Real Tai Chi: not a special choreography

This article was first published in ‘Tai Chi and Oriental Arts Magazine’ about 12 years ago and has been republished in various places over the years.

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A fun example

If you attended an evening course to learn conversational French, you probably wouldn’t be pleased if the tutor simply taught you how to speak English with a French accent. While it may have a certain ‘Je nais se quoi’, if you went to France to use your pseudo-language skills, it is doubtful that you would get very far – and you might upset few French people en route. For instead of having learned a new language, it would just be a case of même merde seau different*. Unfortunately, this is the way that the majority of Tai Chi (Taiji/Taijiquan) is taught today…and don’t even get me started on Yoga or Meditation.

In this article I will discuss how opening the body and developing basic body awareness/body skill should be the first and ongoing step in Tai Chi training, otherwise the vast majority of the superb physio-cognitive skills and benefits on offer can never be actualised.

*same shit different bucket

Popularity

It is a common phenomenon that once something becomes popularised it tends to lose much of its original process, purpose, value and meaning. Training methods from the East such as Tai Chi, Qigong, Yoga and Meditation have been extremely diluted, corrupted and intellectualised over time to be marketable and easy/convenient for the fragile palette of the inactive modern human. In terms of training, anything that’s quick, easy and convenient to learn doesn’t produce quality goods. Without the essential discomfort of change the real and sublime fruits of these transformational internal arts cannot be harvested. Such physio-pyschological discomfort is a natural part of the process and integral to the reconfiguration of the most visceral aspects of ourselves.

Emphasis on learning forms is a modern phenomenon; it has nothing to do with real Tai Chi – but is very marketable.

In most Tai Chi classes a long time is spent trying to remember the choreography of set sequences of slow movements. Very little or no attention is paid to body development; students simply follow along with a teacher, perhaps with some obscure philosophy and dubious breathing exercises thrown in.  

No matter how popular this approach is, or how long people do it for, it has nothing at all to do with real Tai Chi. Furthermore, it only produces a minimal amount of benefit for those doing it when compared to authentic training. Proper training, however, is challenging and deeply satisfying; it gradually transforms the raw materials of one’s body and mind and forms the gateway to all subsequent training. Without going through such a process a person is physically and psychologically incapable of training Tai Chi, and enjoying its many benefits, at the most basic level.

Many of those who practised for years thought they had covered such a basic thing as body development – the reality is that they hadn’t even begun.

I’ve lost count of the number of people who have come to me for training over the years who say they have practised Tai Chi for decades but do not have even a basic level of body awareness or body skill. Many of those people genuinely thought that they had already covered such a basic thing as body skill/development – but the reality is that they hadn’t even begun. If someone exhibits stiff hips and spine, poorly organised skeleton, restricted fascia, flaccid/weak/tense musculature and a scattered/spaced-out/aggressive mindset they are yet to start actual training.

Unconscious incompetence: The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not recognise the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage 

Modern Culture

In our sedentary contemporary age of mis-information and instant gratification many people are extremely lacking in body awareness and body skill and have poor habitual movement and cognitive patterns without even realising or conceding that such attributes have much value. Ironically, this is often especially the case with people who exercise a lot and those, often well-being professionals, who harbour lots of intellectual information about the human mind and body and confuse this standpoint with having actual body-skill and a skilful mind.

Similarly, there is a strong tendency in modern culture that people completely destroy their body and mind by trying to achieve extreme superficial goals regardless of the process, or on the other hand, are completely averse to experiencing even the slightest physical or psychological discomfort. Neither of these are extremes are useful.

What you think you know, you fail to observe.

Body awareness and body skill are two of life’s essentials, without them we are compromised as in every conceivable way – like it or not, our lives are lived and experienced through this body. For those interested in Tai Chi or any other mind-body arts, it’s impossible to progress without continually developing these aspects. Trying to remember choreographed movements and theory, instead of improving the nuts and bolts of human body/mind-mechanics, simply compounds the physical and mental issues that people have in the first place rather than resolving them. 

‘The more details you give people, the more they ask for details.’ Nassim Taleb

For people taking their first steps into Tai Chi the last thing they need to do is to learn a form. Learning a form offers very little benefit; people simply retain their old, habitual ways of moving and thinking. This is especially true if their bodies are in poor condition; which in my experience, is most people. Since many people come to Tai Chi because it is incorrectly portrayed as an easy or gentle option, this a particularly salient point. 

Martial Arts

Tai Chi is a martial art with a difference. Instead of immediately learning fighting techniques the first step is the development of the raw materials of body and mind. I’ve met and taught many seasoned martial artists over the years who have severely damaged their bodies via their training. If your martial art or chosen sport destroys your body over time then it seems sensible to question both the training method and the motivation. Opening and building a balanced body, developing basic body mechanics, becoming at ease with one’s physical existence and possessing the golden freedom of an open and calm mind are vital attributes for life and the basic skills we seek to nurture in internal arts. These attributes form the basis for subsequent martial development in a sustainable and life affirming way.

