Tai Chi for Heart Health

Preface:

Over these twenty-eight years of teaching Tai Chi in a university setting, and elsewhere, I have come across, met, and taught many people exploring the potential of Tai Chi as a therapeutic method of health-maintenance for cardiac patients. So far, I know of no book devoted to this need; a strong need, given the prevalence of heart disease. This book, I hope, will fill some of that need. It is written with all kinds of Tai Chi in mind, but perhaps not all sorts of Heart-disease in mind, since I am not a doctor of anything.
My Shanghai teacher, Gan Tieh Wu, told me once in his home that as one progresses in martial art, the more it becomes like medicine, and the more the teacher takes on characteristics of a doctor. My Montreal teacher, Lee Man Charn, had told me a version of this ten years earlier: Tai Chi is like medicine. This resemblance becomes clear with time, after practice and study.
It is like medicine because it functions as a general corrective for the whole body and mind. Similar to maintenance for a car, Tai Chi practice circulates blood and vital air and, if the mental aspect is learned, a version of mental exercise that extends deep into the person can be had. This piece of writing is conceived as an elucidation of the details of this dynamic. I hope it helps someone, and that more good days are the result.

Introduction:

The therapeutic potential of exercise was recognized by medicine in the last half of the 20th century. But it was known in Chinese medicine for millennia. Specifically, the therapeutic effects of three main types of oriental practice have been researched: yoga (including TM), Buddhist meditation (including Zen), and Tai Chi (but not including Taoism). Yoga and Buddhist meditation have received the most attention. They have both been applied in therapeutic settings, sometimes in hospitals, for cardiac rehabilitation. Tai Chi has received less attention for three reasons: politics, history, and money.
When Zen, TM, and yoga were being researched for their cardiac potential, in the 1970s, China was still behind the bamboo curtain, going through the cultural revolution, and still antagonistic to the west. Communism still bore the imprimatur of McCarthyism.
Unlike Germany, during the 2nd World War, Japan was targeted by the U.S. as a racial enemy. This posture stuck, and since that war, racial antagonism between the west and the far east has not so far been effectively addressed or neutralized.
Knowledge for free, while it has been a defining characteristic of the west since Alexander the Great spread Greek learning throughout the known world of his day, has never been a known theme of Chinese civilization. In China, knowledge and profession are straitly allied into livelihood and income, with knowledge transmission within a relationship coming in as an important close second.
These three factors, felt over the last fifty years, have kept Tai Chi’s potential out of the view of research into its cardiac recovery potential.
Since 1989, and the significant evolution of China’s participation with the world, this has been changing. It is only normal for the appreciation of China’s vast resources as an innovating generator of exercise and exercise knowledge to leap forward. If successful, this book will help.