The research exists. Let me be clear about that from the start.


There is a substantial and growing body of peer-reviewed evidence demonstrating that Qigong and Taiji are genuinely beneficial for people who have survived strokes. Balance improves. Cardiovascular function improves. Proprioception — the body’s ability to know where it is in space — improves. Cognitive recovery is supported.

The Harvard Medical School has published a guide to Tai Chi that sits on my shelf and says so in measured, careful, peer-reviewed language.
The evidence base is real. I am not working in the dark.


But here is what I noticed when I started reading that literature carefully.
It is asking a very small question.
The question it is asking is: can this person manage adequately in daily life? Can they negotiate stairs? Cross a road without assistance? Live independently? Get to the shops on a Saturday? Been there, Done that.


These are not unimportant questions. For many stroke survivors they are the only questions that matter, and they deserve serious research attention.
They are not, however, my questions.
My questions are different. Can I return to technical mountain terrain? Can I climb — properly climb, on rock, roped, moving with a partner through serious ground? Can I paddle a sea kayak in open water, in conditions that ask something real of the body? Can I do things that healthy, uninjured people find demanding?
The literature does not cover this ground. As far as I can establish, nobody is asking these questions in a research context. The gap between managing adequately and returning to a life in the mountains is vast, and it is largely unexplored.
This is where Gwella sits. In that gap.

There is something else the literature tends to overlook. Qigong and Taiji are not, at their root, therapeutic practices. They were not developed to help people get to the shops. They emerged from a martial tradition that was interested in producing capable, resilient, formidable human beings. The therapeutic applications are real but they are a downstream consequence of something originally designed with considerably more demanding purposes in mind.
I am using these practices closer to their source. Not as gentle wellness maintenance — though they serve that purpose too — but as a systematic method for rebuilding a body toward objectives that would have been recognisable to the people who developed them. Hard ground. Steep terrain. Situations where the body needs to be genuinely trustworthy.
Whether that works is what this project exists to find out.

I ran a TikTok account for a while, directly after the stroke. A thousand days of daily Qigong and Taiji practice, documented in short videos from the hills and the garden and the kitchen floor — wherever the practice happened that day. TikTok eventually removed it, as TikTok does, without ceremony or explanation.
But before it went, someone was watching.
I met him recently on a Zoom class for Taiji teachers. He told me that something I had said — a year ago, on a platform that no longer carries the record — had moved him to start his own daily practice. He is now on day three hundred and something.
I did not know he existed until he told me.


If one person stumbles across this project in similar straits to mine, and it moves them toward something they had stopped believing was possible — toward infinity and beyond, as I intend to go — then job done!

That is enough. That is more than enough.
Os credir, fe gyflawnir.
If it is believed, it will be achieved.

#themethod