Teachers and Themes of the 25th Push Hands Meeting
| Room 1 | Room 2 | Room 3 | |
| Wednesday, 08.04.2026 | Birgit Golze | Nils Klug | Natassa Aretha |
| Thursday, 09.04.2026 | Birgit Golze | Nils Klug | Natassa Aretha |
| Friday, 10.04.2026 | Mirke de Kruijf | Samuel Tinguely | Paul Thomas |
| Saturday, 11.04.2026 | Mirke de Kruijf | Samuel Tinguely | Paul Thomas |
| Sunday, 12.04.2026 | Mirke de Kruijf | Samuel Tinguely | Paul Thomas |
Birgit Golze
Birgit Golze has been practicing Taijiquan for over 20 years. For 13 years, she has been teaching Taijiquan and partner exercises in her native city Dassel. Birgit discovered her passion for Push Hands during her teacher training with Master Nils Klug. Since this time, her own teaching of the form is closely linked to partner work.
Birgit’s passion for Push Hands has led her to meet national and international teachers both in Germany and internationally as well as on meetings all over Europe. Birgit also gathered valuable experience in competitions, always ranking among the first three places.
And last not least, Birgit has been a long standing member of the organizing team of the International Push Hands Meeting Hannover. It is save to say that over the years she has ”seen it all” – and she is happy to share her experience with you.
Mirke de Kruijf
My Tai Chi life
10 years ago I started Tai Chi with Master Judith van Drooge (Inner Touch Tai Chi) She taught me the Yang style from Grandmaster W. C. C. Chen. Beside the handform she taught me several weaponforms and Pushing hands. I was introduced in competition and even went to the World Championship in Taiwan.
In daily life I got interested in the teaching side of Tai Chi. Under Judith’s wing I had the opportunity to delve into the world of teaching Tai Chi. In 2018 I started teaching and successfully completed a State Recognised Course: ‘teacher martial arts in the discipline Tai Chi’.
Since september 2023 I have my own school and give 17 classes a week.
Continuous beginners’ program
*Our bilingual workshop for Push Hands beginners follows a coordinated schedule with matching topics. It is led by Birgit Golze (Wednesday-Thursday) and Mirke de Kruijf (Friday/Saturday/Sunday).
Workshop Wednesday:
The first step in Pushing Hands
In the beginning, we want to get to know each other by noticing and learning to sense each other. To achieve this goal, we will work with simple partner exercises.
We will ask ourselves:
Where am I standing? and
Where is my partner actually? and
How can we manage to communicate together and with each other?
Workshop Thursday:
The second step in Pushing Hands
Today, we welcome our partner. We listen to them, and are already able to sense them.
We will also try to find a connection to and in ourselves (hand/foot) and to your partner.
While we are „connected“ in this way:
What are we feeling? And
How can we work with this feeling in free Pushing Hands?
Workshop Friday Tai Chi Body Mechanics
William C. C. Chen teaching methods, body mechanics. What’s good for the brain is good for the body. What’s good for the body is good for the brain.
How do body and mind connect like Yin and Yang. Exploring with focus. Using your mindset. Where your attention goes, the energy follows. Yin and Yang keep each other in balance. How to play with with this balance.
Workshop Saturday Tai Chi Body Mechanics
Grounding, using your feet. Every movement needs grounding and starts in your feet. Without grounding, there is no movement with intention, no shape or direction. Using your grounding for jumping force from the feet. This force creates expansion from the Dan Tien and gives direction to your movement. When you’re not connected with the earth, you’re on your own.
Workshop Sunday Pushing Hands Applications
How to help each other practicing by being a Tai Chi Dummy. Sometimes we need a little resistance to understand and get aware of what we are doing. Helping yourself and the other to find and feel the center. Once found, you can use it or even hide it. Making contact to somebody without losing your centre/yourself. Very useful to integrate in your own Tai Chi and/or Chi Kung practice.
How to use your technics in contact with other people. Not only with pushing hands, but also in daily life, we meet so many people. Pushing hands is like a non-verbal conversation. What message do you get and what do you want to say?
Being true and loyal to yourself and likewise to others and treating others like you want to be treated.
Nils Klug
Nils Klug has been teaching Tai Chi Chuan in Hanover, Germany since 1991.
In 1993, he opened his first school. As the rooms soon proved to be too small, Nils decided to remain loyal to his Linden neighbourhood. He thus built his new school into one of the halls of the disused former factory building as part of an ecological project aimed at preserving the now listed building.
