The Touch of a Master

Tags

Body method, Push hands, Shenfa, touch

There’s a great, great difference between how a “common” Tai Chi practitioner and an advanced practitioner “feels”. You really need to meet people in real life and touch hands with them to understand their level of skill.

When you meet up with common practitioners you won’t feel anything particular when you feel their hands. They feel common, nothing special. That kind of practitioner can probably show different applications or methods, but you will always sense that there’s a technical approach, what they do is mostly based on techniques and not on adapting to a certain body method. Even their push hands feel like nothing special even if they can be sensitive and understand following.

An advanced practitioner should have a developed Shenfa, a body method. What this means is that the practitioner moves, use his balance and body, in a learned manner. What they do is based on many years of experience. Good practitioners step in and out of this body method by will. Even better practitioners have this natural. They don’t even need to think about it, their Shenfa is a natural part of whatever they do. By merely touching an arm or a hand of this kind of practitioner, you will feel something very different compared to a common practitioner. But there’s more to it. All of the great practitioners and “masters”, they all feel different. Their touch is a trademark, it has their own unique characteristics like the unique voice of a singer. Many people have tried to copy the voices of singers like Frank Sinatra or Aretha Franklin. But the brilliance of something that sounds simple and effortless is  mostly something unique, something hard to copy and most often impossible to replace. There’s something similar with the touch from someone who has developed a shenfa. You can’t really copy what they do and how, but you can still develop your own signature “voice”.

Some good teachers touch will feel light as a feather, others can be felt heavy and unmovable. Some feel connected, some others don’t. Some great practitioners will constantly change touch, angle and leave you with a feeling of uncertainness or confused. They all feel very different and the only way you are getting to know their own approach to their art, is not about listening to what they say, but about touching their hands. You can learn a whole lot by touching and feeling a great practitioner. Their whole art is summarized in their own Shenfa, in their body method. And the only way to get a sense of how they really use their own bodies is by one way or another touching hands with them.

I remember the first times touching hands with my first Tai Chi teacher in 1987, the teacher which I consider my primary teacher and the one I have spent most time with. His hands and arms felt completely empty. When he evaded or redirected an incoming push or punch, he would not let anyone feel a connection between his limb and the rest of his body. Sometimes he would react very fast with his body and change, but often when you pushed his arms or at his body, he would let you in close before he re-directed you away.

His teacher Bill, who I also studied for periodically didn’t feel empty, instead he would give you a sense of being connected, rooted. He had a certain stretching quality throughout his body, something that was evident in his forms as well. He would let you feel this and he felt solid. Yet he was very light, and as soon as you touched his hand he would change the angle and never let you push directly at his balance. When he issued power, or performed his fajin, he was so connected from the root that it was impossible to direct away his push if you were too late. You would need good timing and evade him early, if he caught your balance you were already lost.

Bill’s teacher, who I also studied for, was very, very different from every other teacher I had met. Mr He was absolutely brilliant, precise and exact in his movements. He felt rather connected and aleays brought strength directly from his back which meant that even a little touch felt strong. When he demonstrated his art, you could see his shoulder blades moving, sometimes sticking right out from his body, as he made subtle adjustments with the smallest leverage. But when you touched hands with him it was not a question of having time to feel his touch or to study his movements. As soon as he touched your arm or hand, you would find yourself on the floor, one way or another. Mostly just by sitting right next to him where he could easily reach your head with his fist. I don’t believe I will ever have the pleasure to meet a practitioner of his magnitude again.

Another teacher that I had in Beijing, Teacher Ding, was a rough or crude looking fellow. He taught painting and calligraphy as well as Tai Chi. He smoked a lot and used to spit on the class room floor. Yet, when he performed his Tai Chi form, he was extremely soft when he moved. All of his body was well coordinated, but he moved very gracefully like a dancer, yet he had a certain power in his movements. Just like with Bill, it was a real pleasure just watching him doing his firm. But Ding Laoshi was much, much softer and felt very soft. His touch was extremely light. When you touch hands with him, you would find yourself stumbling in air.

