How to Trust your Own Muscle Memory & Body Knowledge – Stop Fighting Your ‘Better’ Self.

Tags

Mind, mindset

I have written about things as internalising knowledge from practice, how to let it become a property of the body. In this Tai Chi blog, I have tried to explain that you work with your nervous system differently when you do something you really know, something spontaneous and effortless, as after having studied and learned to speak a new language fluently. So you might see this post on “body language” as a companion to this post and read that one first.

The next question, when you understand that there are different ways to use your nervous system and how to access that muscle memory, is much harder and more complicated to answer: How do you learn to spontaneously access that special mode whenever you need it? That place in yourself where everything comes together by itself and you don’t need to think about what to do and how?

To access that mode, or body state, when you practice free push hands with friends, might be easier than if someone challenged you to a fight. How do you do it suddenly and purely by will in everyday life? How do you switch from a normal “daily mode” to a “Tai Chi mode”?

First, before answering that question, I would like to add that one of the biggest assets, as well as one of the biggest problems, in Tai Chi Chuan, is the obsession of details. But the details we deal with are specific details on movement and body mechanics. This obsession and attention to details is really the only way to “get” what Tai Chi body mechanics is and how it should be done, as well as how to internalise this. But at some point, you really need to let go of that learning stage and instead understand how to trust your own body. You can’t really do this until it has become a property of the body.

But here is the problem: We always want to control what we do and have the feeling that we control the situation and what we do. No? You don’t see this as a problem? Well, let me try to explain why this is counter-productive to what we want o achieve.

If you want to be able to always access you greatest skill and knowledge, and really let your Tai Chi work by itself, you really, really, need to learn how to let go of that inherent wish to always control yourself and what you do. Yes, letting your Tai Chi do the work, to be able get into that Tai Chi mode whenever you want to access it, is about standing back, letting go.

Stop making yourself trip is not easy

Yes, for sure, it’s something much easier said than done. Let me illustrate exactly what I mean by offering you a passage of the Taoist classic Zhuangzi:

“When you’re betting for tiles in an archery contest, you shoot with skill.

When you’re betting for fancy belt buckles, you worry about your aim.

And when you’re betting for real gold, you’re a nervous wreck.

Your skill is the same in all three cases – but because one prize means more to you than another,
you let outside considerations weigh on your mind.

He who looks too hard at the outside gets clumsy on the inside.”

― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

Read a couple of the lines again:

“you let outside considerations weigh on your mind“
“He who looks too hard at the outside gets clumsy on the inside“

Worrying about what you do, about the results, or how you do something, will be detrimental to what you want to achieve. Putting your mind outside of yourself, thinking about what could happen in a certain situation, might be the last thing you want to do.

Recently, I heard a gun expert saying that “you need to let go of technique and rely on your muscle memory”. I believe this is the same regarding many, many things in life. Just look at yourself when you are riding a bicycle. You can go on for hours without caring about how you move your feet and shift your weight.

But as soon as you try to intellectualise and to understand what you are doing when you are riding a bike, you will switch back to the learning stage of using your body, you will move clumsy and might even cause yourself to stumble or fall. What have you done? Well, you have switched from using your nervous system from the “knowing” stage, to the “learning stage”.

So what does this mean for your Tai Chi in practical practice? Yes, when you practice push hands, practice to use an application, or a real self defence or fighting method, or when you practice to punch at something using Tai Chi mechanics, first, you need to learn the details of the body mechanics and learn to use them.

But, if you want to be able to do something spontaneous in practice or in real life, you need to learn how to forget to focus on the details and the mechanics and just do it.

Actually, if you haven’t practice this, or thought about this difference, then learning to understand this stage will probably feel totally counter-intuitive to what you are used to do in everyday life.

It will probably feel as pulling the floor away beneath you, because you need to enter that place in yourself where you will have nothing of what you have been practicing in the earlier stages to rely on. Here you are not allowed to think about what you are doing, not plan what you want to do. And you are not allowed to think about what you are doing while doing it.

