Between Postures: Where the Gold in Tai Chi Is Mined!

 Every so often during practice I will have an epiphany about some aspect of the Tai Chi form or a particular movement within.  When it happens I feel like I have gotten closer to uncovering the mysteries of Tai Chi. As I continue to explore an epiphany I soon realize that it has already been thoroughly explained in Yang Cheng Fu’s 10 Important Points. This week was no different. In the past few classes, we had been working on the gap/transitions between Tai Chi postures, particularly from Single Whip to Wave Hands Like Clouds but it is in all transitions. Often someone learning Tai Chi will automatically go from one move to the other will little thought or activation put into the transition, thus creating a gap in their structure. Specifically, Yang Cheng Fu expounded upon my epiphany in number 8 and number 9 of his 10 Important Points. Number 8 discusses the importance of harmony between the internal and external parts and number 9 discusses the importance of continuity while going from one posture to the next.

Single Whip

What separates Tai Chi from other exercise routines is once the form has begun the training is the transition from one posture to the other seamlessly. I have found understanding the martial aspects helps focus your attention on those transitions because transitions or gaps are vulnerabilities. In analyzing transitions in the Tai Chi form there are two basic categories. Hand transitions (moving from one side to the other or raising one high and one low) and stepping transitions.

Hand Transitions

Two postures that make a great example are Single Whip to Wave Hands Like Clouds. When you strike with your left hand/forearm (at the 12:00 o’clock) position in Single Whip, your right hand is extended outwards perpendicular to your left, creating a right angle (at the 3:00 position). As soon as you have reached the apex of that left hand strike (12 o’clock position otherwise known as absolute yang), your energy should slowly dissipate from the left hand (and start moving toward yin), as you sense an attack coming at your 4:00 o’clock position. So you begin to rotate your body to face that attack. Your right hand becomes activated and dominant (now yang) while your left comes to support the right, which begins the Wave Hands Like Clouds sequence.

The beginning of Wave Hands Like Clouds

Stepping Transitions

When moving from one posture to another you are transferring weight from one leg to the other, as you propel forward. During most Tai Chi movements there is a point where you must place 100% of one’s weight on one leg as you step. In the form, we practice weight transfer extremely slow to develop strength and stability.

We analyzed our stability when changing hand positions, but how strong are we when taking a step? The answer to this requires a two-part response. First, you would ONLY enter when you see a gap in your opponent’s defenses, and secondly, when you do see that opening you must do it swiftly, like a hawk seizing a rabbit.

To discuss entering it is important to tie it in with my boxing days. Entering is a lesson learned the hard way and it was ingrained upon me in two ways. In that awkward period when you are first learning to fight and you try to get close enough to punch someone, you quickly realize that you are also able to get hit. A lot of fear is generated and leads to stopping you from moving. You want to end the encounter, but you have to enter to do it which exposes you to a counter attack and harm. Many boxers, myself included, were told to never cross legs when moving, because you may get hit when doing so and your base will collapse, resulting in a knock down at the very least.

The important aspect of Tai Chi that is often overlooked is timing, because many Tai Chi people have never had to fight. A good example to understand timing is jumping rope; to jump over the rope at the exact time the rope should be right in front of your toes. If you jump too soon, you will land before the rope passes and if you jump too late you will get hit by the rope. In a self defense situation, the movements are hyper dynamic and the attacker doesn’t follow the rhythms of the form. It is those rhythms of entering either to the outside or the inside and look for openings with a decreased chance of getting hit while doing so. It is that “beat” which needs to seamlessly change with weight transitions. A true self defense or combative training session will work more on the timing of entering than memorization of a choreographed routine.

Transitions are where the gold of Tai Chi is mined. With training, anyone can assume a posture or stance but to carry the mindful focus of the dan tian and using the kua to transfer energy from one part of your body to other takes real concentration and effort. This is why Yang Cheng Fu includes continuity in transitions in his ten important points. It is also why I included his 8th point, “harmony between the internal and external parts”. You can’t transition if you have no smooth energy flow from the right to the left side of your body, nor can it flow if internal and external parts are not in harmony. Working on that harmony is the gold of Tai Chi, it is the neija or internal work that needs to be worked on to grow.

In sum, the form is a great general training tool but it will not fully prepare you for a dynamic encounter either with an opponent or in life situations that could arise. If you include mindful transitions into your form it will help you understand the need to focus and place attention on weaknesses in your form. It will inspire you to incorporate transitions and timing drills into your practice.

The Importance of Naturalness in Tai Chi

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 53

If I have even just a little sense,

I will walk on the main road and my only fear will be of straying from it.

