Learning How to Respect My Body as a Neurodivergent Person with the Help of Tai Chi

Hey everybody, it's Karen A. Parker here, and Happy World Tai Chi and Qigong Day!

I'm hoping to record this and post it on World Tai Chi and Qigong Day as we speak, but in case you're just dropping in from the future or the past if the time machine has been invented, Happy World Tai Chi and Qigong Day once again.

Every year on the last Saturday of April, people around the world celebrate Tai Chi and Qigong, two very mindful Chinese martial arts that promote balance in the body and mind, and also are really great for flexibility and strength and just all-around body wellness.

I recently got into Tai Chi, though "recently" is kind of a relative word. There have been just points throughout my life where Tai Chi has been involved. For instance, when I was 10 years old, I watched a little show you might know called Avatar: The Last Airbender, where one of the protagonists featured was Katara, and whose waterbending fighting style is based on Tai Chi.

And my aunt a few years ago took Tai Chi Chuan classics. Now, Tai Chi Chuan is kind of shortened, not as complex as the full Tai Chi martial art itself. It's more like an American or Westernized version of Tai Chi, but it still has tremendous benefits for older folk and for just any folk, really.

If you have the capacity to move, you can do it sitting down, you can do it standing up, you can do it however feels good.

And that's the point that I wanted to emphasize for this post because...

For a very long time, I did not respect my body, and I'm gonna explain that. I'm gonna do my best to explain it because the story is long, and it has many moving parts.

I think if you're listening (or reading) to this, you might have had physical education courses or PE classes in school, and I had those right up until 10th grade— 10th grade being second-to-last year of American high school. It was nice having those physical education classes, but I was not a huge fan of exercising. I didn't quite like running around the track. Whenever we had to do a mile, instead of just, playing a sport or trying to hang out with other people and doing this forced activity, I would just walk around the track with my friend, and we would just talk, and that's how we get our exercise in.

But just this idea of being forced to do something that I didn't quite really want to do kind of stuck with me.

And, like, exercise just kind of came naturally as I moved about my life. I was, you know, I was in college. I was like walking from class to class, and it didn't bother me too much. But after I graduated college, I wasn't in school, and I was just mostly—I was mostly, like, sitting at home and working, working on my novels and doing all these cool things, but I wasn't active. And I was just like, "Well, I want to do what I want to do. I want to write."

Exercise is not really a thought. There wasn't a structure in place to exercise.

And then right around that time, the Fitbit came out, and my dad got a Fitbit. And I was like, "Well, I guess I could get a Fitbit."

And so, I got a Fitbit, and I tried to do 10,000 steps a day.

I never stuck with it.

I tried to do like a 30-minute walk a day because the CDC—I think it's the CDC, Center for Disease Control and Prevention or something—but whatever health guidelines out there in the United States there are, they say that you have to, or for optimum fitness, you have to exercise for at least 150 minutes a week, which is conveniently like 30 minutes a day for five days a week. Or, I mean, some people might do, like, two days of 75 minutes a week.

But that—All of these metrics, like 10,000 steps or 150 minutes and they were out there, and I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

I read an exercise book for like, you know, "Just do seven minutes of exercise a day!" Like, really set the bar low, and I tried that, and it worked for a little while, and I was also motivated to exercise because, like, around 2018-2019, I was gearing up to chase kids in my English teaching job in Japan. Because, you know, I wanted to be able to play with the kids. And to, you know, use English with them. And just be a generally fit person.

And, you know, that helped. I'm glad that I did that. And again, I had my job to kind of...to give me exercise. And then, a year after I figured everything out for my teaching schedules, I bought a bike, and I would bike to and from work. And that would give me a little bit of extra cardio.

But after I came back to the United States, again, I didn't do much exercise. It just wasn't a thought, but it was always a thought, you know? And you're probably listening to this or reading and you're like, "Yeah, it's always a thought, even though we don't want it to be a thought."

And I think that it's always a thought because we are just inundated with messages about exercise and about weight and about health and fitness all the time. Even if it's not on a TV advertisement, it might be on an internet advertisement with some weight loss supplement, or be a personal trainer, or do this or do that or the other. There's always this constant influx of messages about how fit we should be, how we should do this, how we should "Feel the burn!" and at a basic level, I have had to reacquaint myself with my body.

