There’s no denying that I feel better doing tai chi every day — my skin and my eyes look better, my joints and bones don’t creak, I have less build-up of tension and stress in my body in some ways, and I have a means of getting rid of that which does accumulate.
The one area that still creaks quite a lot are my knees. And I’m wondering how concerned I should be. There are three moves that put particular stress on my knees — the movement called Carrying Milk to Heaven, which is basically a deep-knee bend with swinging arms; the movement called sink into the earth, which is a deep knee bend without swinging arms; and the movement in the form called Snake Creeps Down, which is a deep knee bend with a waist-twisting strike with the hand folded into a Buddha’s teacup.
These are the moves where I hear my knees creaking most. And I think I have to figure out how to take care of my knees. Part of it is keeping track of my food and my weight loss plans more carefully — if I didn’t weigh 300 pounds, I’d be putting less pressure on them. But I also have to go back to the drawing, diagrams and the Tai Chi Classics (There really is a book called that), to see if the issues of knees are a problem. The Way of Energy may also have something to say about it.
