You don’t have to be interested in martial arts, fighting, defending yourself, or contact sports of any kind in order to do taiji. Most people are quite content to do the solo exercise, learning all the basic solo skills that it has to offer… balance, coordination, relaxation, postural awareness, opening & closing the body, and more. But the words ‘martial arts’ means much more than fighting and defending; yes, it is a feature, but all martial arts are more about understanding your own body, being in complete control of it, and maintaining your physical and mental integrity in adverse conditions. This is very hard to experience in solo tai chi practise, where you have nothing to ‘test’ your posture. How are you going to know when you’ve got your solo tai chi ‘right’?
Learning the Tai Chi Form. When I first started learning taiji, the most important thing for me was to get through the sequence of movements in the right order. I tried to get my movements to resemble as accurately as possible what the teacher was doing, and, looking back at it, I can see that, apart from the superficial shape of the Form (the sequence of movements), I missed out on almost everything else that the teacher was doing – alignments (knees, elbows, hips, etc.), sinking, relaxation of my neck, internal rotations, and many of the structural connections that made the body work as a single unit.
Getting it ‘right’.
When you’re standing in a tai chi position, it is very hard to know if you’ve got it right, isn’t it?
Perhaps you can see that it looks okay on the surface, but it might also feel a little uncomfortable, and, if you’re asked to hold it for more than about 30 seconds, it can get very uncomfortable. On top of that, how a posture, or even the act of moving through a sequence of postures should feel inside is hard to describe, if not impossible. A teacher can tell you that the postures should feel easy, relaxed, natural, balanced, as though you’re ‘going with the flow’, comfortable, connected, etc., but these are subjective descriptions. If you are a very tense person, you have no idea how it feels to be relaxed, in the same way that if you are intelligent, you don’t know how it feels not to be (or the other way around!). It’s like trying to describe the taste of an orange to someone who’s never tried one.
What is ‘testing’ the posture? At its most basic level, ‘testing’ a posture means that someone helps you by gently pushing against one part of your body in the direction that is opposite to your intention. If my movement against that force makes me tense up, or feel unstable, there’s a good chance that I haven’t successfully implemented one of the parameters of the movement, and my body is mis-aligned somewhere.
‘The opposite direction to your intention’.
If I am pushing my hands forwards, my intention is in the direction of the push. Therefore my partner pushes towards me.
But the entire body is also involved. If I’m pushing one hand forwards, the other hand must be doing something else. It doesn’t just die or go to sleep. If it does nothing and just hangs, the left and right sides of your body are no longer working together. You’ve actually weakened yourself, because, when the body unifies, the adage “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” comes into play. (Bear in mind that we’re only talking about the balancing of the arms for the moment). This is where testing comes in. It is a comparative process to find out what works best and makes you feel most stable.
For example, if you push ahead with both hands against a partner’s arms or body (simultaneously moving your weight from you back foot to your front foot, i.e. moving into a Bow stance), but you tilt your pelvis sideways so that one side is higher than the other, you will find that you have to work much harder than if the pelvis is relaxed.
Testing is about comparison – what works and what doesn’t work. It’s about body awareness and self-observation. It requires ‘help’, not challenge from your partner, and requires what you might call ‘educated strength’ in the partner’s push.
Only then do you really learn about your own stability, how strength plays no part in the equation, and how relaxation or softness is the key.
_____________________________________________________________
James Drewe teaches Taijiquan and qigong in both London and in Kent. Details of weekly classes can be found on the website, and there are classes for 2-person Taijiquan on one Saturday a month.
CONTACTS: http://www.taiji.co.uk http://www.qigonghealth.co.uk Email: taijiandqigong@gmail.com Phone: 07836-710281 or 020-8883 3308
Comments