Since 1996, the Tai Chi Studio is now located at the Ecological Business Park Linden in close connection to the socio-cultural centre of FAUST e.V.
Teacher training and impulses
Nils Klug completed his teacher training with William C. C. Chen in New York. He has been teaching in his own school for over 30 years. William Chi Cheng Chen and Dr. Tao Ping Siang (Taiwan, +2006), who as Nils’ second teacher has also had a profound influence upon his Tai Chi, both have been students of Prof. Cheng Man Ching.
Nils’ further impulses are received by means of exchange with colleagues in the Chinese arts and of course his students.
Voluntary engagement for the Chinese arts
Until May 2014, Nils has been an active member of the German Network for Taijiquan and Qi Gong (“Netzwerk Taijiquan and Qi Gong e.V.”). Between 2007 and 2013, Nils served in the Taijiquan and Qigong Federation for Europe (TCFE), the European umbrella organisation for Tai Chi and Qigong, as its president. Between 2014 and 2018, Nils has been the second chairman of the DDQT (German Association of Professionals in Qigong and Taijiquan).
In his activities, Nils is committed to promoting international exchange, continual professional training and communication, crossing the boundaries of styles and schools. In this spirit, he organised the 4th Federal Qigong and Taijiquan Forum for the German Network in 1998 and the International Cheng Man Ching Forum 2004 in Hanover.
Since 2001, he and his team organize the International Push Hands Meeting in Hanover, a bilingual (English/German) indoor meeting, which takes place annually in spaces around the Tai Chi Studio in Hannover-Linden.
Over the years, Nils has been teaching at numerous Tai Chi meetings in Germany and internationally and has been hosting at great number of guest teachers from around the globe.
In addition to other online activities, Nils has also been creating an international online portal for Tai Chi and Qigong, now accessible in two languages, on which he has been continuously working during his free time.
Topics
Wednesday: The opponent starts first and I arrive before him.
Thursday: From Tifang to Fajing
Detailed description follows.
Natassa Aretha
Exploring Balance, Presence, and Play through Martial and Somatic Arts
Natassa Aretha moves between worlds — from the discipline of Tai Chi and Aikido to the openness of improvisation and the depth of Butoh. Trained at the State School of Dance in Athens and the Merce Cunningham Studio in New York (IKY scholarship, 1996–1999), she blends the rigor of martial traditions with the creativity of contemporary performance.
Her journey in Tai Chi Chuan began in 1992 and continued in New York, where she joined practitioners in the city’s parks, experiencing Tai Chi as a living, daily practice. At the same time, she trained in Aikido in New York, encounters that enriched her sense of balance, presence, and trust in the encounter.
Founder of the space “Fygin Adynaton” in Crete, she creates workshops where martial clarity meets improvisational freedom — inviting participants to rediscover presence, play, and connection through the body.
Class Explanation
When I was first asked to teach here, I was skeptical. My formal martial arts journey is not my primary language; my expertise comes from a lifetime of deep somatic practice as a professional dancer, specializing in improvisation and movement dialogue. What I offer is a different path to the same truth: an advanced understanding of internal body awareness, weight-sharing, and kinetic connection that allows effective Push Hands to emerge not from muscular strength, but from intelligent movement.
This class will translate the somatic techniques of dance improvisation—listening through touch, responding without premeditation, and managing momentum and balance in real-time—directly into the practice of Push Hands. We will focus on cultivating a softness that is an active radar, not a passive state, and a grounding that is a dynamic conversation with the floor. This is how we build the foundation for a push that is an expression of whole-body coherence rather than local arm strength.
Whether you are a beginner seeking an accessible, feel-based entry into these internal principles or a highly experienced practitioner looking to refresh your sensitivity and understand your power from a new perspective, this class is designed to offer value. I am here not to teach you a new technique, but to introduce a new layer of awareness—a somatic intelligence that can deepen and illuminate the practice you already love.
Paul Thomas
Paul Thomas started his Martial Arts journey in 1982 at the Milton Keynes Martial Arts Academy. During this time he studied various practices and w a s first introduced to Taijiquan. His focus fully on Yang Style started in 2007 in West Sussex with the scholl of Tai Chi and Internal Arts where he was introduced to the MIAM Method of Master Sam Masich. It was here that he began teaching before moving to Germany. While in Germany he became an indoor student of Sam’s. He is interested in many aspects of the curriculum, with a strong focus on Push hands.
Teaching
Passive and Active Breath
Creating Passive and Active Movement
In this workshop we will explore how the breath can be separated into phases and how those phases support different movement tendencies in the body.
