Help for Special Tai Chi Group

When I was a child, my mum had a part time job at St Peter’s Hospital in Bourne. St Peter’s was one of the old-fashioned styles of mental health hospitals and is no longer there, having been demolished in 2001.

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Mum would take me along to events such as summer garden fetes at the hospital where I would meet her workmates and some of the patients. At the time, I didn’t really think much about it. We were just going out to try and win a cake on the tombola stall or similar.

Whether she realised it or not, I will never know, but Mum was giving me a very useful life skill. By mixing and making friends with people we would now realise have learning support needs, I was quietly becoming accustomed to their situation.

So, if we then fast forward 30 or so years to 2011, I started teaching Tai Chi at Wake House in Bourne. At the time, there was a group of people with learning support needs permanently using one of the rooms there. It did not take me long to start talking to them and getting to know them.

My comfort and ease with these people did not go unnoticed and I was asked if I would like to try doing a Tai Chi class for the group.

Tai Chi in its pure form is quite complicated but I already had experience of simplifying the art and keeping the benefits from other work that I was already doing for Dementia Support South Lincs. I agreed to give it a try and we all had a good time.

Twelve years later, we are still doing it!

However, the world is a different place to what it was a few years ago. Before lockdown, we had a healthy number of people coming but somehow the numbers didn’t really recover afterwards.

This kind of work is important to me as it gives benefit to many people – the service users, their carers and their families. So I wanted to keep it going even though it had become financially difficult.

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I contacted the Tai Chi Union with my idea and they liked it. There was a simple application form for the grant which I filled in and sent to them. Our special class was then discussed at their board meeting.

They unanimously agreed that the cause was a good one and that the Tai Chi Union would award our group the maximum grant possible to pay the rent for the hire of the room. It’s made a little bit extra special by the fact that this is the first such grant ever to be issued.

This means that, for around seven months, the rent for the Learning Support Tai chi group is covered. I can now confidently go out and recruit new members to the group, safe in the knowledge that the group is stable and that we will not have to stop running it.

As a professional Tai Chi teacher, I am a member of the Tai Chu Union for Great Britain. One of their latest initiatives is what they call ‘The Gerda Geddes Fund’, named after a famous Tai Chi teacher. With this fund, they supply grants to Tai Chi coaches who deliver Tai Chi lessons to ‘disadvantaged’ people.

I am not a professional carer, so if a person needs that sort of help, then a carer must come with them. Other than that, there are no real restrictions on people joining the group. If you or someone that you know has learning support needs and would like to make new friends in a Tai Chi group, please contact me and we can chat about it.

If you would like to learn more about these or other Tai Chi classes please contact me via email ray@ki-ways.co.uk or give me a ring on 07413 620344 or look up the website www.ki-ways.com

Artwork by Tracy Pawlett