And I'm not kidding when I say that. As as a neurodivergent person, as someone who is level one on the autism spectrum, emotions and physical sensations can be really, really overwhelming for me.

I do not have a lot of spoons by default. I have maybe like one, two, three spoons at a time. And resilience getting back up after something strenuous or a challenge is hard for me.

I went to AWP a few weeks ago—which was amazing, by the way, getting to go to a writing conference and all that—but literally the next week after, to the day, my body was like, "No, we're just gonna— We can't do anything. We gotta lie down. We gotta recalibrate because that was a lot. We walked up and down, we talked to people, we were socializing."

And, um, yeah, my body was like, "You—You paid the price, and now you get to pay."

And so, over the course of the last few months, I have been trying to figure out what it means to work with my brain and not against it, while also simultaneously working with my body and not against it.

Because I think for a long time in my life, I've just tried to push through and just do what I think my body needs when I don't actually know what my body needs.

And so, for several years I would meditate, and that would help me give the clarity of mind, but I wouldn't do the same for my body. I wouldn't do the same for my legs or my arms or my lungs or my heart.

The thing that has finally started to make sense for me or allowed me to cultivate that respect for my body is Tai Chi.

There's this YouTuber—Well, not YouTuber. I don't know if he calls himself a YouTuber. But there's this physical therapist by the name of Adam Potts.

And he has a ton of Tai Chi videos that I try to watch every single day.

And the way that I go about it is I don't immediately go for the 55-minute or 45-minute Tai Chi flows. I started really, really, really small. I said to myself, like, "Okay, let's start…Five minutes. Let's start with five minutes of tai chi, and then we'll work our way up.”

We'll check in with our body, and say, "Hey, um, five minutes was good. You want to try to 10 minutes?”

If it's a yes, we do 10 minutes. If it's a no, we don't do 10 minutes.

Um, we don't do 10 minutes, we go back to the five, but—but that that level of conversation and starting small and working my way up has been really, really helpful.

The Tai Chi itself has been really helpful because it is extending my mindfulness and my Secular Buddhism to my limbs instead of just my brain. But the fact that I don't have to meet this goal of mine in one strict, specific way has been really, really freeing.

It’s okay if I do five minutes today or four minutes or one minute. Like, I can be easy with myself.

And if you're listening to this and you happen to identify as neurodivergent, I highly recommend giving Tai Chi a try because it does cultivate that mindfulness, but also it allows you to move your body in a way that is not super forceful when you don't want it to be. If you want to lose weight and if you want to develop muscle mass and you have all these other goals, then maybe Tai Chi isn't for you.

But for neurodivergent people, being in the body can be a really tough thing. Feeling all of those sensations, dealing with that overwhelm, dealing with stress, dealing with burnout, dealing with meltdowns, dealing with shutdowns. All of that can be really, really overwhelming.

But when you give yourself the space to just be and to go slowly and to go gently, and you start to communicate with your body like, "Hey, I'm here for you this time. I'm not going to make you do anything that you don't want to do"?

That's huge. That is so powerful. And I can't understate that.

Yeah, that's my little spiel or my pitch for Tai Chi.

Me being the very nerdy and particular person that I am, I may or may not look into some kind of Tai Chi certification because I like to learn more about a topic and to feel like I have mastered it, and I feel like I'm career academic almost.

But, um, probably not if it costs too much money, But, yeah.

I just wanted to hop on here real quick and just, um, and just talk about that for a little bit, and, uh, if you're celebrating, um, let me know.

If you're not celebrating and, uh, you're curious about tai chi, um, yeah.

Go—go after it, and I—I'm also curious about, um, I'm also curious about what it means to be ethical towards your body. Like, what does being gentle with your body look like? What does being respectful to your body look like?

It might not look like Tai Chi. Maybe it's yoga. Maybe it's, uh—Maybe it's some other thing that you do physically or don't do physically or want to do physically.

Yeah, just wanted to open up that conversation in case y'all wanted to leave some comments, which thank you, by the way!

I've seen your comments on other posts, so really grateful to that.

But yeah, like I said, just a thought.

But I will see you or maybe hear you in the next one.

Bye-bye!