I might have something to say about a few other teachers and practitioners I have met, but mostly I have nothing special to say. Some of them I appreciate a lot, and even if they might be very good, their approach is very different from mine. But mostly when you touched hands with them they didn’t feel like anything special, they didn’t have a unique signature touch. But so what about me? It’s hard to know how you feel. Maybe halfway through my road up until today, I often tried to shift between solid and insubstantial. One of my friends said that he sometimes thought he had me on the hook, but then I would suddenly empty myself. It felt like like pressing on a door that was closed but suddenly opened up. Back then, I had still a lot to learn and I could still become hard, stiff up and sometimes fell back into using strength. A few years later, I re-discovered “lightness”, the art of being light. It’s a bit peculiar that I hadn’t done so before, but I had very much been focusing on structure and alignment the latest years and I believe that had a negative impact on my progress. But as I had truly understood lightness, I also re-discovered “softness” and learned how to trust in “song” (relaxation/releasing) in a new way, and I also started to understand a deeper meaning of “emptiness”. From that point and onwards, I have always had lightness as my main focus when I touch hands with someone. When I had my own and last Tai Chi group, I always practiced my own lightness and softness in class and tried to promote this as I believe this is much of the essence of this Art. But that was quite some time ago, about ten years ago from today. I seldom teach today, but hopefully it will become more of that in the future. I hope to find people who wants to travel the same kinds of roads. It would be interesting to feel how their touch would change from year to year and to follow their journey.

If this post has interested you, please also read an article in another blog, Adam Mizner’s translation of Li Yaxuan’s text, a description of the different qualities of Fajin by his teachers and friends. I believe you would find it enlightening.

When Should You Start To Learn Push Hands?

Tags

Applications in Tai Chi, Form, Progress, Push hands, Tai Chi

A common question from beginners and non-practitioners especially who are interested to start studying T’ai Chi Ch’uan, is about when they can start to learn push hands.

There is a common view that form should be practiced first and push hands later. Many teachers, even some established and well known, will teach form and basic exercises for the first one or two years, and then go on to start teaching push hands. Applications and combat practice will be initiated even later.

Some people say that you need to practice form first to be able to understand push hands. I don’t agree with this conception. Form practice is not a prerequisite for push hands. In my opinion, the truth is quite the opposite around. Push hands is a tool for learning how to practice the form correctly, especially in terms of balance, alignment and intent. Form should be taught together with, and alongside, push hands and applications. Otherwise your form practice will be just as good as walking around with an empty bag. Later you’ll probably need to re-learn how to do your form… if you haven’t already cemented a false appreciation of the form and still are able to change it…

But practicing push hands, and applications especially, early when you have started to train, doesn’t mean that you should do it in a purely ”technical” or ”external” manner, as you commonly see in Karate or Jujutsu. No, on the contrary, you should do this using tai chi principles and practice this to learn and understand Tai Chi principles. My own teachers paid a great attention to details right from the beginning. When we did simple applications and “leading & following” exercises, my first teacher would show me how to stand correctly, how to relax properly, how to sink into the stance and how to use my waist. He would to tell me how to breath correctly or not to hold my breath. And he would constantly repeat “relax, relax, relax”. Tai Chi principles were taught and drilled right from the start, practically. The first thing my first Tai Chi teacher did on my very first class was not about showing a form or any kind of solo exercises. No, instead he taught some simple evasion and guiding exercises, as well as balancing and unbalancing. These few exercises set the course for the whole progress in my Tai Chi practice. For the years to come, form, push hands and applications were always fully integrated. I learned balance, rooting & structure more from the latter two parts of the practice and I would continue to study what I’ve been taught in class when I practiced form home alone.

In my own opinion, this is the correct way to teach form, push hands and applications. For push hands, I believe that the basic simple drill also could be taught from the start. But the progress from drills to free push hands exercises should be achieved by a gradual process. In my own opinion, free push hands is always better as a semi-cooperative game where you help each other solve problems and come up with solutions. Free combat practice and sparring should is in my opinion better learned from other formats of practice.

 

Form, Push Hands or Sparring? – On developing Fighting Skills in Tai Chi Chuan

Tags

Fighting, Push hands, Sparring

I know a Tai Chi teacher who… Oh, sorry. I don’t know him. I know about him and I have met him briefly. I won’t mention any name, but he teaches the short 25 movements form. Only this form and one or two basic push hands drills. When someone asks him how you learn to fight in Tai Chi, he just says that fighting skills comes with time through form practice. Many teachers says “fighting comes from the form.” So most people just practice forms, drills, jibengong standing meditation and other solo exercises.

