Ten Principles Tai Chi

My apologies to everyone who left comments or wrote to me pointing out that my T’ai Chi class notes were no longer online. I’m afraid I forgot to copy them back in the last time I upgraded the blog software. They’re now back, and available for download once again.

This blog post was originally published as a podcast in June 2009. I’m slowly transcribing all of my podcasts, to share them with my readers who either cannot play podcasts on their computer, or who simply prefer reading instead of listening.

I’ve just completed tonight’s class teaching the beginners on a Thursday night, and there are two key lessons we’ve taken from tonight’s class.

First of all, no matter what the weather, no matter how hot or how cold it is, the class always goes easier if it is nice and lighthearted, and people are able to have a good old laugh as part of the class. It makes them enjoy themselves a lot more; as a result they actually find that they’re more focused. As a teacher, you’ll see that in the students because they’re not looking to escape – they’re not watching the clock; they’re here, they’re in the moment, and they are enjoying themselves.

And then the second lesson we’ve taken from tonight’s class is that there’s no substitute for hard work, no substitute at all. Repetition – going over the moves bit by bit, breaking them down and practicing, practicing, practicing 10, 15, 20 times a night in the class really helps people learn and re-enforces the teaching they’ve already picked up for each of the moves.

It’s amazing what difference you can see in two hours between everybody in the group, and it’s a real joy to see … it’s one of the things that as a teacher keeps bringing you back to class week in and week out.

And then there’s a third thing as well … as beginners, T’ai Chi is something that they cannot yet understand. They’re being taught the form because the form is a teaching tool [it's also a martial fighting form - Ed] to teach true T’ai Chi afterwards. At this stage of learning the form all the movements are … they’re not flowing because it’s all muscular, it’s all hand and foot mentality, as my teacher would have said. It’s a case of always reassuring them and let them understand that they’re actually doing very well because at this stage they’re doing the best they can. It’s all you can ever ask from anybody. And encourage them to come back every week.

This is week 26 now for the Thursday group, and just seeing the difference from week 1 when they came in having not done any T’ai Chi before; and now they’ve played the form twice tonight, and we’ve done corrections on five / six separate moves, and had a good debate about how things should be and why, and such a short period of time really from when they first came through that door and this is just the start of their journey. It’s a real joy as a teacher, and as a student of the art, to share that with people.

You may be listening to this on the podcast and wondering what this has to do with T’ai Chi, and how does it help your practice … try and bring these things into your practice. Look for the enjoyment in your form and the moves and the principles that you are applying and the goals you are working towards. Put in the work to achieve those goals. Have a plan about what you’re going to do, what you’re going to explore. Stick to it: do the work. And then finally, accept that when you get there, what you really do is achieve a new level of understanding and a new set of goals to work towards. It never stops. You’re capable – everyone is capable – of infinite polishing; being polished more and more, improving more and more as time goes on.

And that’s just as true in solo practice as it is in a group teaching situation.

Over the past two years, I’ve been working on a set of notes for my Beginners’ class. With the help of feedback from my students, the notes have been polished, tried and tested, and I’m now happy enough with them to share them online for anyone else who is interested in reading them.

To make my notes easy to find, I’ve added a new Class Notes page to the website which lists all of the notes I’ve uploaded. I still need to finish off and publish my T’ai Chi for Improvers notes, plus the notes I’m scribbling away about my own practice!

And, to make my notes as free as possible, I’m licensing them under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 (UK) license. This license allows you to re-use my notes, and to make your own version of these notes, provided you give the original author (me) credit and that you also distribute your own version of the notes under the same license.

This makes our T’ai Chi notes a Free Cultural Work.

Why am I doing this?

• Our art has a tradition going back at least to Yang Cheng’fu in the 1930’s of sharing everything we know. This means you don’t have to take any modern teacher’s word on T’ai Chi; you can go and track down a translation of Yang Cheng’fu’s book and see for yourself.
• When my teacher died, his surviving family chose to withdraw the two instructional aids he had made during his lifetime (videos of both himself and his teacher playing the form). This sadly means that my students (and, in time, their students) cannot compare their own understanding and practice to that of the teachers who went before me. My own work, such as it is, is now a Free Cultural Work and can never be withdrawn from my students when I die.

I hope you find these notes helpful, and I’m always keen to receive feedback to help me improve them still further.

At the start of our form, we give the following instructions:

Set your feet shoulder width apart, and in your own time, lower your centre of gravity. Tension below the belly button, relaxed above the belly button. Eyes looking forward, and the tongue up to the roof of the mouth. Attention on tan tien. Deep breathing in and out, contraction and expansion of your belly.

