In January 2022, I arrived in Swansea to begin my doctoral journey. The shadow of Covid-19 still lingered even as the world pushed forward, eager for normality. Behind the reopening, I sensed something harder to name – a quiet disorientation. As if, in resuming, we had lost our footing.
Cutting through the shadow: finding fragility in post-Covid Wales
I came to Swansea as a researcher trained in art and cultural practice. But in that charged moment, a brief breath in history, I found myself asking a different kind of question: could the traditions I carried, which are too often seen as cultural artefacts, become tactile, rhythmic, and rooted in daily life? Could they speak softly but clearly to the quiet fracture I now saw around me?
My research explored Chinese papercutting and its impact on cognitive health in Welsh communities. Between 2023 and 2024, I led over 50 workshops across Swansea, Cardiff, and Aberystwyth. Participants began with basic patterns, moved through imitation, and gradually found personal expression. The goal wasn’t perfection but presence.
In those quiet rooms, much happened. Concentration arrived first. Then came the stories. A Chinese woman who had lived in Wales for over 30 years gently unfolded a childhood motif she had created. She paused and whispered, “I didn’t know I still had this in me.”
A Welsh woman was surprised by how long she could stay present because her attention held steadier than she expected. Another, who hadn’t created anything with scissors in years, began to rediscover the rhythm of the hand, even as she stumbled.
One participant laughed, noting that the friendly atmosphere was, “quite good emotionally”. For another, it was the gourds, the curves, and the folds that quietly shifted something in how she saw the world.
Papercutting in these rooms became more than craft. It opened time, memory, attention, and a place to feel, to connect, and simply be.
And for me, it opened something deeper. Not just the question of how we heal, but whether healing can touch what lies beneath: the rhythms the body never unlearned, or the stillness we carry before explanation.
Breath and flow: listening through the body
Papercutting invited stillness, but it was the body that carried me through it. With each careful cut, I felt my awareness drop lower, out of the mind and into the body. And it was in the slowness of my hands and breath that a memory returned.
Though Tai Chi and Qigong had been part of my childhood, they had long slipped into the background and had been overtaken by study, deadlines, and the forward pull of life. I hadn’t rejected them; I had simply forgot to return. But through this research and watching others slow down and reinhabit their bodies, I was reminded of something I had once known. Healing, for me, had always begun here.
So, I returned, as someone remembering the shape of their own breath.
Tai Chi slows movement to let breath speak. With each shift, I noticed where tension hides, where breath hesitates, and where gravity meets intention.
Instead of performing, the body responds. Movement begins with attention. Action rises from the feet, travels through the spine, and lands in the hands. The mind leads, the breath carries, and the body follows.
As the breath deepens, awareness turns inward. Time loosens, and memory and anticipation fall away. What remains is a kind of presence, quiet but full.
In Tai Chi practice, strength lies in the fine alignment of breath, weight, and awareness. Slowness becomes listening and yielding becomes knowing.
Tai Chi is not something to master, but a rhythm to return to; a way of inhabiting the world without resistance and with full attention. This resonates with Lao Tzu’s way of effortless living, where stability comes before precision and feeling guides form.
And in this rhythm – the yielding, the rooting, the slow remembering – I began to settle into being.
A home within: toward a philosophy of settling
Now, when I teach Tai Chi in schools and community centres across Wales, we don’t aim for mastery. We return to stillness. We explore what it means to inhabit the body as a home.
I have seen people move differently, not through new skill, but through sensing. Breath softened emotion. Anxiety gave way to stillness and a kind of recognition that rose quietly from within.
What I offer is not a cultural export. It’s an invitation to ask: In a restless world, how do we settle?
Can we settle into the body to simply feel what’s there?
Can we settle into the self, as rhythm rather than role?
Can we stand between cultures and not choose sides?
For me, belonging isn’t about ethnicity or language. It begins when I can dwell in my body without judgement. When I stop striving to arrive and realise I’m already here.
To settle is not withdrawal. It is return. A return to the breath, the body, and the rhythm beneath thought. A return to what was never truly lost.
