Tai Chi Progress

My under­stand­ing of Tai Chi seems to come in the form of a sine wave: the more I learn, the more I real­ize I don’t know, and as I adjust for more and more details, oth­er details get lost.

For the last few months, I felt like I was get­ting nowhere. The con­cepts made sense in my brain, but not in my body. My teacher has said that Tai Chi is already too intel­lec­tu­al­ized, and as a per­son who’s nev­er been very phys­i­cal­ly co-ordi­nat­ed and tries to com­pen­sate in SHEER MENTAL POWA!, this holds true espe­cial­ly for me. Until I’ve mas­tered telekine­sis, how­ev­er, I’ll be reliant on more tra­di­tion­al means of move­ment.

In the last cou­ple weeks I feel like I’ve reached anoth­er lev­el of under­stand­ing, as rudi­men­ta­ry as it may be.

One thing that helped a lot is when a senior stu­dent showed me what ward-off (peng) felt like. As he stood with struc­ture in his body, I tried to push him1, but end­ed up push­ing myself off him and falling over. In order to move him, I was forced to use the prop­er tech­nique (since he’s con­sid­er­ably big­ger than me), and expand with my entire body — legs, waist, arms, chest, lungs — instead of sim­ply try­ing to move through him.

Then we reversed roles and he pushed me until I could chan­nel his ener­gy through my feet. It was the first time I ever felt ground­ed, instead of sim­ply under­stand­ing the idea. I still don’t real­ly under­stand it, inso­faras I could­n’t explain it to some­one else.

Adapting this all to the form is some­thing else. I try to focus on one thing at time2 but it falls apart in oth­er places. At this point, I’m just try­ing to get all the gross mechan­ics to be nat­ur­al with­out hav­ing to think about it, hop­ing that I’ll even­tu­al­ly be able to fine tune every­thing else.

  1. It remind­ed me of the feel­ing of squeez­ing a rub­ber stop­per, some­thing with give but not much, that becomes expo­nen­tial­ly dif­fi­cult to com­press. []
  2. Such as stay­ing at one lev­el with­out being rigid (con­sid­ered “breath­ing”), relax­ing my low­er back, think­ing of my body being anchored through my legs, and keep­ing struc­ture and intent in my palms. []

4 comments

  1. The basis of “ground­ing”, as I have dis­cov­ered so much lat­er in live, will even­tu­al­ly make you come to the con­clu­sion that: “My toes are too weak”

    Through my own explo­ration in the trans­fer­ence of force through­out the body, I real­ized that usu­al­ly, a “ground­ing” is not pos­si­ble, when one small mus­cle (in the chain of mus­cles required for the force trans­fer­ence from cer­tain direc­tion) is too weak. In my case, I have more posi­tions open to me now my toes are strong enough to sup­port my weight. So instead of need­ing to get into a stance for cer­tain forces, I am already in the right stance with­out wast­ing time to change.

    The rub­ber band anal­o­gy is prob­a­bly the high­est form of the con­nec­tion between a cou­ple that dances. I still have trou­ble with it as I often for­get my dance part­ner when I am in the zone. It’s about being aware of the oth­er.

  2. Interesting. Shotokan Karate teach­es sim­i­lar things, includ­ing “grip­ping the ground” with your toes. Power comes from the foun­da­tion to the ground, and–in a way–connecting that pow­er all the way to your arms by using the mus­cles prop­er­ly.

    Cool. :)

  3. @Causalien — For me, it’s my quadri­ceps. I’ve nev­er had par­tic­u­lar­ly strong quads; when I go snow­board­ing, they burn out after one run. That would be my weak link.

    The “rub­ber band” anal­o­gy of ball­room danc­ing sounds like the “breath­ing” anal­o­gy of Tai Chi: some­thing that it’s cohe­sive and struc­tured that breathes (i.e. isn’t rigid).

    @Steve — I think pow­er com­ing from the ground makes a lot of mar­tial sense, so I’m not sur­prised that oth­er mar­tial arts, even hard styles, fol­low the same prin­ci­ples.

    When doing exer­cis­es like uproot­ing in Tai Chi, you aren’t sup­posed to move your feet off the ground, but it’s per­mis­si­ble (i.e. not cheat­ing) to wig­gle your toes to get a bet­ter grip Edit: my Tai Chi teacher has clar­i­fied the feet should be relaxed but firm on the ground, so no toe wig­gling. Since we prac­tice with our shoes off, it makes me won­der whether this is applic­a­ble in a real-world self-defence sce­nario when one is wear­ing shoes.

  4. Sounds like a fas­ci­nat­ing point for learn­ing. Far far­ther in Tai Chi than I got to talk about ener­gy trans­fer­ence.

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