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THE CORNERS OF THE MOUTH.
Perseverance brings good fortune.
Pay heed to the providing of nourishment
And to what a man seeks
To fill his own mouth with.
In bestowing care and nourishment, it is important that the right people should be taken care of and that we should attend to our own nourishment in the right way. If we wish to know what anyone is like, we have only to observe on whom he bestows his care and what sides of his own nature he cultivates and nourishes. Nature nourishes all creatures. The great man fosters and takes care of superior men, in order to take care of all men through them.
If we wish to know whether anyone is superior or not, we need only observe what part of his being he regards as especially important. The body has superior and inferior, important and unimportant parts. We must not injure important parts for the sake of the unimportant, nor must we injure the superior parts for the sake of the inferior. He who cultivates the inferior parts of his nature is an inferior man. He who cultivates the superior parts of his nature is a superior man.
I Ching, 27. The Corners of the Mouth (Providing Nourishment)
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Who is Elizabeth Wenscott?
Mission of the Tai Chi Center of Chicago
Who Is Elizabeth Wenscott
by Rob Wittig creator of Robwit.net
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In 1981 Elizabeth Wenscott made a crucial decision: to wrap up her studies of visual arts at
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, from that moment onward, to dedicate her
life to the study and practice of a martial art, Tai Chi. "Tai Chi just made so much sense,"
Elizabeth says.
To understand why Tai Chi makes so much sense in Elizabeth's life,
you first need to imagine a rough-and-ready child who, she says, "grew up outdoors. I was
always out in nature --- running, hiking, camping, exploring. I moved all around the Midwest
and Northeast when I was a kid, but the family had to live near water, since we're a family
of sailors." Elizabeth sailed her first solo competition when she was 9, improvising an
acrobatic method of purposely capsizing and recovering by scrambling across the hull, and
taking first place. Sailing once even nearly took her life, when she and her father came up
against the full force of a sudden storm on Lake Erie. "That really taught me about the
power of nature, the power of water and wind," she says.
At the same time, at home, Elizabeth says, "My whole thing was to get up before everyone else did and do art work --- building things." Her creativity even extended to building go-carts and organizing neighborhood races. On the playground, Elizabeth was often a protector, defending weaker kids from the bullies.
So, when she hit the point in her art studies where "I liked the process, but I didn't like the object I was left with," she felt it was time to make a change. "Creativity had always been something light, and formal art seemed like a burden. When I saw Tai Chi Chuan, philosophically it was beautiful. Being a Taoist art, it is based on nature. It is an art form you can take anywhere, do anywhere, not leave anything behind, and you can practice it your whole life."
Her search for a teacher finally led her to Grandmaster Hsu Fun-Yuen, a grandmaster born in Tien Tai, Che Chiang Province in the People's Republic of China. Grandmaster Hsu is a life-long martial artist, having started his studies in Shaolin external forms and herbal medicine as a child, due to his poor health early in life. "When I saw him," says Elizabeth, "his form seemed like nature to me, combining strong and soft, rooted and light , like the storms I would see sailing as a child.
Grandmaster Hsu studied with two renowned instructors, Li Yuan-chi and Cheng Man-Ching.
Elizabeth became a serious student of Master Hsu's, working with him nearly every day for ten years. From him she learned numerous forms, including Master Hsu's family style Tai Chi Chuan, Sword, Staff, Push Hands and Da Lu to name a few. Master Hsu officially adopted Elizabeth (Hsu, I-Wen) as senior disciple in 1992 and granted her Master's certificate in the same year.
In 1991 Elizabeth accompanied Grandmaster Hsu to the International Wushu and Tai Chi
competition in Zhoushan, China. Elizabeth recalls a memorable closing ceremony: "It was an
olympic-style spectacle in front of 40,000 people, and I was sitting there preparing to
enjoy it when I saw my name in the program as a performer! I told them I wasn't prepared,
and a few minutes later an armed military escort arrived to take me to my hotel and get my
sword. They aren't fooling around! So I got the sword, got changed, and suddenly there I was
doing a sword form in front of a national TV audience on a 3" thick padded, carpeted floor! That was very alien to the ancient wood, stone and earth floor training I had! I made it through fine. My teacher was very proud. It was an important moment for both of us."
In recent years, Elizabeth has extended her studies to encompass a wide range of healing practices complementary to the Taoist medicine inherent in Tai Chi. "Early on most of my students were interested in the martial aspect of Tai Chi," she comments. "Now, there are more and more people interested in the health aspects so I want to expand my teaching in that direction as well. In the lineage I come from it is felt that as you learn the martial aspects of the art it is important to learn healing arts as well. The attitude in the old schools was: you break it,
you fix it."
In summing up her teaching style, Elizabeth says "I think of myself as building a bridge between the needs of my current students and the gifts I have recieved from my teacher and the Taoist systems of past."
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Mission of the Tai Chi Center of Chicago
The symbol to the left is an adaptation of what Chinese Taoists call the Three Treasures or Three Manifestations. This ancient cosmological symbol consists of:
Heaven above with its perfect Yang essence of light and shadow,
Earth below with its perfect Yin essence of firmness and receptivity,
Mankind in the middle with the potential of harmonizing all that is above and below through understanding, love (in the sense of human feelings), and rectitude.
LaoTzu, the father of Taoist Philosophy, wrote: "Humankind can find their way to open the Gate to the Essence of All Life when they model themselves after Earth, which models itself after Heaven, which models itself after the Tao, which models itself after Nature."
Tai Chi is one of the oldest known practices to begin the process opening this gate by creating a state of harmony with all that is above and below.
The goal of Tai Chi Center of Chicago is to create a supportive atmosphere in which students learn time-honored skills and adapt them to their lives so that they might live harmoniously between heaven and earth with a clear mind and healthy body.
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