Community Classes with Chris

From the charity's beginnings Chris's work for Tai Ji Circle was voluntary. When charities working to improve the lives of older people asked if she would set up regular daytime Taiji and Qigong classes, she agreed. These daytime classes sat alongside Shifu Liu's own regular weekly classes for the charity.

In Barnet she taught two classes a week for Age UK from 2015 until the centre closed in the pandemic of 2020. Twice, in 2015 and 2016, she led a mass Taiji demonstration for Age UK Barnet on the pitch at Saracens' Allianz Park, on behalf of Tai Ji Circle; the Mayor of Barnet joined in. The photographs here, from the school's archive, come from those years.

In September 2018 Chris Jones began teaching a new Taiji class for people with Parkinson's disease. It ran on Thursday afternoons in the Parkinson's Unit at Edgware Community Hospital, as one of Tai Ji Circle's community classes.

The class concentrated on relaxation, and set out to help build strength and flexibility and to improve coordination and balance. Each session began with seated warm-up exercises, continued with part of the Taiji Qigong 18 set, and finished with a relaxing seated meditation. The class was open to all who attended at the hospital. The Parkinson's class closed in March 2020 after the first Covid lockdown.

Chris has taught Chen Taiji and Qigong for the Kensington & Chelsea Forum charity for over ten years, before and after the pandemic. It is a weekly class and a very popular one. The Forum has asked her to speak on the health benefits of Taiji at more than one of its AGMs.

For the TJC charity's lifetime this teaching was part of her volunteer work for Tai Ji Circle, and she donated any fees from the Forum and other charities to the school. Since Tai Ji Circle closed in 2023 she has taught these classes under her own Living Tai Chi banner, three seniors' classes a week: one she organises locally in Camden, the Kensington and Chelsea Forum class in Notting Hill, and, since September 2021, a class for the charity the St Pancras Community Association in Camden. Both charities offer the classes for free, and give help, advice and wellbeing support to older people in their boroughs (livingtaichi.co.uk).