John’s Tai-Blog @ Camp Tai ChiTai Chi and anything I can relate to Tai Chi … like life

How Tai Chi Overcomes Embarrassment

Master Cui and Miriam Holland

What’s happening when your face turns red?  Is blood rushing to the surface of the skin on your face?  No, you’re concentrating on the wrong thing; that’s what’s happening.

When I first started practicing tai chi I wasn’t very good, so when my teacher corrected me it was no big deal.  After a year or so, I really thought I’d learned a lot.  I was at least good enough to take new students off to the side and show them a few basics or answer questions for them.

The problem with this theory is, when you start to work with someone else you really find out how little you know.  My teacher, Laoshi Miriam, was thrown into teaching by our master after studying with him for a couple of years.  Master Cui told her she new enough to share what she had with beginners, and he knew she would learn much more about herself and her abilities if she taught others how to do what she had learned not so long ago.

The usual drill for me early on was to take a brand new student and show them a few things.  Then Laoshi Miriam would come over and ask them to show her what they had learned.  After watching them she would sometimes ask me to demonstrate the move.  Then she would correct me, not them.  It was more than a little embarrassing.

Then the first time I met Master Cui I watched him give Laoshi Miriam corrections in front of everyone.  Now neither Master Cui nor Laoshi Miriam was abusive, they simply gave corrections.  All the same, it can be rather embarrassing to be given corrections in front of someone you’re supposed to be teaching.

This common Chinese style of teaching accomplishes a number of things, all of which are meaningful when learning any martial art.  Teaching is about passing on the art so that the art will live on.  We are important because we are the ones passing it on, but in the classroom the art trumps our egos.

I still feel a little embarrassment when Laoshi Miriam or Master Cui, now my master as well, correct me in front of others.  Now though I find it easier to focus on the art and not on myself.  It’s helped me develop better concentration and it helps me be a better student and a better teacher.  Master Cui still says he wishes he had listened more to his grandfather while he was alive, and I’m sure he judges himself more critically than his grandfather did.

Next time you find yourself feeling embarrassed, ask yourself where you’re focusing.   If you can set your ego aside and focus on what’s really important, embarrassment ceases to be a part of the equation.  It can be difficult to set aside your ego and look at the situation without preconceptions.  Difficult but it’ll help you focus on what’s really important, and it will also help you correct the situation rather than dwelling on what you may have done wrong.

Aside from me teaching us how to better deal with the inevitable embarrassing situations of life, Master Cui is also a great role model for how to live a good life.  He seems to treat everyone, from the street vendor to the owner of a large company the same, with respect.  His sister is same and she’s every bit as fun to be around.

Although Master Cui can be a lot of fun, he can also be a very tough teacher.  This tells me something of the family he comes from.  More often than not he seems to be able to put himself in the other person’s shoes.

I think this picture really captures what it’s like to spend time around Master Cui.  I don’t remember why he’s pointing but, as usual I’m sure he was joking with the photographer.

Your thoughts?

Tai Chi Push Hands… Pushing The River?

In life people often try to make things happen.  Tai chi, as well as life, has taught me you can’t actually “make” anything happen.  You can however, know what you want and keep it in mind as you move toward it, more on this in second.

In push hands (tui shou) you listen to your opponent’s energy as they move with you.  Tai chi is a defensive art, so we wait for the opponent (aka ally) to attack and then either neutralize the attack or turn it back on them.  Even in offensive marital arts, like karate, you can’t actually make your opponent do anything.  You can only guide them and the better you are, the more effective you are at guiding.

The key is to be flexible, in mind as well as body.  When your opponent begins an attack your better off if you have several options ready and available, that is if you’re going to be effective.  Even if you’re attacking you still need a number of options, and you’ll need to be ready to defend yourself if your opponent turns the attack back on you, or if they counter attack.

All right back to daily life.  Do you consider life to be your opponent or your ally?  If you take the first viewpoint, life is going to be pretty hard no matter how well things are going for you.  If you take the viewpoint that life is your ally, life can be pretty good, even if it doesn’t look that way from the outside.

Have you ever been in a 3rd World country?  If so have you ever noticed how often the people there were laughing, even in the midst of what we would consider terrible living conditions?  Sure most of them want more than they have, but they don’t get quite so caught up in how there going to get it, or that they don’t have right now.  So when an opportunity arises they take it.  They’re flexible, and believe it or not they’re happier than most Americans.