Keeping to the main road is easy,

But people love to be sidetracked.

When the court is arrayed in splendor,

The fields are full of weeds,

And the granaries are bare.

Some wear are gorgeous clothes,

Carry sharp swords,

And indulge themselves with food and drink;

They have more possessions than they can use.

They are robber barons.

This is certainly not the way of Tao.

(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)

When first studying Tai Chi, a common question usually arises about coordinating breath with the movements. That one question needs a little background before it can be answered. Let's start with a seminar, I attended in 1999 with Madame Gao Fu. She was 82 at the time. It was a seminar in which you could choose who you want to workout with. I was new to Tai Chi and did not know who was famous and who was not. There were other teachers there who offered exotic styles with even more exotic names.

But all this 82 year old Chinese woman taught was zhan zhuang (standing meditation), and chan ssu jin (standing and doing spiral movements) for 3 hours per day. I thought there must be something to this because her practice is so simple while the others at the workshop presented more complicated esoteric forms. I ended up practicing with her for the rest of the 5 days. Towards the end of each practice we got a chance to ask questions. Someone in the crowd asked about matching the breathing with the movements. Madame Gao Fu said it was not necessary to try to match them up. Adding that after continued practice they would come together naturally. During one of those question sessions I asked, "my connection to my Qi comes and goes; sometimes I feel really in tune and then it goes away." "Is that how it is supposed to be?" She said that the more you practice the deeper the connection until you are never disconnected.

What Madame Gao Fu espoused was a type of natural unforced but committed practice, while standing in place or moving. Now in 2017, 18 years later, I still remember that seminar and I am still deeply committed to the wisdom she passed on.

Often when simply being natural you are perceived as lazy and in America laziness is the enemy. To just be natural in America is difficult because so many experts want you to DO STUFF, ACCOMPLISH GOALS and ACHIEVE RESULTS. I have found a lot of conflicting messages being promoted by health experts in America, "you should diet," "go jogging," "think positive," "have social networks," "sleep 8 hours per night,""set goals," "be successful," "challenge yourself," "meditate daily" and "reduce stress." The problem is that people are lost and the experts are lost. The Tao just is. All you have to do is follow the current. Where is the current? It is everywhere but the best place to start is in your body.

Many years ago when I visited Mississippi. My wife wanted to take me to her family summer vacation spot, the Buffalo River in Arkansas. There my wife and I went in a canoe and her father and mother went in a separate canoe. My father-in-law is a very devout Christian in Mississippi and I was this Tai Chi practitioner who KNEW the Tao, After all I have been studying the Tao Te Ching since the 80s. But this very 'square,' in the 60’s sense, school district superintendent, put his canoe in the water as I did. As he entered the river he effortlessly glided towards the part of the river where the current was strongest, whereas I battled the water and huffed and puffed and shouldered my way to that same current then it changed, as currents tend to do, and I lost it. So I again struggled to get into the right path. I would look up and there was this old guy blissfully gleaming along. Granted it was my first and really only time canoeing in a river but it is a good example of how to find the Tao.The Tao is not exclusively found in China, it is not owned by Taoists it simply is. You don’t even have to do Tai Chi to find it, although, I find that the pace of Tai Chi and the movements themselves reveal a deep understanding of the spiral energy that is part of the universe and doing them assists in finding the current within yourself.

There are two parts to this naturalness, one is the release to the Tao, the state of which is wu wei. I have explained wu wei before. It is a type of thoughtful non-action. It is not simply doing nothing, which many interpret it as and it is not using force to make something happen either. The second part of naturalness is song. Song is a state of being, like being relaxed but with a slight level of attentiveness. So it is not standing at attention like a soldier nor is relaxing at a beach in Cabo. It is somewhere in between.

Song is also applied to parts of the body and it involves conscious releasing of control of the waist, neck etc. The hardest part of Tai Chi is to release these parts of the body where most people store their tension. You find when working on this release that you are more able to find your center of balance because many of us are living in a shell like body that is not even aware of our true place on earth.

So to attain song is the first important but hardest step because it allows for the energy to settle in your dan tian and then it can start is transformation process.

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 15

Who can wait quietly while the mud settles?

Who can remain still until the moment of action?

Observers of the Tao do not seek fulfilment.

Not seeking fulfillment, they are not swayed by desire for change.

(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)

There are a lot of hours, maybe a lifetime of work that goes into what was just described above. In fact that is the main practice, whether you chose to just sit and meditate or do the most esoteric ancient qi gong, song is the main activity to find the Tao. You can not find your center without song, you cannot do Tai Chi without song, and you can not attain wu wei if you do not song.