Yes, it’s hard. The great, legendary acting teacher, Konstantin Stanislavsky, had sort of an exercise to illustrate how hard it is. He told his students to stand in a corner and not think about a polar bear for 15 seconds. Can you make it?

Good use of Tai Chi is like great film acting. Acting without acting. Doing things spontaneously without thinking about it. Whatever you do in Tai Chi, practicing form, playing push hands, defending yourself from a throw or punching someone in the face, it must still be just as you did the most natural thing you could do. Just as lifting a glass of water. Or as if you stretched out for the remote control and switched the TV off. Things you do all of the time n your daily life without thinking about it.

So you really need to learn how to make this transition – from the learning stage – to the doing stage.

To be able to trust your own knowledge, to trust everything you already have put inside your body, and into muscle memory, is not easy. Especially not when someone stands in front of you planning to knock you down. That is just one of those moments when “letting go” and relax feels completely counter-intuitive.

Practicing how to “Let go”

But still, just like learning how to ride a bike, you need to learn how to let go of that control and trust your body, and trust yourself in your already gained, inherent knowledge.

I believe that it’s essential to practice, and often practice this “letting go”.

Here are a few examples on exercises, or how you can practice to let go:

• When you practice push hands and play free push hands, try to sometimes practice without looking – using your sensation only. You can look if you lose contact, but when you have gained contact again, immediately close your eyes again, just try to feel where your opponent is going, how he is moving and try to “feel” where his balance is.
  
• When you practice applications and defensive methods – Let your partner use a few basic attacking methods. He should flow and change between them without you knowing what comes next. Don’t think about what to do an dhow to defend yourself. Just act spontaneously and let your body decide.
  
• When you practice punching and similar on some kind of tool, forget all about the mechanics, only rely on your feeling. (You need to learn mechanics and methods before you can practice on how to forget them)

Now, how can we come to that point so we can switch to the real doing mode directly and spontaneously? I will tell you this – in a real situation, and if you already have practiced Tai Chi for a few years, it will probably be there by itself. You might be amazed about how much you can do. Because things will go so fast so you won’t have a chance to even think about what to do.

But still we shouldn’t take this for granted and believe that we always can act spontaneously. We should practice to better understand how to actually do this switch automatically.

When simple thing you can do in everyday one is trying to feel how your body feels when it does something correct. Regardless exactly what you do, try to feel what you do when you “just do” something. Learn how it feels to do things without “thinking”. Don’t try putting it into words, just get the feel and be aware of the feeling.

Finding your own trigger – to release your muscle memory

Later, when you have done this, you should try connect this “feeling” to a “trigger”. Focus on one thing when you do everything correct while practicing your Tai Chi. Try to do everything correct and then when you know that everything is in place, focus on one single thing that you have already implemented or add. You can focus on breathing, how it feels when you sink internally, or on how to gently, softly stare with your eyes.

There are many things you can use as a trigger. But the main point is that you should teach yourself to do this one thing, and when you do this thing, everything else should follow. So, instead of trying to do everything correct, you should be able to remember this one thing and focus on that. And the rest should follow – the sinking, breathing, relaxing, the aligning of yourself – everything should be put in place when you focus on that single thing.

So you should practice to connect everything else to one single thing. So when you know how to do this, you should be able to do this one single thing and at the same time let go of the control of everything else. This trigger will act as a controller by itself.

The state of no-heart/mind might help

Maybe the mind-set of Wu Xin, or emptying your heart-mind, is the best mind-state you could possibly learn to understand. It’s good and can be helpful if you can connect a certain mind-state to the trigger. The mind-state itself could act as this trigger.

But there can also be a certain feeling, or a “tone”, permeating your whole body, at the same time you do the trigger. I don’t know how to express myself more clearly on this point. And I don’t want to go deeper than this. It’s a very personal thing, something I believe you need to actually experience in order to understand.

If you don’t understand this, try to do the doing and feeling, and figure it out by yourself.

