Tai Chi & Qigong for Resistance and Anti-Oppression

About the event

Tai Chi & Qigong sessions held by Jalal Afhim. Free and open to all!

About this event

Join us for Tai Chi and Qigong to create capacity for self reflection and allow us to return to a place of safety in our bodies. Tai Chi and Qigong are embodied health and healing practices which utilise breathing techniques and mindful movement to cultivate strength and resilience of body/mind/spirit. Kahina Resists seeks to address the trauma and injury of systemic oppression of racialised and otherwise marginalised communities through Tai Chi and Qigong, an indigenous technology of healing and personal growth developed in East Asia over many centuries.

Free and open to all!

What is it?

As an internal martial art, Tai Chi teaches practitioners to better live inside their bodies, to better regulate responses to external stimuli, and to harness the potential of relaxation and softening of the body. It builds practitioners’ connectedness with their own bodies, and nourishes the connection between mind, body and spirit.

For people struggling against oppression, Tai Chi provides emotional grounding, taking practitioners out of the headspace where the emotional tension and stress of oppression dominate our consciousness. It moves us out of that headspace into a body/breath/spirit space where we become mindful, connecting to our whole body and to the Earth through our feet and through gravity.

The martial essence of Tai Chi is in yielding with softness and relaxation. Within the yielding softness is a core of strength which emanates from the Earth, through our feet and legs, and is able to overcome opponents size and strength advantage. Relaxation and rootedness allows us to remain centred, balanced and strong while the opponents aggression becomes their weakness. We can apply these principles to the struggle against oppression. Unlike many martial arts, Tai Chi nourishes the body and spirit, instead of wearing out the joints and causing injury.

How do we practice?

The exercises and discussion is designed to teach practitioners:

To better occupy and relate to our bodies, and notice body responses. (my body is mine)
To understand how caring for our bodies is an important part of resisting oppression and accessing joy
To use rooting and grounding, turning softness into strength
Taking the soft strength of our practice, and walking around with it
Using our exercises and discussion to process emotions, like anger, sadness and grief
The practice is relational. We connect with each other on the level of our emotions and our experiences of oppression. We support and hold each other as a community.
ACCESSIBILITY: Closed captioning is available for all our online events. If there are any access needs you’d like us to consider, please email info@healingjusticeldn.org.

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Sessions are held by Jalal Afhim (he/him). Jalal Afhim has been practising Tai Chi and Qigong since he began learning in China in 2005. He is also a trainer and career coach, and brings a pedagogy of self-actualisation into his practice. As a survivor of institutional racism, he brings lived experience of navigating institutional slow violence into this work, forming connections with the experiences of participants.