by Bill Ryan, founder of Moving Tiger

I founded Moving Tiger as an means to introduce the Moving Tiger energy exercise system as a tool for self-care to as many people as possible.

I wish to do so because I think that practice of these wonderful exercises can help individuals better respond to some very significant health-related challenges that are emerging in the United States today.

I also hope that if a lot of people learn the system, then perhaps I will have made a small contribution to our society as a whole better responding to these challenges.

My reasoning for this is simple and is based on my experience teaching the system to hundreds of people in the last fifteen years. If more people learn and practice this energy exercise system, then more people will become healthier. If this occurs, then there will be less strain on our health care system and our society's resources. This would be a very good thing because our health care system and resources are likely to be strained enormously in upcoming years.

The challenges that are emerging are as follows. For more information about each, please click on its title.

* Health Care: how will we continue to afford as individuals and as a society our increasingly expensive – and some say increasingly ineffective - health care system?

* Aging Population: how will we adapt over the next thirty years as the percentage of our population who are elderly steadily increases?

* Stress and Depression: how will we cope with the increasing levels of stress and depression that statistics show more and more of us are now experiencing in our lives?

These are challenges that my teacher Bruce Frantzis has been talking about for almost two decades. His opinion long has been that one of the best ways for any of us to respond will be to try to stay as healthy as possible by learning and using self-care tools.

I always have shared Bruce's concerns over these challenges. But my mind turned toward them more in June of 2005. That was when I turned the tai chi school that I founded in 1992, Brookline Tai Chi, over to a nonprofit organization that I helped form with the teachers and students there. I then took a few months off to decide what to do next.

During those months I read about and considered these challenges in more depth. I became more and more concerned about them and decided to try to use my knowledge of Chinese self-care tools to help people prepare to meet these challenges.

I realized that of all the self-care health arts that I've studied, the energy exercise system that the Chinese call "Dragon and Tiger Qigong" is the one that people can learn most easily and receive significant benefits from.

This energy exercise system is a centuries old self-care tool. Its primary benefit is that it gives people more all-day energy. This is the energy we need to accomplish more in life, to take on challenges and solve them. All-day energy in turn brings one better health and other benefits.

During the spring of 2006 I began to develop - with Bruce Frantzis' help - the Moving Tiger Method for teaching the Dragon and Tiger system.

In the fall I then launched Moving Tiger with a simple purpose:

to introduce the Moving Tiger energy exercise system as a tool for self-care to as many people as possible

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