The first step is to understand our own breathing patterns and a short time will be spent on
this.
We then move on to look at the phases of breath focusing on passive and active phases in inhalation and exhalation. We will use the small heavenly circuit to connect the breath to passive and active movement. Looking at how the breath travels and at what physical points the changes occur between passive and active, the approach being experimental and playful, driven by personal experience. Some time will be spent here on this segment.
For a fun interactive experience we will then take this into partner work, using simple sensing hands exercises, to show how dramatically the combination of passive/active breath and passive/active movement, can effect our partner. The focus will be more on the passive phases as time will be short, and this phase is in some ways less obvious.
This workshop is designed as a fun introduction to a very large practice, that is central to a lot of what I teach, my intention is to expand on this in a follow up workshop with additional details. Those that attend other workshops I run will find this practice running through all of them. It ties to the work of the last 2 days if you attend and will support the deepening of that study, but will also function as a stand alone practice, that will benefit any practioners.
The External Harmonies and Chansigong
Presented by
Paul Thomas
In this workshop my aim is to introduce a s e t of exercises to improve our understanding of how chansijin is present in Yang style Taijiquan. We will do this through 4 solo exercises repeated on both sides. Chansigong is not often discussed in Yang style though it is a vital component enabling us to connect the six external harmonies and the nternal harmonies. It has largely been a closed door practice, over a period of several years my teacher Master Sam Masich has been working on this material with his Tudi (indoor) students and more recently in public classes. The question is – why practice the exercises if chansijin is present in our form? I would say that while it is feasible to learn the form connecting the external harmonies in “simple” postures like Peng it is a vastly different task to do so in moves like Turn Body To Sweep the Lotus or taking it into weapons work or Push Hands. In the same way that Zhan Zhang as a practice allows us to manifest root in our form or partner drills instill a sense of the point of connection in solo practice, Chansigong exercises allow Chansijin to be present in our form.
Obviously we are only together for a short time so my hope for the sessions is to introduce the exercises and provide access to follow up materials, if it sparks an interest in you.
We will briefly also look at how Chansigong is different between Yang and Chen. I will prepare some handouts and send a video of the exercises to those attending.
I have found this practice extremely useful and it is at the core of everything I am working on personally at present, be it form, Push Hands, 25 energies study, 13 powers or the 37 essential postures.
We will warm up using the exercises that teach us how to connect our external harmonies. Then look at how we can use these connections in pushhands with partner work.
Taking some time to see how it can be applied to short sections of form. The workshop is a place of experimentation to allow us to take these exercises and build them into our personal practice.
paulthomastaiji@gmail.com
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Passive and Active Breath
It’s effect on movement.
Breath is something that is simple yet it can be worked from various view points that can deepen our personal practice.
Here we will start to explore the phases of breath, we breathe, this is easily separated into inhalation and exhalation, then holding of the inhalation or exhalation. I prefer to view this not as holding, but the patient moment when we sit between the in and out of the cycle.
These patient moments can also be seen as phases of breath, so here we are at 4 phases of breath inhalation, patient moment, exhalation, patient moment. I sometimes refer to these patient moments as turn around points, particularly when I am linking breath with movement in my teaching.
Now we get to the point of the workshop passive and active phases of breath. The inhalation has a passive and active phase, as does the exhalation, and between the passive and active there is also a turn around point to mark the change or a micro patient moment (this may be less obvious and realistically a subject for another time).
We have now passive inhalation, turnaround point, active inhalation, patient moment, passive exhalation, turnaround point, active exhalation, patient moment.
What was just in and out, now has 8 phases. There is one other phase that I will add into the mix, which is a skip breath.
What is a skip breath?
Firstly skip breathing may occur in the active phases (by its nature it is not passive). It’s a little inhalation or exhalation to lengthen the active phases.
Why is it needed?
In the way I approach breath work (for the most part) I work with the natural breath of the individual, none of our phases will sync with the phases of others. It is valid and an important practice to work on lengthening or deepening the breath, but when working with natural movement and using breath to create and support it, the breath needs to be natural and comfortable. Then comes the problem that we are as a group learning a sequence of movements and maybe our breath cycle is not in the correct phase to support the movement, this is solved by the skip breath.
These passive and active phases of breath coincide with passive and active phases of movement. The inhalation is paired with opening and rising qualities, the exhalation with closing and sinking qualities, we will only touch on these principles as time is short, but I want it in the notes for clarity.