Anyway, when you connect this mind-state to the correct mechanics, when you do everything correct, you should practice in an active and conscious manner to forget all of the mechanics and details of what you are doing and only do.

So this trigger should help you to make everything else fall into place automatically. All of this together means that there is actually a method that you can use to program yourself with, to more easily switch from the “Thinking, intellectualising and worrying” state of mind – to instantly be in the empty state of mind. You can learn methodologically how to use one “trigger” to release your own whole body knowledge and muscle memory.

Sounds confusing and deep? Yeah, this is probably the deepest I’ve been on this blog so far. But it makes sense, don’t you think so? Well, you need to practice and put it into use.

The thing is, you really need to practice and experience this by yourself. I doubt ythat you will really understand it completely before you actually can do it. But I hope this text can serve as at least some kind of pointer, so you can understand in what direction you could aim your own practice.

And don’t worry, the next time I publish something here I am trying to go back to that “shallow” stuff, about punching dead objects, something I promised to follow up. Maybe. We’ll see where my inspiration drags me next time.

Why Rewiring your Brain is Necessary for Tai Chi Chuan

Tags

Mind, Xin

I like this idiom, or saying, “rewiring the brain.” Ok, I know, in a strict physiopsychological meaning, we are rewiring our brains all of the time. I do it now when I am writing this, you do it now when you are reading this.

From an article in Psychology Today:

“What does it mean to rewire your brain? In one sense, it’s trivial: it means that connections between neurons in your brain are changing. Everything we learn is stored in the brain, and the brain can’t store information if it doesn’t physically change in some (usually routine) way. In this sense, your brain is constantly being rewired, even right now.”

But I like this quote better from Quora, it’s more about what we are dealing with here:

“What this means is that the ultimate criterion for significant ‘rewiring’ is success in achieving the desired behavioral, cognitive or emotional goal.
….
How long this takes really depends on the field, in addition to your own motivation, skill set, training time, and so on. But in general becoming an expert requires years.”

So in general, you rewire your brain constantly. But you need to rewire your brain a lot to become an expert on something. When it comes to something more difficult, many years.

But wait a minute, how come people have such a hard time to get what Tai Chi is all about? Now I am not talking about becoming an expert, but juts to get a general understanding about the art. You don’t need to become an expert to understand how Tai Chi Chuan works, but still it seems like it takes five, ten or fifteen years for many people to even reach a basic understanding of how Tai Chi works.

And even if they understand what Tai Chi is and how it works, they still struggle to make it work. Is Tai Chi Chuan really that difficult?

I read what people write as comments after they have watched videos. In videos, I see how practitioners participate on seminars and summer camps and how they react on the demonstrations. Practitioners still act, behave and seem to think like beginners. Have they really not rewired their brains? Not even a little? How come so many students stay, as one of my teachers expressed it, as perpetual beginners?

In an earlier post I write about learning by doing. But just doing seems to be not enough. I believe that you need to be actually aware about that you need to rewire your brain to be able to do it. You need to take responsibility for your own progress and actively want to change yourself, want to change your thinking, want to change how you experience yourself and the world around you.

This “want” is in my own experience a very important key. You cannot change yourself if you don’t want to. And if you don’t want to practice on how change yourself, and learn how to get better to change yourself, you just won’t progress.

So if this is true, where should you start? One way to start to gain a better understanding, I believe, is to study to be critical about what you learn, search and research. First you need to have a very clear picture about what you want to achieve. Then, when you take responsibility for what you want to achieve, you will have a direction to walk and a goal to aim at.

The second part is about how to practice. One clue I believe is in what the classics and what Tai Chi teachers speak about all of the time, but something few really understand what it means. I am thinking about “xin” or “Mind” in Tai Chi, about practicing by using “Xin”.

As I wrote in the linked post above, the character “Xin”, or 心, means “heart”. Xin often translates into “heart-mind”. It’s often characterised as the motional mind. What “use mind” to practice Tai Chi means that you need to practice with awareness and focus. You cannot practice Tai chi as routine, only going through movements every day as a routine. Your mind and heart must be there, you need to practice with all of you, including yourself, your own “I”, being constantly aware about what you do. And this is just as important when you practice push hands, applications or study the weapons.