How many times have you missed an opportunity because you were focusing on “how” what you wanted should come about?  How many opportunities do you think you missed because you never noticed them?  Extremely successful people all seem to say the same thing, “Opportunity is everywhere; you just need to recognize it as opportunity.”

I know a number of very successful people, most of whom have had significant setbacks at one time or another.  These folks understand the need to remain flexible.  If one thing doesn’t work, it’s not important.  Do something else; try a different approach.  Thomas Edison understood this in way few people do.  While developing a viable electric light bulb, he experimented with around 10,000 different materials before he got the results he was looking for.  He fully believed in the saying, “There is no failure, only feedback.”

Some might say, with this attitude, Edison “made it happen”.  I say he knew exactly what he wanted and every time he found something blocking in his path, he was flexible enough to go around it and keep moving.  I’m sure he occasionally felt discouraged, but it never stopped him and he never failed because he never stopped trying.

If you’re feeling a little discouraged by your inability to do a particular form in tai chi, just keep practicing.  You’ll get it, and the victory will be sweet when you do.  I promise.

“Don’t push the river, it flows by itself”  ~  Lao Tzu

Your thoughts?

John

Tai Chi Is In Everything and Practice Makes Perfect

If you want your tai chi to be any good, you have to practice.  Expect to make a few mistakes along the way and everything will work out just fine… now, GET OUT THERE AND PRACTICE!!!!

“A jug fills drop by drop.”  ~  Buddha

Your thoughts?

John

P.S.  No pressure. 

Stressful Tai Chi

Tai chi is commonly used to combat stress, yet stress is not necessarily the enemy.  This reminds me of when I started studying wilderness survival.  When I was cold and standing in the wind I would tighten my entire body and then begin to shiver.  I was told, “The wind is your brother.  He can’t hurt you if you don’t fight him.”  So I relaxed and I felt better.  Tightening does little to actually warm us other than leading to shivering, which does warm us a bit but uses more energy than it’s worth.  Our bodies will work to keep themselves warm without our conscious help.  If we use too much energy by stiffening and shivering we drain our body’s energy reserves, and our bodies, with depleted reserves, loose heat even faster.

I can hear some of you saying, “Yea that sounds great, but what about wind chill?”  For most of us that’s definitely a concern.  Did you know though that an Eskimo can withstand much colder temperatures, and often without buttoning their coat all the way up or even donning their gloves?  Why is that?  Could it be they’ve learned to respond to temperature differently?  I think that’s the case.

As a kid when I moved from the Deep South to the Midwest, and then to New England, I had a difficult time adjusting to the cold.  I still prefer warm weather but now I can deal with it.  It just doesn’t bother me all that much once I’m used to it.  I found I could spend long periods outside in single digit temps, and colder, with little problem.  Before I learned to relax I would become very uncomfortable and my fingers and toes would begin to hurt from the cold.

We need a certain amount of stress to function properly.  Doctors tell us our bodies need physical stress to maintain bone density and muscle mass, and our minds need to be challenged if we’re to stay sharp.  Tai chi teachers often tell us to relax; yet this is not always the best advice.  Relaxing conjures the image of laying back in a hammock, letting the hammock support us completely.  When practicing tai chi we still have to support ourselves.  I think a better description is to be loose with energy, meaning to use only as much muscle as needed to hold proper body structure.  If we loosen up, even a little, we’ll loose our alignment.

Just like using too much muscle, we focus too much on stress.  The act of focusing on what we don’t want, such as stress, creates more of what we don’t want.  Focusing on lifting our arms when our attention should actually be on our hands causes us to use more muscle than necessary too.  This is very much like when we focus on every little detail of exactly how we want something done; our focus creates more stress.  Most of the time we would be better off focusing on the outcome we want and letting the details fall into place as things progress.  Often there will be improvements we could never imagine before we began.

Humor is another key ingredient.  Students who stick with tai chi always seem to have the ability to laugh at themselves.  Those who stick with it don’t take themselves too seriously.  Laughter’s a great stress reliever.  If we could carry this same attitude into our daily lives we could dramatically reduce the amount of stress we experience.  How many opportunities do you think we’d find to laugh at ourselves, at how foolish we’re being?  We are very funny people.

So if you haven’t already, take your lessons in tai chi and start applying them to your daily life.  Use only as much focus as you need to perform the task at hand.  Let yourself make mistakes.  Who knows, you might occasionally discover even better ways to do things.  I make some of the best mistakes now, ones that make my life easier.

Your thoughts?

