Enlightenment in the dark

Aimon Kopera does Tai Chi exercises at her Paris Mountain Home. Staff/George Gardner e-mail this story to a friend More details WANT TO GO? Hong Kong-based Master Binhui He will visit Qi Mountain's 123 N. Main Street studio Oct. 18-23, giving a free tai chi qigong lesson the first night. Call 275-1148 for more information. A FEW TERMS qi — energy gong — skill qigong — a self-healing art that combines movement, meditation and visualization as a means of attracting vital energy tai chi — a branch of qigong with movements that focus on self-defense and strength-building Related Related stories: • Tai chi works best outside

For 21 days she lived in total darkness, feeling her way from a second-floor bedroom to an exercise mat on the first floor. She smelled her food to determine what it was. She spoke to a cleaning crew she couldn't see — but who could see her through night-vision goggles.

The petite, 38-year-old Greenville businesswoman was immersed in the study of tai chi qigong — an ancient Chinese practice of exercise, meditation and self-healing that she teaches in the home studio she calls Qi Mountain. But she won't be leading any darkness retreats for her students.

The sight-deprivation training was for advanced students only: Out of 40 Americans and Europeans who began the three-week retreat in northern Thailand, only 12 completed it.

The purpose was to emulate the primitive teachers of qigong who studied in dark caves, Kopera said. At Master Mantak Chia's Universal Tao Center, where interior posts were padded and balloons hung over stairwells as warnings, the total darkness altered the sensibilities of the brain and body.

When sight is removed, the brain is relieved of the constant barrage of visual information it receives from birth onward, explained Kopera's public relations adviser Philip Yanov.

"By getting in the absolute darkness, you shut that off and now the brain starts to work on itself," he said. "Now you can actually begin to think about, 'What is this I'm thinking about? What is important to me?' The chemistry of the brain actually changes without all this imagery coming at you."

Days without books or television or other vision-related options were spent solely in meditation and exercise — and writing notes that Kopera couldn't always read once she got home.

She never got bored, she said, but she did occasionally suffer vertigo when she miscounted the stairs. She also suffered "monkey brain," as she put it, or tricks of the mind: She'd try to walk to her bathroom and end up hitting the closet door.

But mostly she loved the darkness and the opportunity it gave her to seek inner peace and harmony.

"There are no distractions, so you study about yourself more," she said in her lilting English. "Everything becomes about the inner self."

Registered nurse

Born and raised in Bangkok, the half-Thai/half-Chinese Kopera was a registered nurse who worked in United Nations-sponsored refugee camps in Southeast Asia. At 23, she came to the United States to study at the University of Pittsburgh and met her American husband, Dr. Kevin Kopera.

They moved to Greenville in 1992, when he was recruited by the Greenville Hospital System. She worked as a nurse briefly, but soon opened Aimon's, a Main Street gallery that imported Asian furnishings.

In 1997, she launched the upscale Lemongrass Restaurant on Main Street to serve the Thai food of her homeland. In 2001, the Greenville Jaycees named her their outstanding young business leader.

About the same time, she began noticing that many of her friends in the business world were experiencing health-destroying stress. She was a longtime tai chi practitioner, having learned the ancient exercises from her Chinese grandfather when she was a teen.

Now she began to consider them as a means of bringing an alternative health resource to her adopted community.

The Koperas were living in an Asian-style home on Paris Mountain purchased from former Greenville Symphony conductor David Pollitt. They finished the lower floor as a tai chi studio with hardwood floors, comfortable mats and floor-to-ceiling windows to take in the expansive views of the city.

They also had landscape designer J. Dabney Peeples redesign the grounds — including the clearing of a grassy expanse for Kopera to perform the "swimming dragon" and other slow, circular movements that characterize tai chi qigong.

Kopera sold the Lemongrass and began traveling to study with qigong masters around the world. She opened her home studio last September and currently works with about 40 students — occasionally under the full moon to maximize lunar energy.

"You can't do qigong without total concentration, which means you're not worrying about work or money or whatever," said one student, Greenville business owner Anne Clapper. "So your body comes out refreshed, but also your mind. You get a little rest from that hamster up there who keeps yakking away at you."

This September, Kopera will open a second studio in the building she owns at 123 N. Main St.

As she makes preparations, she practices tai chi qigong four hours a day — 7-9 a.m., then 11 p.m.-1 a.m. The two hours surrounding midnight, she said, are optimal because they embrace the opposites of yin and yang so important to Eastern philosophy.

"That's the time," she said, "that yang changes to yin."

Costly retreat

The three-week darkness retreat was, of course, further than most tai chi practitioners ever go. For one thing, by the time airfare to Chang Mai, Thailand, was included, the cost was nearly $10,000.

Time was marked by bells that called participants to wake, to pick up food bags they carried to their rooms, and to practice exercises with Master Mantak Chia eight hours daily.

"The fascinating thing," Kopera said, "was after the first week ... you started to see things. Not hallucinations, but you started to feel and see the heat from the people, their auras."

Students were re-introduced to the outside world at night, wearing sunglasses. For days afterward, Kopera said, the ground rolled as she walked.

Five months later, she recognizes at least two lasting benefits of the retreat: her body's ability to enter a deep level of meditation almost instantly and a lost fear of the snakes that slither out of the woods around Paris Mountain.

"In the dark, some people have fear," she explained. "But everybody who goes through that three weeks has no fear."

Deb Richardson-Moore can be reached at 298-4127.