You need to practice with all of you and not only your body. You need to practice with your awareness, thinking, thoughts, emotional focus, with everything of you. And at the same time, you need to keep your goal and direction of your practice alive and fresh in your mind as an idea of your purpose with your Tai Chi and what you want to achieve.

Passion is another good word. You need to have passion about your art, your practice, and practice with passion. If you practiced half-committed with your mind wandering and don’t care about your practice, you just won’t get any big rewards or benefits from your practice. If you don’t want to practice your art and experience what you do with the whole of your own being, maybe Tai Chi Chuan is not for you. Maybe you would be happier if you found something else, something you love. Again, if you don’t love your arts and practice your art with passion, you won’t achieve very much.

Tai Chi is a very complicated art, especially if we speak about rewiring the brain. You need to use your whole body and your whole mind to practice. It’s not like learning how to eat with chopsticks, you don’t need to do big changes in the nervous patterns in your brain to achieve this little skill. Even if you compare Tai Chi with a more complex hobby than playing the piano or learning how to ride a unicycle, tai chi is much more complex. Tai Chi is about whole body balance, about integrating breath and mind in physical movement. Unifying everything together, both in movement and in stillness.

Mind or No-Mind? – On “Xin” in Taijiquan

Tags

Mind, No-Mind, Shen, Wuxin, Xin, Yanshen

Something I find fascinating is that there are certain types of words that are used very differently in different languages. One of the most evident groups of terms or type of words belong to the spiritual and mental world. If you compare similar words in different languages, you will find that words like soul, spirit and words for consciousness   and mind are used differently and not always in a way that is directly translatable.

The Chinese character “Xin”, 心, is one of those words that is used in a very cultural specific context and needs explanation to be understood. But first before we dwell deeper into this subject, I must excuse myself that I again use another romanisation than what you usually find here.  In the olde Wade-Giles system, the Pinyin “Xin” is spelled “Hsin”. But the more modern way, “xin”, is nowadays much more prevalent in literate and texts.

Literally the character “xin” or 心 means heart. The standardised version seen today is a simplification of a much older character that was originally a picture of a human heart. The problem for us when we try to understand what the word xin actually means in a Chinese language context, is that it is mostly translated to English as “mind”.

For Western thinking, this is weird as we associate the mind with thought and logic. The heart has no mind, right? There’s no process of thinking in the heart. We associate the heart with feelings and emotions, but mostly only in a symbolic manner.

Sometimes though, the Chinese “Xin” is translated to “heart-mind”, meaning the emotional mind. My own teacher in Chinese Philosophy, who kindly gave this very lazy student a very high degree for some strange reason, explained this relationship as that the brain and heart are very much connected in Chinese thought. He meant that the heart and emotion is actually what all thoughts reflects.

I believe that at least some of what he tried to explain is that the thinking is constantly judging and validate itself through emotions. Without emotion, there is no conflict and no reason for thought. Only if there is some kind of self-reflection, doubt or insecurity there is a continuation of thought process. If not, the mind is still and doesn’t need to think.

And here lies a key. “Emptying your mind”, relaxing the mind and becoming calm is very much an emotional process. If you cannot control your emotions, making your “heart” still, you won’t be able to collect your thoughts. So again, as explained above, you can from this see better that the thoughts are very much driven from an emotional process.

But how then is the word “mind” actually used? I mean, it is said that you must use mind in your Taijiquan practice. (“to use xin” is something different from “to use Yi” as in “to use Yi instead of Li“.)  So what does this mean? I will tell you this: it’s much more simple than you might want to believe. It’s not about thinking, and it’s not about developing any mind-power or “thinking-energy” as a Qigong teacher explained the processes in what he did. Just as all of these strange mystical sounding words as qi, yin-yang and everything else that is usually mystified, “xin” is also something used daily, a common word in the Chinese language.