I’ve heard so many people who practice form, form and form. They practice one or two or three or even more hours of Tai Chi solo practice exercises everyday. Some people I meet says that their goal is to spend so and so many hours of Tai chi practice everyday. Spending a lot of time practicing and developing your Tai Chi as well as yourself is obviously a good thing. But you should not confuse this practice with fighting skills. Even if those people who says that fighting comes from the form have practiced for thirty plus years, most of them still get stiff and and use strength when I meet them in free push hands practice. They show absolutely no Tai Chi skills.

Li Yaxuan (Yang Chengfu’s most acclaimed student) wrote:

(Scott Meredith translation)

Li Yaxuan believed that it’s essential to practice against others, testing and developing your skill against others. You can’t develop fighting skills in your own room by yourself. You can’t learn following skills, like adapting to the opponent’s structure or learn to listen to his energy from solo practice.

Tai Chi is meant to use against someone else. It’s meant to be used as self-defence and fighting. Think of Tai Chi Chuan the same way as you learn to use a tool or an instrument. You can’t learn to be good at bowling without practicing with the bowling ball. All movements you perform in the thin air means nothing compared to holding that ball and use it. The same thing goes for learning to play the violin or the piano. You must really practice with the instrument to become good.

You learn the correct balance and alignment not when you practice form without any martial practice. You learn these qualities when you meet the opponent’s pressure, when you evade from a punch or try a takedown against him. It’s when you practice push hands and sparring you should practice your Tai Chi skills. Practice following and leading against your partner. Learn to handle a push or leading away pressure from your practicing partner. The knowledge you attain from push hands and applications practice is what you should take into your forms, drills and other solo practice. My teacher said that most people practice form as they were statues. But Tai Chi should be a functional form. Practicing a Tai Chi form is not like practicing like you are a statue. It’s like practicing as you were a filled tea pot. A statue just have a stationary weight. But a Tai Chi form should have a functional weight, form and balance. The correct function and balance is what you learn from push hands and applications practice. Then you take that knowledge and fill the form with it. If you don’t have this knowledge to put in the form, practicing your form and your drills will be like carrying around an empty bag. Then you don’t use it for the purpose it was created for.

Practice your forms, drills, meditation, jibengong and solo practice. But don’t believe that this will help you even slightly to apply your movements correctly in push hands or fighting. You need practice push hands again and again, both drills and free push hands against many different people. You need to test applications and combat methods against resisting partners. Only when you can understand how to be insubstantial and formless in different formats of practice and in different competition formats, and have succeeded to keep your Tai Chi body and your Tai Chi mind dealing with many different people in different situations, you can claim to have reached a point where you can truly say that you know how use your Tai Chi Chuan for real.

Also read about how to gradually build Tai Chi combat skills from pressure and testing and what it is like fighting with Tai Chi for real.

Building Tai Chi combat skills from pressure and testing

Tags

Combat, Push hands, Tai Chi, Tai Chi Combat, Tai Chi Push Hands

Some teachers don’t like their students to compete. But others, like Li Yaxuan, Yang Chengfu’s most famous and competent student, said that you must practice your Tai Chi in free push hands and free sparring. Li also encouraged Tai Chi people to compete in Push Hands and Sanda/San shou tournaments. But if you do, he meant that this is to test your Tai Chi skills. You must really use your Tai Chi. You must be confident in your art, know how to always breath, stay relaxed and not use excessive or unnecessary strength.

But I can never see real Tai Chi skills when I look at Tai Chi Push Hands competitions. They all use brute force, tricks and speed. How come? Why is that so? I read about a quite famous teacher who commented Push Hands tournaments and why you hardly see anyone who use Tai Chi skills in competitions. That teacher said that even if students do everything right in class and use their Tai Chi when they practice free push hands in class, they tend to not trust their skills and practice when they meet the pressure in a competition. So they use brute force and speed instead.

This is somewhat a strange phenomena. One of the reasons of course could be that many of these competitors practice to compete in competitions and not too build genuine Tai Chi skills. Another reason could be that many of them are young and have not enough practice to keep their skill when they are pressured. I couldn’t not always do so for the first five or seven first years. Even when I met Tai Chi people for free push hands practice, I sometimes tensed up, and especially so if the other person was tense or used strength.

