Is Anybody Out There?

Push hands is the practice of remaining in contact with an opponent while ‘listening’ to their energy. The goal of push hands is to put your opponent off balance. The skill of listening is critically important because you need to be able to feel and respond to an attack before it is completely carried out.

If you’re thinking about the attack and analyzing what to do next it’s too late. You’ll probably be thrown. You need to be in the present moment, and you need to be listening with your own energy. If you’re doing this correctly, you’ll respond almost instantly to any change in your opponent’s energy.

When you watch two people who are evenly matched at push hands it can look as if they are doing a dance and it sometimes takes quite a bit of time before you actually ’see’ an attack happen. One of the players has to make a mistake for an attack to get far enough for you to be able to see it happen.

This is a very fun skill to learn and it can be use it in everyday life. Transferring it to daily life though, takes more practice. You need to listen to others in different ways. You need to watch people’s faces and listen to what they are saying without jumping ahead of them. To me this is even harder to do.

To listen to others on many levels means constantly bringing yourself back to the present moment. You can’t think about what happened while you were driving into work or what you think you should say next. You have to really listen to what the other person is saying and doing, and then trust yourself to respond correctly.

Most of us are afraid we won’t respond correctly so we are constantly thinking about what we should say when the other person leaves us an opening. Most of my partners and I have this same tendency in push hands. Sometimes I find myself ‘thinking’ about what I should do next rather than listening to what my opponent is doing. When I do this, I’m in trouble. When my opponent does this, they’re in trouble.

The only person I haven’t been able to catch not listening is Master Cui. It takes him only a couple of seconds to defeat me, and I always learn something from the encounter… mostly because he points out what I was doing wrong. Not always because I realized what it was. Learning from him is a real treat because he is more than 50 years ahead of me. Remember he started at the age of 4 and I started at the age of 40.

Try really listening and watching people you are talking to. At first it will probably be hard to keep yourself from jumping ahead of them. Practice this with your friends at first so you don’t worry about how well you’re doing. The really interesting part of this is that you’ll find you’ll just ‘know’ what to say, when to say it, and your friends will notice the difference. You find you won’t have to think it.

Learn to trust yourself. Bye for now,

John

P.S. I found this picture at just-thinkin.net/2007/07/what-the-heck-was-that/

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