About Anna

I am Anna. I teach tai chi and Daoist meditation in Amsterdam.

I have been practising for 20 years. For sixteen of them I studied with one teacher, master Jie Kong.

I teach tai chi on Saturday mornings at Moychay on Rozengracht, and Daoist meditation online on Sunday mornings. Both in English. Both open to people starting from nothing.

How I got here

I grew up in a village in the Ural mountains. Summers were spent outdoors and mostly barefoot, and I did not think of that as anything. It was simply how the days went.

Then I moved to a city, and the days stopped going that way.

It took me years to work out that the nervousness I had been carrying around was not a character flaw. I had been living at a speed that was not mine, and nobody had told me that was a thing that could happen to a person.

I started looking at eighteen. Yoga first, then ashrams and teachers in India, three Vipassana retreats, sacred sites across Southeast Asia. I was collecting practices the way some people collect records. Each one seemed more interesting than the last.

It took me a long time to notice the problem with that. Collecting keeps you on the surface. I thought I had gone a long way; I had gone across, not down.

The change came at a festival, where I met the man who became my teacher. What I remember is not what he said. It is that I went quiet, in a way I had been trying to arrange for years and had never managed.

I studied with him for sixteen years after that. Tai chi, bagua, Daoist meditation, and the long unglamorous work of learning to hold attention. The seminars took me from Argentina to Cambodia. The practice itself mostly took place in a room, doing something slow, again.

I also came to Amsterdam and took a degree in business administration, which sounds like an interruption and was not. I wanted to understand the practical side of life rather than treat it as the enemy of the other side. I no longer think those are two different things.

I teach because the thing I was looking for at eighteen turned out to be learnable, and slower and plainer than I expected. Most people who come to me are somewhere in the part I remember best: moving fast, thinking constantly, and not entirely present for their own week.

My teacher

For sixteen years I studied with master Jie Kong.

One of his own teachers was Chen Xiaowang, the nineteenth-generation lineage holder of Chen style tai chi. That is the oldest of the tai chi traditions, and the one every other style grew out of. He is a grandson of Chen Fake, and since 1990 he has spent most of his life teaching outside China.

What I teach on a Saturday morning comes down that line. I mention it not to borrow anyone's authority, but because you are entitled to know where what you are being taught actually comes from.

How I teach

Slowly, and in plain words.

I do not use terms you would have to look up. If one slips out, stop me. That is my mistake, not a gap in your education.

I do not correct people in front of the group.

I do not think an hour a week will transform your life, and I will not tell you it will. What it does is smaller and more reliable: you move more easily, you sleep better, and less of the day goes to your own thoughts.

What I am not

I am not a therapist, and these classes are not therapy.

I am not a doctor, and nothing here replaces one.

I do not run retreats where you are expected to open up to strangers.

If you are looking for that kind of work, I am not the right person, and I would rather say so here than have you find out on a Saturday morning.

Where to start

Saturday, Amsterdam. Tai chi, €18. See the class

Sunday, online. Meditation, €13. See the class