Tai Chi Community
Community is important to all of us at Tai Chi Nation. As well as our Facebook and YouTube pages we all have interests within the Tai Chi world and beyond.
Matthew's Community
My teachers are Luke Shepherd and Patrick Kelly. They have helped me see Tai Chi with new eyes and working with them has enabled me to deepen in my understanding. As well as my Tai Chi work I have been interested in Buddhism since I was 19 years old. For several years I have been on the Foundation Programme developed by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso. This has been a huge inspiration for me and helps me bring spiritual teachings into my everyday life. His work is truly incredible and I have never known anyone to work so hard in order to benefit others.
I work with my friends at the Roy Leighton Partnership, teaching Tai Chi to clients such as Unilever. I have become good friends with Roy and Emma there and we always enjoy working together. I recently attended a course at the Schumacher College with Roy - it was Margaret Wheatley's Leadership in Times of Chaos course, which was life changing and really inspiring. The Schuhmacher College are doing valuable work and as they are only down the road from me, we have decided to work more closely together in the future.
Another recent link locally is with the Barn Retreat Centre. They have invited me to run a Tai Chi retreat there in October of this year. It's a lovely place run by Peter, Mark and Isla. I have also been teaching at Sharpham House for many years, which has been a great priviledge.
I live in the small community of Harbertonford, a village in South Devon. It's really a wonderful place to live and me and my wife Ali and dog Ben really feel blessed to be here.
Other things in my community (local and global) I really value:
Polar Bear - my brothers band
Work Club - founded by my good friend Martin Brooks
Embercombe - a special place in Devon
Aeon Festival - where I am teaching this August
Poems - by my father
Pottery - by my other brother
Ashoka Centre - my local Buddhist Centre and World Peace Cafe
Tree Nation - a project we support and plant trees with
Andrew's Community
My Tai Chi teachers are also Luke Shepherd and Patrick Kelly, both of whom have helped me deepen and integrate Tai Chi practice into daily life. I feel a depth of gratitude to them for helping bring my practice to life in this way.
My other passion is Buddhist Meditation and I helped set up and then run both Gaia House Buddhist Retreat Centre near Newton Abbot, and Dharmagiri Buddhist Hermitage in the Drakensberg Mountains of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa. I continue to have a passionate interest in the wisdom teaching of Buddhism and hope to undertake a month long retreat at Gaia House early next year.
I have recently embarked on a two-year training journey based on teachings that evolved over thousands of years in the ancient indigenous cultures of the Americas. This course, known as the Council Guide Training, offers tools, concepts, practices and protocols that aim to awaken the deepest sense of who you are order to evoke inner and outer leadership. My guide on this training, White Eagle, is a truely inspiring and powerful woman deeply committed to walking this life in beauty.
It is with the support and inner authority of this training that I intend to step forward more fully in eldership of all the rich experiences, understandings and expertise that I have been growing thus far in my life. How this will flower as it grows, I am yet to discover. For now, I am enjoying and appreciating the journey.
Last month I completed an intensive one week course in the Disciplines of Peace with two of my teachers from the Native American tradition called Rainbow Hawk and Wind Eagle. This Disciplines of Peace is about an unfolding relationship of consciousness with all the powers of the Universe, called the First Peace. The vision of the World Foundation for the Discipline of Peace is to create a world-wide People’s Movement of the First Peace. Over the next few months and years I will be offering ‘Seedplantings’ into these teaching as part of a wider vision to shift human consciousness towards a more unifying spirit of peace as we approach 2012.
