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

Got Purposeful Posture?

We call it being loose with structure.  For beginners this can be challenging.  Students are often just told to relax.  I have a bit of a problem with this word, although I find myself saying it occasionally.  With most of us it conjures an image of lying back in a hammock holding a brightly colored drink sporting a little bamboo umbrella.

Even though most students seem to have trouble with this concept at first, it’s really not all that difficult to do.  Once you can accomplish this, you can begin to manage it and break that old habit of holding unnecessary tension.

Let’s use holding up your arm as an example.  The idea is to hold your arm out as you would in one of your tai chi postures.  Now pay attention to how it looks.  Does it appear to be held in place with purpose, or does it resemble a limp noodle that’s ready to fall at any moment?  In case you’re wondering, it should appear purposeful and solid.  Use only as much muscle as you need to keep it from looking like that limp noodle.

Once you can do this on command have a friend or training partner take hold of your arm and move it around slowly.  If you’re doing it correctly your partner will find little resistance, yet your arm will continue to have the same appearance, and as soon as they let go it will maintain that solid appearance wherever it is left.  When you can do this with ease, you’ll have learned a vital skill for the advancement of your tai chi forms that will translate into later push hands practice.  Think of it as “being there, but not really being there.”

Your next step is then to transfer this feeling into the rest of your body.  Don’t try to do it all at once.  Take your time.  Apply the feeling to your feet, your calves, your lower back, etc.  Whenever you notice tension in your body focus on that point and let go of whatever tension you don’t need.  You may find you need to adjust your posture before you can release tension.  This is one of the ways tai chi teaches you to listen to your own body.

It’s been said over and over that tai chi gives you energy.  That’s true, and one of the ways is by freeing up energy you were wasting in the first place.  Think of it like an energy audit for the body.

If you haven’t done this already, give it a try and leave a comment about your experience.  If this is old hat for you, please share your insights.  Everyone has different experiences and we can all benefit from the lessons of others.

John

Let Go and… Let Yourself

I’ve said this before, but not quite in this way.  I see students and even advanced tai chi players who can’t let go of the past.  The past defines us only to the point we allow it.  If you have an image of your level of ability, let it go.  This is the fastest way I know of to improve your level of tai chi.

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”
Lao Tzu

Are you still using training wheels?

John

P.S.  I found this picture here: http://www.ehow.com/how_2123516_ditch-training-wheels.html

The Seventh Principle of Tai Chi Chuan “Upper and Lower Body Are Coordinated”

The Seventh Principle of Tai Chi Chuan has got to be one of the most important from a purely physical aspect.  Without constant attention to this principle, tai chi looses all effectiveness.   In my e-book The 10 Principles of Tai Chi Chuan for Beginners, that I give away with my video Beginning Tai Chi Exercises, I give a brief description of the Seventh Principle that’s geared toward beginners.

Upper and lower body are coordinated: Energy is brought up from the ground, through your feet and legs, directed by your waist and expressed through your hands and fingertips. For this to happen every movement must be coordinated so that each part of the body begins and completes each form at the same time. Pay close attention to timing; it’s very important.

In tai chi it’s really all about awareness of your body.  While your mind always directs your movements, it’s also critical for movements to be properly timed with the upper and lower body beginning and ending movement at the same time in almost every case.  In fact the very few times movement may begin in the lower body while the upper body pauses are so few they can almost be ignored, and the movement of the upper and lower body always end at the same time.

For me this is a core principle and should be part of your training from the very beginning.  When I’m training I can feel when my timing is on and when it’s even a little off.   It took a while to get to this point, but I think it was worth the focus.

Your thoughts, experiences?

John

Yes, I’m Getting Rounder. You?

While I’ve been accused of being delusional in the past, I don’t think this is the case here.  I really do think I’m getting rounder.  The particular flavor of Yang Style Tai Chi I practice uses predominantly large circular movements, and I’ve been steadily working on making better and better circles since I first began this journey of body and mind.

What I see in new students a real difficulty in making circles that actually resemble… well you know, circles.  They’re usually so focused on getting their hands from point A to point B that they loose track of what happens along the way.  When it comes to small subtle movements, the circles generally disappear altogether, like fali in Yang Style Forms.* I seem to have a vague recollection of having some trouble with this early on, but don’t remember it clearly enough to be certain (must be flash backs from all the chi kung).

Look at the diagram of moving circles above for just a minute.  When you see a circle begin to move, focus on it.  I think focusing on any one aspect of a form has a similar impact as looking at any one of these circles.  When you really focus on something you see if for what it really is, not what you think it is.  A side effect of focusing on one thing is that other aspects of the form seem to disappear in the beginning, literally.  Don’t worry; this too shall pass.

The nice part about focusing on one thing at a time is once you get that particular aspect into your body, you also begin to develop the ability to do it without focusing directly on it.  It becomes part of your peripheral vision, so to speak.  So if you want your forms to look better, feel better, and have more “substance” to them, focus on circular movements.