But the question is, if you want to develop genuine Tai Chi skills, what way, how and how often should you meet pressure and have your skills tested? Maybe competitions is not the best way. If you lose too much confidence in yourself and in your skill, will you have enough courage later to really use your Tai Chi? Will you ever be able to use it?

In my own humble opinion, the best way to test your Tai Chi skills is to test them against a Tai Chi practitioner who is much better than you. If you meet someone who really know how to relax, can keep relaxed all of the time, and can still play around with you just like you were merely a leaf caught in the wind, you will learn far more than if you put yourself into pressure when you yourself yet don’t know how to keep relaxed all of the time. If you meet up with skilled teachers and practitioners, you will feel how they feel, you will experience their timing and eventually come to understand their Tai Chi spirit.

This is the right way to approach Tai Chi and build genuine skills that can be used for real. First, learn to relax properly in a Tai Chi environment. When you can keep yourself relaxed and not tense up, then test yourself against non-Tai Chi practitioners. When you can demonstrate and keep your Tai Chi body all of the time, without interruption, you might want to expose yourself to people from various styles who are skilled in wrestling, competition push hands and free fighting. If you want to make your Tai Chi work for real, my advice is that you make your progress to develop in clear levels, taking one step at a time and learn how to keep your Tai Chi skills when dealing with different levels of pressure. Make one achievement at a time and let your progress in Tai Chi develop over the time it takes to jump up one level at a time. By doing so, you will always progress further without compromising your Tai Chi or your confidence in your art.

Following, adapting, mirroring – Do you really know how to practice this?

Tags

adapting, following, Li Yaxuan, Mirroring, Push hands

When you have read this post about mirroring and adapting in Tai Chi, I can recommend to also read the posts: how to practice Tai Chi applications and Five important points of Push Hands practice.

In Tai Chi, we try to learn how to adapt to the opponents movements, following him like the reflection in a mirror. But there are two things I see in how people commonly practice Tai Chi that I don’t agree with. Both of them have to do with focusing on techniques before principle. Both may lead to bad habits and a false sense of timing.

First, people practice from stationary postures. Your opponent need to move. You can’t start from your opponent standing with a stretched arm. There must be a movement to follow. Almost all applications you see in vids on the tubes start from either a push hands setting or stationary postures. How can you learn how to mirroring your opponent if you don’t have anything to follow? In this sense, much push hands practice serve better to build tai chi skills than most applications practice you can see that people show up on the youtube etc.

Second, people are too concerned with the limbs. They practice how to defend themselves from hands, arms, legs and feet. But what you should learn to follow and adapt to is the opponent’s center, his balance and to his “yi”, or intent. The traditional Chinese philosophy is to get rid of problems while they are small. If you know that you don’t want a tree to grow, get rid of it as soon you see it comes out from the earth. Don’t wait until it has grown strong. The same can be said for Tai Chi philosophy of self defence. Don’t wait for a punch or any attack to become strong and connected. Then it’s too late. So if you can, get rid of it by it’s root, before there is any power in the attack. To do this you must follow and adapt to the movements of the center. Use timing, get in as soon as you can get in to the right distance and get rid of the problem.

But you need to practice on this. You won’t get any practice you can use in real life self defence or combat if you start practicing techniques with your opponent holding out a stretched arm and fist. This will only build bad habits and won’t help you to develop your timing.

Li Yaxuan (Disciple of Yang Chengfu) on this issue of timing and adapting to the opponent’s movements:

Even before physical contact, with a single glance you join contact with the opponent or partner, establishing a firm connection with him. Adherence can begin even at this stage, prior to physical contact. This is important because when you are working in a more intensive competitive or combative mode, if you depend on physical contact to start your adherence, that’s too late and you’re going to be too slow to exploit any advantage of timing or positioning.

(Translated by Scott Meredith: Link to the complete text, PDF)

• Practice to watch your oppponent, to feel what’s the appropriate distance to enter or attack.
• Practice to follow his every slight movement done by his centre, feet, hips or shoulder tips.
• Try to lock the distance from your center to his center.
• Watch his eyes: When does he look and can you see his gaze changing just before he goes to an attack?

Follow, follow and follow. Try to act as his mirror, adjusting to every slight movement, even if he moves some part of his body even one tenth of an inch. And then when you have contact with your opponent, let your tingjin (sensitivity skill) decide when, where and how to respond and attack.’

Recommended posts: how to practice Tai Chi applications and Five important points of Push Hands practice.