My wife who works with chemistry recently said that why she is better to find out what is wrong with an instrument or why she usually find when something is wrong before many of her colleagues, is because she use “xin” in her work. What she meant was really the same as the English expression to use the heart, that she puts her heart in her work. She is focused on her tasks, does things with awareness and cares about everything she does. This is to “use xin”.

What it is meant to “use xin” in taijiquan is the same. It means that you cannot mechanically do the form or any exercise just because you should do it. You must put in a lot of heart in your practice, you need to be aware and pay attention on what you do, “take care” of what you do.  You need to be mindful, take your practice very seriously and examine yourself carefully, and reflect on how well you carry and embody the Taiji principles in every inch of your movement, in your stillness and in your breath. Otherwise, if you don’t put a lot of heart in what you do, it will all become superficial practice and not even good Taijiquan.

Your Taijiquan should always be done this way. To “use Xin” is thus something commonsensical and practical, though there is also a much more philosophical way of describing the “heart-mind”. In Taijiquan, it is also said you need to calm your heart, gather your thoughts together and let your emotions be still. “No-mind”, wu xin (or mushin in Japanese) is the state of tranquility, the place to where you need to take yourself and your consciousness. When you have no own active thoughts and your heart is still, the mind is like a clean glass or a cleaned mirror. Your thoughts and emotions are what stops the light to shine through. or to reflect clearly, without hinderance. When you have a clear mind, you will be able to understand the world and everything around you more clearly.

In Chinese tradition, the heart is also regarded as the place for shen or “spirit” (I won’t go deeper into this word and character in this post). Only if you can clear your mind and calm your emotions, thus make “the glass” or your mind clean and clear, your shen, or spirit can rise to the head. The light of your spirit will then shine through your eyes, forming “yan shen” or eye spirit.

I’ve always thought that it’s something peculiar with calmness. Looking into the eyes of a very calm Taiji practitioner can actually be a bit scary. There is a strength in the eyes of a calm mind that cannot really be described. But I believe that the Chinese language does a good effort with the idea of “yan shen”. It’s really the calmness of the heart and strength of the calm mind that reflects through the eyes.

Complicating the Simple. Simplifying it Again.

Tags

Chan, Learning, Mind, mindset, Simplification, Tai Chi, Teaching, Zen

My own teaching style is to keep everything as simple as possible, trying to simplify and make things that look hard or complicated comprehensible in simple ways. This might sound great and maybe seems to make sense. But still, this is not always the best way to communicate Tai Chi Chuan. Many people are locked in their own complicated thinking, their own way to look at things. As they have their own preconceived ideas they constantly try to reaffirm and verify their own preconceived view on the world. To reach these people, simplifying things is not an option.

This is why Chinese Zen (or more accurate Chan) masters invented the Ko’an (originally Gongan) as one of several methods trying to force students to simplify their thinking. If they couldn’t simplify the answer on a riddle in the simple manner of a child, they wouldn’t be allowed to proceed with any teaching. In some ways, as a Tai chi teacher, I try to do the same way. But it’s not easy. You cannot force a complicated mind to change. People must be willing to change themselves and understand how to change themselves. So the ball, here the willingness to understand what it takes in order to learn, is always in the hand of the student.

We can not transform anyone’s mind if it doesn’t want to transform itself. Thus, simplifying the world does not always work. Often, to have a chance of doing this, we must speak in an intellectual language that the intellectual, complicated mind can understand. We can use math and science, we can use metaphors and images to paint pictures with words. We can use different methods that will satisfy the intellectual or logical mind. We can also engage a person’s fantasy and creativity, to activate him or her to change the way of doing and acting. All of these ways are complicated, detours to help someone to understand things that are in their nature most simple. A student who spend a long time learning, trying to understand an art as Tai Chi, and finally reaches a stage of real understanding, will inevitable be surprised, that everything he or she strived to develop, was in fact something very simple.