In the beginner’s class on Thursday, I was asked about the purpose of the tan tien. I normally give the following explanations:

1. It is a little bit below the belly button, and a little bit inside.
2. According to Western science, it is the centre of gravity for the human body.
3. According to Eastern philosophy, it is an important part of taoist internal alchemy.

But what exactly is taoist internal alchemy? That was an excellent follow-up question :)

I don’t practice taoist internal alchemy myself, as it’s something that isn’t part of the system handed down to me by my teacher. It wasn’t that my teacher didn’t believe in chi and its cultivation per se, it was simply the case that my teacher rightly believed that we have no place teaching things we cannot demonstrate and put to the test. As a result, my knowledge on the subject is simply theoretical, and I have no formal teaching in it myself.

Taoism is one of the oldest surviving philosophies in the world, best known through the great work the Tao te Ching attributed to Lao-tzu. At the core is the concept of The Way (the do in Japanese martial arts such as akido, iaido, judo and kendo) and how we can all find our own harmony with The Way. Practitioners of taoism are known as taoists. As a way of living, it has a lot to offer us Westerners, and it is said to be the underlying philosophy that Tai Chi is based on. (More on that in a later article!)

Man everywhere is obsessed with his own immortality, and taoists it turns out are not immune to this desire :) The difference I guess is that some taoists believe that real immortality is not only possible, has actually been achieved in the past (by such as Cheng San-feng, the legendary creator of Tai Chi). Just as western alchemists attempted to turn base metals such as lead into pure gold, so taoist internal alchemy is concerned with practices to turn the base energy into a refined spirit.

One of the practices of taoist internal alchemy is to turn ching (generative energy) into chi (vital energy), and then to turn the chi into shen (spiritual energy). The area we call tan tien in our class is actually the lowest placed of three separate tan tiens (the second is at the solar plexus, and the third between the eyebrows). The lower tan tien is used to refine ching (generative energy) into chi (vital energy); very appropriate from a western point of view given its location at our centre of gravity, at the place in Tai Chi where all our movement is controlled from.

This is a gross and decidedly ill-informed over-simplification of the subject, I must stress! Anyone interested in learning more should seek out a qualified instructor on the matter, or failing that start with reading Eva Wong’s translation of Cultivating Stillness.

I freely admit that I’m not all that comfortable talking about my own experiences with the mystical side of Tai Chi. Part of it comes from my teacher’s own understandable feelings on the subject, and part of it comes from my own training as a scientist and qualification as an engineer. There’s also the important matter that, if we tell our students what feelings to expect, the mind has a funny way of manifesting those feelings whether or not the work has been done to make them real! And, as if that wasn’t enough, I’m sure that there are some in our community who exploit students’ interest in and (dare I say) desire for such experiences. I do not want to become one of them, even unwittingly.

But what it comes down to is this. At the end of the day, how can you share your experiences with someone else? You can’t, not without a common frame of reference (a teaching tool I need to write a lot more about!) As teachers, it must be our role to direct our students through a programme of learning that will result in our students having these experiences for themselves. How to achieve that is perhaps the ultimate question of teaching, and it was the last question my teacher and I discussed before he left us.

And, as I experienced on Tuesday night watching my Improvers’ students explore the principle of Relax the Waist, on those rare occasions when we pull it off, there are few pleasures in life more satisfying :)

In last week’s Beginners’ class, we enjoyed a great discussion about the books I recommend on this website, and which books are of any use to someone just starting learning the art.

My own experience with books over the years is three-fold:

1. As a beginner, I simply had no common frame of reference to understand the great advice available in the great Tai Chi books. Looking back in recent years, I can now see that many of the answers I’ve sought were there under my nose the entire time, but I simply didn’t understand enough to see that.
2. There are a great many Tai Chi books that (imho) are utter rubbish. I don’t mean that they are written badly, but that the advice they contain is demonstrably wrong. Much to my wife’s disgust, I collect these almost as avidly as I do the better books, and my students can look forward to the day when I share these books with them, and ask them to pick out the many flaws they contain :D
3. The books that could be called authentic are a great source of advice. I was taught to take nothing on faith, to always seek out and verify everything I was taught by Robert. New information can promote a path of experience to new understanding, and in the light of new information things must change.

You can’t learn from a book. Knowledge comes from a book, but understanding only comes from experience. Books can’t replace a good teacher, but they can certainly validate good teaching. And they can expose bad teaching too.