Note: Tai Chi could mean the series of postures most people think when Tai Chi is mentioned or it could be the balancing of yin/yang energies to canoe a river more adeptly or live to a ripe old age of 88 and still be teaching a physical activity.

"Madame Gao Fu died in Beijing January 17, 2005 at 88 years of age, following a brief illness."
http://seattletaiji.oo.net/bio.htm

Opening your kua increases the benefits of Tai Chi

One of the joys of teaching Tai Chi to older adults is that you can see progress as they develop. The people who come into my class for the first time have very little balance or coordination so if they decide to stick with it you can clearly and profoundly see your impact as a teacher.

Knowing the impact of falls on that population and helping some people avoid some of those negative outcomes is quite rewarding.

The major challenges I see in people when they enter my class is not knowing the location of their center. This becomes increasingly evident when they are constantly overreaching, which places a heavy load on the vertebrae, and makes them top heavy. They also do not have their feet flush on the ground, which can again result in a fall. Overall, there is little coordination between the upper and lower half. I am always discussing the importance of the top half and lower half moving in agreement with each other and that discussion leads directly to the person responsible for the popularization of Tai Chi, Yang Cheng Fu. Yang Cheng Fu promoted the health benefits of Tai Chi, and created a list of 10 important points to do Tai Chi correctly (below). An excellent book on his teaching can be purchased here.

Yang Cheng Fu’s 10 important points:

1. Empty Neck, Raise Spirit  

2. Contain Chest, Raise Back   

3. Loosen Waist  

4. Differentiate Empty Full

5. Sink Shoulders, Drop Elbows

6. Use Intention not Exertion

7. Upper Lower Mutually Follow

8. Inner Outer Mutually Harmonize

9. Continue without Interruption

10. Move from Centre, Seek Calm

One of those important points is, "Upper Lower Mutually Follow" where I see most people have difficulty when they are learning Tai Chi. Most older adults I teach think that the Tai Chi form is a series of choreographed dance moves and want to memorize steps and hand positions. I guess being American and older they come to class with their prior experiences from square dancing and other American dance forms they grew up with. What they are missing is their whole structure is a shell with little or any understanding of the internal work that Tai Chi demands.The one exception to this is a woman who was married to a Spanish gentleman and they did a lot of Latin dancing. She had a very well cultivated understanding of her dan tian and could root quite well. Currently, she is 82 years old and still going strong.   

I often share with my students Yang Cheng Fu’s important principles because I think they are essential to truly practice Tai Chi. In fact, my teaching of Tai Chi focuses on cultivating these principles rather than rote memorization of the 24 form, because if you can attain some level of proficiency with these principles it will be more beneficial to your health and well-being.

One of the things I continually notice in class as people age is they use their kua less and less, and those who have the most balance issues seem to be the most rigid in their kua (Pictured below). The kua is known anatomically as the inguinal crease or the grove where the femur meets the pelvis. In a quote from Zhang Xue Xin, a renowned Chen-style Tai Chi master, “Americans know how to use the hips and not the kua.” (this quote is from the hyper link to a paper on the kua above)

The kua and the dan tian work together to create a kinetic chain that:

• Is the "glue" between the upper and lower halves of the body.
• Keeps the center of balance aligned and sunk.
• Provides better alignment of the body for smoother movement with less chance of sprains.
• Creates a "mutable" joint that increases leverage and disperses force by tricking the opponent as to the actual location of your center.
• Increases power output, i.e. force multiplier.

The dan tian is a Chinese term that means “Sea of Qi.” If you read ancient Taoist texts there is a lot of mystical abilities attached to this area. For an essay on that topic click here. Suffice to say, that the dan tian is the center of balance for people, it is located 1”- 2” below the navel and midway between the lower abdomen and the spine. Many people argue about exact locations but this is not meaningful to our purpose here.  There is no anatomical distinction for the dan tian. It is however your true center and that is the most important thing to remember. Every object has a center of balance because gravity makes it so.

One of the best explanations on opening the kua is by Chen style practitioner, Chen Zhonghua. He has a trailer for his video that can be purchased here. Unfortunately, I can not find anyone on youtube who explains it as clearly as he does. 

Training your body to move from the kua and its relation to the actual physical center of your body (dan tian) is a real game changer for your practice. If you were to go up to the average person on the street and ask them where their center was, they might point to their heart or to their stomach area but I will bet you most will not be close to knowing where it is. Imagine you have this body and every day you are walking around on this earth and you are completely clueless as its proper alignment with its true place in the universe? This awareness changes your life because for years you have walked, played and slept thinking it was way higher than it actually is and once you embody its placement your body is unlocked and you can experience so much more of life.