and Bone Marrow Nei Kung.
      The first chapter concludes with a passage headed Integrating Your Meditation into Movement. Even for a reader who regarded himself as familiar with much of this material, the writing offered incisive new insights and many corrections to careless daily behaviour.
      The second chapter explains that among the benefits of ‘tai chi chi kung’ are improved posture, a strengthened nervous system, the easing of chronic illness and negative emotions, and enhanced connective tissue, tendons, muscles and chi circulation.
      Chapter three then reviews basic principles of tai chi, which include maintaining the centre of gravity in the lower tan tien, keeping the body vertically aligned as if suspended from the crown, breathing with the lower abdomen, opening the joints through gentle inward rotation and much more, before concluding with relaxing the body and calming the mind, clearly distinguishing yin and yang and coordinating inner and outer, mind and body.
      These teachings, which can seem simplistic on first exposure, have a remarkable capacity to transform one’s sense of physical, mental and spiritual self-empowerment if followed and practiced with steady and sensitive resolve.
      Most satisfying, this introduction to a world of self-discovery and self-understanding opens up a process that offers a sense of steady, relaxed and purposeful self-improvement.
      The book then moves into a series of thirteen further chapters that take the reader through Warm Up Exercises and Preparation, Tai Chi Chi Kung Thirteen Movement Form, Sequence for Home Practice, Yin/Yang and Inner Smile Forms, Rooting and Grounding: Connecting with the Earth, Activating Chi Through the Body and a variety of other sensitive disciplines.
        A short passage from Yin/Yang and Inner Smile Forms captures the quality of the instruction offered:
        “…in Tai Chi training the student must first learn to relax and become flexible in every joint until all unnecessary stiffness and tension are refined out of his or her movements. As a result the student becomes strong yet supple, soft on the outside yet firm on the inside, like steel wrapped in cotton. This is true power, a balance of yin and yang.”
      In this fashion the reader is continually offered insights into many of the subtleties of Chinese thought and practice and invited to accept new routines and disciplines that offer a fresh sense of the integration of body, mind and spirit.
      Of course, as anyone who has ventured into this world can attest, the rewards do not come easily or quickly, but they do provide an ongoing sense of progress already achieved and further goals yet to be attained.
      In this respect, the subtle disciplines and insights communicated by this work invite the reader to commit to a new and promising sense of direction in life, regardless of present situation or age.
      It is sometimes difficult to comprehend and master movements from drawings on a lifeless page and, like all such texts, this work reminds of the importance of having a teacher to provide personal instruction.
      Having said this, the present reviewer was often surprised by the effectiveness of the writing in communicating insight into complex physical movements and difficult aspects of the tradition as well as inspiring a desire to go out and put into practice new understanding.