The direction of breath
The inhalation moves up the back with passive in the lower and active in the upper. Exhalation moves down the front of the body with passive in the chest and active in the abdomen. This follows the pathway of the small heavenly circuit for those that are familiar with the concept.
Passive and active movement
We will look at “peng” and “an” in the arms. I use the Chinese terms here because the translation into English is largely unhelpful at best, in most cases detrimental to good practice.
“An” has a sinking and closing quality if we simply stop doing it there is a passive release in the wrist that creates a movement tendency to the elbow. This passive release can be linked to or created by the passive inhalation as the movement goes up the arm at the elbow it has a turnaround to active movement which coincides with the turnaround in the breath from passive to active. Now the active inhalation phase is developing to it full capacity and our movement reaches the shoulder and “Peng” as a movement is complete. This is the patient moment between inhalation and exhalation.
The passive exhalation allows (or is allowed by) the armpit to soften, the passive movement becomes active at the elbow (turnaround point) and the active movement moves with the breath down the forearm until at the most active point of the exhalation the wrist “sits” and “an” is established. The cycle repeats.
Samuel Tinguely
Samuel discovered push-hands during kung fu classes in 2003 in Geneva, and has been in love with this practice ever since. During these classes, he learned some basics of meditation, qigong and taijiquan. When the kung fu school he was studying at closed in 2010, he pivoted to taijiquan, learning with Dominique Flaquet, a student of Master P’ng Chye Khym. There, he studied Yang style taijiquan and practised tuishou religiously. By that time, Samuel was also an accomplished dancer and dance teacher.
In 2015, Samuel moved to London and had to find a new teacher. Very luckily, he found Master Yan Long Jiang, disciple of Grandmaster Zhan Bo from Harbin. With Master Yan Long Jiang, Samuel learned Wu style taijiquan and deepened his knowledge of tuishou, spending hours weekly practising one-on-one with the master. During his stay in London, Samuel also learned Soft Tissue Therapy (a form of remedial massage therapy) and studied qigong from Master Yan Long Jiang, books by Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming and directly from Masters Faye and Tary Yip. Studying under the latters, he is now a recognised Health Qigong Instructor. Throughout this period, Samuel also taught blues and folk dancing in several festivals throughout Europe.
Samuel moved back to his native city of La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland) in 2018, where he started teaching taijiquan and health qigong, in parallel to his massage practice. He started taking part in international events as well, attending Tai Chi Tcho in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 2019 and the 20th Push-Hands meeting in Hannover in 2020. This broadened Samuel’s approach and allowed him to deepen his knowledge of the styles he knew well. He now teaches many weekly classes in both Wu style taijiquan and health qigong, as well as regular workshops about health qigong and meditation. He also organises monthly tuishou meetings in his town, where people from diverse styles meet to share their love for the discipline.
This history, combined with Samuel’s passion for anatomy and the human body, gives him a unique perspective to share ideas around tuishou, ranging from mechanics to more esoteric approaches.
Topics
Peng Lü Ji An (Wu style)
Out of the eight jin («techniques», «powers»), most people have encountered peng and lü. Indeed, they are almost always the first ones we teach, because they are the most basic actions in tuishou. Abstruse translations set aside, it’s about pushing, and sending your opponent’s push into nothingness. The next two, ji and an, are a bit more subtle, but can still easily be practiced with both feet on the ground. In this class, we’ll learn a drill from Wu style that links these four jin, and dive a little bit into their definition and general use.
Peng Lü Ji An Chai Lie Kao Zhou (Wu style, moving feet)
Beyond peng, lü, ji and an lie more secrets, that require us to move our feet. In this class we will adapt the drill from the above to the moving feet paradigm, and expand upon it. We will then explore chai, lie, kao and zhou in more details, to understand them in general, and not just in the context of the drill. While it is not technically necessary to have followed the previous class to join this one, it is highly recommended, and you will need to learn very quickly if haven’t practiced the first drill already.
Anatomy of breathing
For some, anatomy is a very intellectual discipline, detached form the real world. For me, it is a tool to deepen the understanding one has of their body, and to expand the repertoire of available movements at all time. Breathing uses, or at least can use, at minima the whole trunk, from the first rib to the pelvic floor. For this reason, it can influence such important movements and concepts as grounding, pushing, creating space to dodge, and so many others. And also oxygen is nice. In this class, we will delve into the anatomy of the movement of breathing, and see how we can use that knowledge to our advantage in tuishou, sports, and everyday life.