John

P.S.  I found this pic here:  http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mike.mccluskey/1/1263329877/tpod.html

The “Tai Chi Repsonse”… not To Be Confused With “Reaction”

For many tai chi students it takes a while to get their heads around the idea of responding to their partner.  I think of it as reacting, but faster.  I’ve been told to wait for your partner to attack then counter before they finish implementing.  I can’t really say I have this down yet either.

I think this is a skill that requires some faith to develop too.  You have to pretend you can do it before you actually can in most cases.  I think this relates back to our adult need to understand things intimately before we can accept them.

If you were to write a couple of paragraphs about being able to understand something you know almost nothing about before you could do it, the argument would begin to fall apart.  Trying to figure something out first gets even harder if you don’t believe it’s possible.  How many times have you been able to understand something before you learned how to do it?  It seems to me the understanding of anything, always came after I learned how to do it.

As human beings we are multi-sensory learning machines.  We learn through practice, through doing, and the magic component is action.  I was recently watching Jamie Smart talk about this very thing, and can you believe it, it got me thinking about tai chi?  How odd.

I remember learning to ride a bike as a kid.  I didn’t give a rat’s you know what about understanding how it worked.  I just wanted to do it.  I fell down a few times, got back up, brushed the dirt off, and once again trusted my Father to hold the back of the seat until I told him not to.  Then one time I said, “OK, you can let go.”  I looked back and saw him smiling… from a really long way off.  The realization that I’d been riding on my own shocked me so much I fell right over.  Then I got up and did it again.

What happens to us between childhood and adulthood?  We go from saying, “Hey I wanna learn that.  Lemme try.” to saying, “I wanna learn that. Let me figure it out first and then I’ll be able to do it.”  The “let me figure it out plan” never works.  We still have to learn through doing.  Maybe it’s a way of building up our courage, the way a couple of drinks makes us better dancers.

I wish I could bottle up that childish enthusiasm so I could have it on hand when a particularly timid student wants to get it all figured out before they’ll make a run at it… hey, I think I’ll start work on that right now!  See ya!

Your thoughts?

John

Your Car Keys, A Key To Successful Tai Chi Practice

Meta physicians have been saying it for millennia, “Everything comes from the mind.”  Whether you buy into it or not, there’s truth to this old adage.

How many times have you seen someone so focused on what they believed, they couldn’t see what was right in front of them?  A perfect example of this is someone who can’t find their car keys.  When we can’t find our keys we usually say to ourselves something to the effect of, “I can’t find my keys.  I’ve looked everywhere and I just can’t find them.”  The subconscious mind hears this and says, “If you say so.”  Then someone else walks over to the table you’ve already looked on 3 times, picks up your keys and hands them to you.

Your keys were there all along yet your mind obediently blocked them out.  How does this apply to your tai chi practice?  Well, I’m so glad you asked.

You see, when you tell yourself a story your subconscious mind takes you at your word.  When you tell yourself “I can’t do that”, your mind says, “You’re the boss.”  So when you try that difficult move your subconscious mind keeps you honest and doesn’t let you do it.

I’m sure at this point a few of you are questioning this, and that’s as it should be.  I can hear a few of you saying, “Wait, you mean all I have to do is say to myself, ‘I can do that’ and everything will be just dandy?”  Well, no that’s not exactly it.  The real key is belief.  You not only have to say it, but you have to believe it too.

This can be tricky stuff, just like finding your car keys when you’ve already looked everywhere and you’re running late for work to boot.  You have to find a way to convince yourself you can find your keys, even before you really think you can.  The best way I know of is repetition.   Yep, good old fashioned brain washing.

The funny thing about the mind is, it’s not all that bright.  If you tell it the same thing over and over with emotion, sooner or later it will accept it as truth.  That’s why logic works so well; did you catch that?  I was talking about emotion and tied it neatly into logic.  Logic is often nothing more than building a case for a particular viewpoint.  Sometimes the most logical argument is completely off base, yet people buy it.

So how can you make this work in your favor?  It’s easier than you think.  Tell yourself, I’m getting pretty good at this.”  Then start looking for little ways in which you’re improving.  Look for the smallest bit of evidence and when you find it, say once again “I’m getting pretty good and this.”  Look for more evidence and tell yourself the same thing again.  Before you know it you’ll begin to believe it, and sooner than you might think you’ll actually be pretty good at it.

Give this little exercise the old college try and before you know it, you’ll be impressing your family and friends with your remarkable tai chi skills.  Your thoughts?

John

P.S.  I found this pic here:  http://www.topspeed.com/cars/police-cars/ke2339.html