Jan Golden, a full-time teacher of t'ai chi in Dublin, helps people to reawaken their nerves and sensations in order to be aware of their bodies
I teach until about 10 p.m. most weekday nights so I get up at about nine in the morning. Then I stand for between one and two hours.
The only way you can progress in t'ai chi is if you stand for a long period of time.
The goal is to release all superfluous tension in your external musculature; that's what gives you the ability to move smoothly and with grace.
Combined with deep breathing and a sense of being present, you could call it aerobic moving meditation.
I then do my ta'i chi long form which is another 40 minutes or so. Then I eat my first meal of the day.
In the afternoon I might have a class at lunchtime and I do my accursed administration. I eat again at about 5 p.m.
Then at 6 p.m. I teach until 9.30 p.m. or 10 p.m. so by the time I get home I'm fairly tired.
I need about eight or nine, sometimes 10, hours' sleep. I think most people are chronically sleep-deprived. I'm very sensitive to things which don't make me sleep well like alcohol and caffeine and eating late at night is a disaster.
Your liver accumulates all the blood in your system at about 1 a.m. so the further away from then that you eat, the better. That's why they say 'breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dine like a pauper'.
Most of the people who come to my classes are absolutely numb in terms of being able to feel their bodies.
Generally in the beginning at least one or two people will feel faint or dizzy because they are so much in their heads. When people actually begin to wake up their nerves, it's a very odd sensation for them.
I think the tension levels are off the scale in this country.
As a product of this society, I was and still am quite a tense person. Other people I met around the world pointed out it's the result of internal tension and an inability to become still.
Most people are so pre-occupied with trying to make the future better or obsessively going over the past that they never actually live in the present. That's why, before we do any t'ai chi, I try to get people to be stable, immobile and to get the mind to stay in the present. When you do that your body starts to relax and open up.
Part of my job is to make people realise how important and delicate health is and how you can really mess it up. As the body's capacity to heal itself is often dismissed as placebo I say 'yeh' for placebo - there should be more research into it.
In many cases, miracles are a question of the mind being convinced to heal itself. The dismissal of subjective experience by western science is a fatal mistake.
I have years of experience teaching. I was a language teacher for eight years and I've been doing t'ai chi full time for six years.
When I was a language teacher I was primarily teaching abstract grammatical terms and concepts so learning to teach a physical discipline was a vast difference. It took me on a journey into my own body and back again.
I never get bored with teaching the same thing over and over again because I learn something new every time.
I wouldn't do anything else.