I’ve always loved both tai chi and qigong. Initially my interest was sparked by a close encounter with violence in the street, and it was then fuelled by watching ‘Kung Fu’ on TV with David Carradine.
At this stage, it was all about wanting to feel able to ‘handle myself’; I didn’t want to feel at the mercy of a larger-than-me angry man who I banged into by mistake when he was coming out of a betting shop (I assumed that he’d lost!). After watching the TV series, I then wanted to be able to move smoothly, with poise and grace, and be able to ‘look after myself’… (at the same time, I also wanted to be very wise, with deep meaningful sayings oozing from me).
Having taken up kung fu and simultaneously tai chi, meditation, yoga, diet & nutrition, as well as learning about herbs and healing, I set about trying to understand how to make my body function more efficiently.
I guess that the pleasure that I derived from tai chi after that was more about learning sequences of movements – Forms. I wanted to know more about the mysterious ‘qi’ or life-force, being under the impression that, once you had enough of it, you were pretty much impermeable to most problems, both mentally and physically. If you had plenty of it, I thought, life flowed through you, you flowed with life, and nothing affected you. By this stage I was about 25 years old, or thereabouts.
Forms are good.
After learning a great many ‘forms’ (sets of movements), hand forms of different ‘styles’ of tai chi, sword forms, fan forms, 2-person hand forms, 2-person sword forms etc., I gradually became much more interested in the way that you did the movements, rather than the forms themselves. Forms are good – essential in fact; you need to have something to work on, an unchanging shape, in the same way that an artist needs an outline, or a concept, to begin to draw. Various different styles of Forms are also good; they show you different approaches to the same subject matter in the same way as a pianist might learn music by Chopin, Beethoven, Glass, or Oscar Peterson. It’s all music; the notes are still the notes, but the combination and rhythms differ, and you end up with a different ‘feel’. You need different styles to practise and develop your technique, although, having said that, it’s not essential, and many people never go that far but still get tremendous pleasure from only doing one style of tai chi (or one musical composer).
What is the appeal of both tai chi & qigong now?
Is it because they are slow moving, or gentle, or relaxing, … what is it?
Your body functions at its very best when you use all parts of it collectively. This is easy to feel; if you only use your arm to push or pull something, it’s much more exhausting than using your whole body. The expression, ‘put your back into it’ makes sense here. In both tai chi and qigong, we are learning to ‘balance’ the body, to make it work so that, when doing an action, we are also aware of what the other half of the body is doing.
For example, if, when turning my right shoulder towards you, I only think of the right shoulder doing its action, I’m no longer aware of the body acting as a unit; I’m thinking of only one part of it.
If, on the other hand, whilst turning my right shoulder towards you, I also note how my left shoulder is turning backwards and away from you, I suddenly become aware of the body action as though it’s revolving from a central axis.
Making the body work as one.
This applies not only to the front and the back of your body, but also to the left and right, and the top and the bottom. There are 2 points here: 1) When you are able to bring all aspects of the body into harmony in this way, the body starts to act like a ball; nothing is stagnant. When one part of the body moves, all parts move, and because your focus is on the centre, it starts to feel as though only the centre is moving. 2) If however your attention moves to the periphery of your body whilst turning your centre, it can feel as though the centre is hardly moving at all but, because of that slight movement, a maelstrom is created on the outsides of the body.
A spinning bicycle wheel demonstrates this easily; the outer rim of the wheel moves very fast whilst the hub moves slowly.
So…
When you are able to make your tai chi and qigong movements function in this way, although the body might be moving forwards/backwards, or left & right in the space you’re using to practise, there is a sense of stillness within the movement, as though everything is in harmony, and the movement is ‘perfect’. Furthermore, as you gradually refine the more subtle details of the movement, this sense increases, because you begin to note how the elbows work with the hips, the wrists with the ankles, the shoulders with the hips, how one elbow works with the other, and how the knees start to relate. Observing all of this means that, when one of those bits of anatomy do something, there is an instant affect on all the other bits. Nothing works in isolation.
The best thing of all about this is that you feel and know when you’ve got it ‘right’; no one needs to tell you!
__________________________________________________________________________________________________ James Drewe teaches Taijiquan and qigong in both London and in Kent and online. Details of weekly classes can be found on the website, and there are classes for 2-person Taijiquan on one Saturday a month.
CONTACT: http://www.taiji.co.uk https://www.qigonghealth.co.uk Email: taijiandqigong@gmail.com Phone: 07836-710281 __________________________________________________________________________________________________