*** Under Construction - We hope to be live in '27! Come back soon! ***
Site Under Construction - Launch '27!
Ok, What's this all really about?
That's a really great question, and we are glad you asked!
Let's start with the name, what the heck does that mean?
At the core, Seaweed Tai Chi is a personal philosophical framework based on combining Western and Eastern traditions/ philosophies into a unified framework.
In our framework, love is a central concept to unify these two philosophy or approaches. But the western approach versus the Eastern approach, differ in significant manners.
In the west, we tend to view love as our guiding light. Our ultimate destination. However, we angst about it a lot. You can simply look at our culture and see this. It is in our music, our writing, and core to many of our beliefs and desires. Indeed, many seem to feel that it is unobtainable and or fleeting. Our relationship with love is complex, no doubt.
In the east, or at least through the lens of Taoism, views love as simply an extension of the concept of the way. And of course the way is Taoism. The main difference being that Taoism views love as something fluid like water. Thus you can’t grasp at it and there is a basic impermanence about it.
So the marriage between the two concepts seems like a beautiful thing that might produce some interesting offspring!
East + West = SeaWeed + Tai Chi
But, what does SeaWeed mean in this context?
SeaWeed is a short hand for what we love of the west. Our culture (the good, the bad and the ugly), love of innovation and technology, and our fluid ability to move across many disparate concepts.
Sea = salt + music + dance
Weed = well, weed
Well, I think I get where you are drifting, but you still have some explaining to do...
Oh yes, we do! Let's keep exploring down the hole...
Thus marrying the approaches has a certain symmetry and beauty about it.
We have used western and eastern broadly here and taken and implied many liberties.
Each of these deserves additional elaboration.
Western philosophy comes from a long Rich and storied history and tradition. Much is written on it, and obviously cannot be synthesized down to a few trite paragraphs or sentences. Thus, we will not attempt to even summarize these philosophical basis that underline our framework. What we will simply do is list the major ones that we feel are impactful, and hopefully provide at least a starting reference of places that are interested reader could go to find more information. No doubt, many are much better versed in these philosophies than us. The major ones Incorporated here are:
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Classical Liberalism
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Postmodernism & Social Constructivism
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Secular Humanism & Utilitarianism
And of course, these philosophies certainly were influential in the spawning of the major religions adopted by the West.
The dominant religion in the west are Judea-Christian related, with the vast majority practicing some form of Christianity. There is, however, a significant secular, and sometimes referred to as a scientific dominant school of thought. Practitioners of those who consider this core to their beliefs may claim to be atheist, agnostic, spiritual, or simply not aware or interested.
From the east it derives it’s primary concepts from:
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Taoism
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Confucianism
The eastern religions that spawned from these philosophies are many and diverse. They are difficult for Western's to comprehend because they come from a completely different direction. The East as described by Taoism beliefs see "the way" as organic growth from nothing to the natural flow of life.
So, the west beliefs in God as a benevolent "creator" of all things (or simply the universe as described by universal laws) are assembled into our existence. The east views this same reality as simple growth of the Tao (the way) from nothing to flow of life is from the bottom up.
West top down. East bottom up.
East grows. West assembles.
These are simply concepts to explain our existence. We have "boiled down" these disparate approaches into the relevant representations of our framework.
Theses concepts are expressed on the western side through:
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Beach Lifestyle & Lowcountry culture
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Music and dance
On the east it is expressed through:
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Tai Chi
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Meditation
And so, we have our framework. We join these two beautiful yet disparate concepts into our SeaWeed Tai Chi framework and it feels as if the results are love. We will let you be the judge of that.
SeaWeed + Tai Chi = Love
Alga Taiji
Our final level of abstraction will be with the language we use.
“Tai Chi” is actually a westernization of the simplified Chinese pronunciation of Taiji. For our framework we will adopt the native pronunciation.
“SeaWeed” from the ancient Latin is Alga. Latin being the original language of many of the western traditions will be adopted here for our framework as well.
So we call our framework Alga Taiji.
Alga Taiji or Agataki
Some have further westernized this by refering to Alga Taiji as Agataki. We support both. Your choice what you use, and we will occasionally use them interchangeably. We hope not to confuse you as badly as we are!
For clarity of application we use Alga Taiji to refer to our framework and philosophy. We use SeaWeed Tai Chi to refer to our movement, dance, and practice of all things related to Alga Taiji. We hope you join us on our journey.