Sometimes people say they see things the rest of us don’t see, kind of like a “Sixth Sense”.  Well, “I see tai chi circles”.  Can you see them too?

John

* In Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan fali, power releases, are practiced in drills and not in the forms themselves.

P.S.  I found the optical illusion of rotating circles while visiting an alternate reality.  If you like it, go to the source: http://www.urgle.com/~mike/optical/Illusion.html

I found the crop circles photo in a very unusual spot, a UFO website.  To visit this dimension click here:  http://www.ufo-reports.com/crop-circles.html

“Workin’ On A Dream”

Let’s talk about proper practice methods for a moment.  Some teachers believe your should set a rigid practice schedule and stick to it.  Today you’re working on leg strength, so you’re going to do the drill post exercise for 20 minutes then practice moving drills until a couple hours have passed, your legs are bit rubbery, and your practice time is over.  Tomorrow you’ll work on the timing of your forms for the first hour, spend 30 minutes working on kicks, and then the last 30 minutes doing fali (power release) drills.

This kind of practice schedule is important… if you’re practicing for a major tournament where your skills are really going to be tested, or if your village is always being invaded by marauding outlaws from across the boarder and you’ve been put in charge of protecting the village’s precious supply of Jelly Belly Beans.  However if you live in the same World I do, where you feel you have to work and the police department does a pretty good job of protecting the village provisions, you may not have that kind of time to devote to hard-core tai chi, and besides you haven’t even been in food fight since high school.

Great, so we’ve established you don’t really need to practice all that hard most of time.  So how do you improve your skills?  How do you grasp that all-important sense of accomplishment, not to mention attain a stronger body and just plain old feel better?  Is going to class once a week for 1-2 hours enough?  Well not really, unless you think a snail’s progress is just out of reach and a nifty goal to shoot for.  If you want to be able to notice your own progress more often than you change the oil in your car, you’ll want to do a bit more.

Well then, what’s the right amount of practice?  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, “that depends”.  Don’t you just love it when a teacher takes a firm stance?  Most students are looking for leadership here; the thing is most students don’t follow through when a teacher pushes them to do more.  So what’s the answer?  The answer is… “Do what feels right.”

What in the World does “do what feels right” mean?  It means you should look to yourself for inspiration.  What do you want to achieve today, tomorrow?  If you want to maintain what you learned in class and advance at a slow comfortable rate, spend 5 minutes a day running through what you practiced in your last class.  If on another day you’re feeling particularly frisky do 15 minutes, or more.  There’s lots of information available on tai chi and it’s philosophies: buy a book on tai chi, read it, and apply what you learn.

When I spend time with my master, I see him take little slices of extra time and run things through his mind while practicing small sections of a form he’s working on.  Sometimes he’ll do this for 30 seconds, other times for 5 minutes.  Follow Master Cui’s lead and do what you’re inspired to do.

Where does inspiration come from anyway?  Before I’ve accomplished anything, I’ve always dreamt it first.  If you’re just starting out you might want to begin with a few thoughts before building up to the big leagues and real life waking dreams, you know the “I have a dream” kind of dreams.  Remember start small and work your way up.  If you’re like me in the dreams you have with your head on the pillow, things don’t always turn out the way you intended them to.  My dreams of tai chi proficiency can sometimes come up a bit short too, so I look for inspiration.  Inspiration takes me places I may never have thought of, but it always takes me somewhere.

Your thoughts?

John

Hanky Panky? There’s No Hanky Panky In Tai Chi!

Let me begin by saying, that emphatic statement is not entirely true.  Before I tell you why it’s not really true I’d like to explain what I’m getting at.  Later I’ll let you in on what got me thinking about this.

When playing tai chi the movement of the shoulders through space has little or nothing to do with the shoulders.  When beginners watch their teachers and then mimic a move they invariably twist their bodies to get their shoulders into what they believe is the proper position.  The movement of the hands and shoulders is distracting them and what’s missed, almost without exception, is the turning of the waist.

The upper body is strongest when the shoulders and hips are in alignment with one another.  When movement is controlled by through the waist, there is power.  When there is proper, alignment, and only as much tension as necessary to maintain alignment, there is movement of energy.  When there is controlled movement of energy, there is increased power.

Practice keeping your shoulders over your hips and use your hips to turn your shoulders.  Your tai chi will improve dramatically.

When I said that there really is hanky panky in tai chi, what I was referring to are the hidden movements designed to surprise opponents, and occasional misdirection through extending one hand to distract the opponent while striking with the other.  There is also the use of the efu, or uniform, to hide the subtleties of movement from the opponenent as well as bystanders.  So yes, there is hanky panky in tai chi, just as in other martial arts.

Now, the not-so-little-known fact that got me thinking about this comes from the practice of magic.  Specifically sleight of hand.  I found this reference in the book Who Knew?, by David Hoffman.

The term “Hanky Panky” stems from the magician’s practice of using a handkerchief in one hand to distract the audience from noticing what he is doing with the other.

Your thoughts?

John