“Use Yi instead of Li.” – 用意不用力

Tags

Force, intent, Mind, Qi, strength, Tai Chi, Yi

Often when I read something on forums or in discussion groups, I think a long time before answering on a topic. Of course If I answer on it… Sometimes my answer becomes all too long because I think about it too much. Sometimes I still publish the answer on a board or in a group, but sometimes when I write I choose to cancel the reply and go to my blog instead and write about it there. Or I mean here. Recently I saw a discussion about the Tai Chi Expression 用意不用力 or “Use Yi, don’t use Li.” Or “use Yi instead of Li.” I wrote about Yi in a more general sense earlier in this blog. But I think that the topic is worth to address again because the expression above is very much a Tai Chi specific expression. As I wrote earlier, using Yi in Tai Chi is more a kind of anti-yi, or Yi used in a negative manner to force the mind to focus on something else than using Li.

“Li” means common muscular force, and “Yi” means mind, intent or idea. In Tai Chi, Yi is not a way to “think”, and it’s not a way to focus strongly on something. If you focus too much or use a strong intentional idea, the mind becomes tense and your body as well. Yi is something else. Now, what is important to realize about the opposite concept of Li, which is something you don’t want, or something you want to get rid of, is that using clumsy force or Li is not about thinking, it’s doing. From a Tai CHi POV, Li is a clumsy, forced way to do something, but at the same time it’s something direct, something you do without thinking. Yes, using Li is a way to actually “do”. This might seem very obvious, but think about how people consider yi, they consider it to be a way to think or having a strong idea. But thinking or using any kind of thought as “wanting something” before actually doing something is too slow. We are talking about Tai Chi as a martial art here. If you think before punching, you are the one that will be getting punched. So Yi, just like using force, must also be something direct without thinking. Yi is also a way to do something. It’s not thinking, it’s not a stage before doing. That is too slow. Instead, “using yi” is a way to DO something. It’s to do something similar to how using force is about doing something.

So how about actually using Yi? Well, when you see an opponent offering an opening to strike, then your fist should just be there instantaneously without thinking. When you get rid of Li, your fist can land on your opponent without thinking. Now it can just land there on the target as a spontaneous reaction. This is your Yi that “do” the attack for you. The idea doesn’t come first, but instead the idea/intent and the action are one. There is no gap between them. The “idea” of watching an opening and attack it, is much faster then thinking and coming to a conclusion. It’s something direct and instantaneous. And there, just as this instantaneous idea pops up in your mind, your fist reach out and hits your target without thinking. This is “using yi”. This is the meaning of “Yi leads the Qi. The Qi leads the movement.” It’s not something similar a chain reaction or the movement of a whip. It’s rather similar to particle teleportation, where one end reacts together with the other end regardless the space between them. There is a direct connection. The instant thought or idea and the physical reaction moves together. They are both part of the same reaction.

But the expression “Yong Yi, Bu Yong Li” or “Use Yi and not force”, is not only an advice to not use clumsy force, it also express the method, or rather a collection of methods, that Tai Chi teachers use to teach their students to not use Li in order to learn how use Yi. There are methods on how to think and on how to move your eyes when you do something to use your mind to force your body to not use strength.  “Use Yi instead of Li” is a re-learning process. But when you have fully understood to “not use Li”, the concept of “use Yi” will lose it’s meaning. When you have got rid of Li, then “using yi” just becomes a matter of doing. Or like Hao Weizhen expressed it: ”If you are able to use intention to attack the opponent, then after long experience, even intention does not need to be applied, for the body standards will always be conformed to.“

The more clear and relaxed your mind is and the less you interfere with intentional thoughts, the better your Yi will work just by itself. The aim on developing a certain mind-set should, in my personal experience, rather be on emptiness and not on Yi. So “Use Yi” is just a stage, a transitional stage between using Li and another way of doing. Or rather, what you develop with this practice of “use Yi instead of Li“, is a way of “being” where the way to do becomes something perfectly natural and unrehearsed.