Anna Lum is joyful. Not giggly, not sappy, just delighted to be alive, even when she’s being wry about some calamity or rolling her eyes about politics. We talk in her kitchen, sipping rose oolong tea in front of a giant picture window that looks out on a terraced garden wild with ivy. A tai chi teacher, poet, and cofounder of the HEARding Cats artists’ collective, she’s also a math major who worked for IBM, fell in love with her baby and quit, then owned and ran a gym. I ask her advice about women’s health—body, mind, and soul.
“The body of course is the easiest one,” she says. “No matter what you do, just keep moving.” Learning tai chi’s graceful forms is really just a way of beginning to understand Taoism, she adds. “We see the world composed of yin and yang, shadow and sunlight—opposites representing all the opposites we live with.” Those opposites aren’t as black-and-white as they seem: “We move through the gray space between them, and we need to understand one in order to understand the other.” Thinking that fluidly removes prejudices, Lum says, and it reminds us “that if there is one way to do something, there are 10,000.”
Set aside ego and simply pay attention, Lum urges, “so you become aware of what the problem really is.” Like the collapse of a sunny yellow couch she’d bought on impulse, not thinking what three daughters and two dogs would do to it. When she finally stopped beating herself up over her folly, she turned the sofa upside down and realized that it would be quite easy to brace the arms.
She teaches students to physically feel their hearts opening, because she remembers how it felt when her heart was closed to her father, a Chinese diplomat. “He came to live with us when he was 84, and I realized he was not like anything I’d kept in my head all these years.” (She’d gone away to boarding school at age 9.) “It took me seven years—all the cells in my body had to change!—before I could love him as an old man.”
Students often seek her wisdom, but advice is overrated, Lum says. It’s attention—“real attention, not doing five other things at the same time”—that helps someone find her own solution. And it’s attention that calms and settles a child. “Adults want to give wisdom. I just listen. And they tell me incredible things.”
