Serendipitous thread - a Viking is advising Wow on becoming a pirate! 
Seriously for a minute, about the Tai Chi - I did some of this a few years ago, in India (yeah, go to India and take up a Chinese martial art 
) and there was nothing religious about it. Nothing even 'spiritual' beyond stillness, concentration and quiet. So I wonder if you just fell in with a dodgy organisation? Anyways, I enjoyed the Tai Chi because it made me concentrate on coordination and balance, but gave it up because the Sunday morning classes were eating into riding time.
The Taoist Tai Chi Society is pretty big. I'm amazed at how many members it has. They seem to be congregated around SE England (there are hardly any members in the north) and there are amazing numbers in Essex. I think our branch alone, SE Essex, had something like 400 members. It's not the only tai chi organisation around, but it seems to be the biggest.
From the outset I had some misgivings about its structure. It seemed pretty "cultish" but with some very praiseworthy and altruistic aspects. We paid an annual subscription, but as I mentioned, none of the instructors is paid - they do it entirely out of altruistic motives. When they have instructor training, they have to pay for their travel out of their own pocket, even if this means going to Canada, which it does, reasonably often.
Its founder, Moy Lin Shin, also founded the Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism. When I started about 4 years ago, I had never heard of this. However, in the past year or so it seems to have taken over and the religious element has come to the fore. I didn't want to be any part of this, so I left. I was somewhat disillusioned as, when this takeover was first mooted, our instructor (whom I think is a really good guy, and often would bring in a copy of Gray's Anatomy to explain which joints/bones/muscles a particular exercise was improving), as well as a number of others who occasionally attended our class, seemed to me to be pretty much unanimous that if the religious crept in, they would walk out. This clearly didn't happen.
Every so often there would be a subtle, or not so subtle, change in the exercise we were doing. It was a bit Orwellian: that way of doing things had never existed. The new way of doing things had always existed. The clear question was: if the new way is doing us loads of good, and the old way wasn't why did we ever do things in the old way? I never felt that this question was properly addressed.
Ultimately, it seems to me that the TTCS is not welcoming to people who ask awkward questions or have a tendency to rock the boat. As you can probably imagine, I didn't really feel as though I fitted into such an organisation.