Ultimately this means that real Tai Chi training is much more physically and mentally rigorous than most people might expect. Creating an open, stable and connected body requires a lot of physical work; and you must learn to calm your mind, to pay attention completely, in order to succeed. The students who don’t just give up when they realise that proper training is a challenge go on to achieve something rather special; it changes who and what they are.

As a teacher, I want my students to instigate and experience a complete change in the way their bodies and minds operate and not to spend years concerned with remembering sequences of movements or puzzling over esoteric or anatomical theory – that’s just more mind stuff derived from a culture already drowning in mind stuff. As most people are not used to proper training in this way the most significant benefits are gained from fully establishing the basics, of which there are many tasty and nutritional variations.

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Opening the body 

All of our classes begin with exercises to open the body – they are not mere warm-ups, they are the most important part of the work. Simple and distinctly challenging, these exercises all follow a theme of stretching and opening the fascia (connective issue) of the body along the main fascial lines and into all the neglected nooks, crannies and crevices. Not only does this build a body that is fully felt and alive – open, elastic, powerful and perceptive – but also teaches one to experience directly how they weave together to form the three-dimensional body in a tangible way. Some of the exercises are strenuous; not only do they create a strong stretch but also continuously emphasise developing sufficient stability to facilitate balanced movement that emanates throughout the body.

I have taught a wide variety of teachers from other training modalities, such as Yoga, Dance and Martial Arts who have pulled their body apart through incorrect stretching so that it operates as a floppy, disparate mess, or conversely, like a tightly wound guitar string – injury and neurosis follow these causal factors. Often when people stretch it’s a waste of time; pulling tight parts of the body tighter in a bid to make them looser is questionable. Similarly, forcing the body to be so flexible that it can contort into all kinds of dysfunctional shapes and movements usually causes major problems along the way. This isn’t what we want to do – instead we have specific methods for stretching and opening the body in a balanced way that optimises release, space and elastic/fluid potential in the body.

Opening the body emphasises a number of key elements that are essential for people who want to develop their body skill:

• Releasing the hips and spine: flexion, extension, lateral motion and rotation are deeply explored and liberated. These are areas which are usually very restricted and completely unfelt in most people and are vital for successful existence as a human 24/7.
• Balance and leg strength. Squatting motions (assisted or freestyle) and balancing on one leg help to build stability whilst facilitating functional hip mobility. As unstable bi-peds, cultivating stability and balance while moving is one the most important skills we can develop. Bi-peds are still quite a new phenomenon in evolutionary terms – one study I read suggested around 80% of brain activity is concerned with simply keeping us balanced. 
• Releasing and connecting the arms to the back and liberating the shoulders. Our arms are not independently ‘strong’ levers that are separate from the body, their function and dexterity depends on how well they are connected to and stabilised by the back so that feeling, movement and power generated by the legs and body can flow through them.
• Development of a clear felt sense of how all body parts are woven together, from the toes to the fingertips, through the elastic facial web.

Standing training:

Standing training is the next step after the elasticating endeavours above. Standing is simple and superb: practised correctly it deeply releases and stabilises the body, helps stabilise the mind and develops a clear sense of the tensegrity and interconnectedness of the human body structure, amongst many other things. Tensegrity structures, like a well trained human body, distribute forces and movement throughout the entire system via the balanced, elastic fascial web rather than being dealt with locally as they are in lever systems. Tensegrity reverses the centuries-old concept that the skeleton is a frame upon which soft-tissue is draped and replaces it with an integrated fascial fabric with floating compression elements enmeshed within the interstices of tensional elements. A body that exhibits tensegrity in an optimal way is tensionally balanced in all directions under the reliable and constant pressure of gravity:

“Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guaranteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviours of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviours. Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder”

 R. Buckminster Fuller

Standing practise (of which there are many variations) is the epitome of reorganising the perceived separate parts of the body back into a homogeneous pliable, functional and sustainable whole. What separates the body is habitual tension and restricted tissues underpinned by a lack of awareness in the corresponding parts. Usually we are not aware of the restrictive patterns that have become enmeshed in our structural fabric over the course of our lives. Everybody has them but they are essentially unfelt. Standing then, is to help us feel, locate and release restrictions in the body and return to a settled balanced state so that the body becomes an integrated and cohesive structure of function; a malleable mass free to be directed by our will.

Proper standing training is physically tough – the key to quality practise is to observe, feel and release the body at progressively deeper levels. Open hearted observation through the lens of stillness allows one to discover and augment the inherent qualities our bodies possess but usually miss because of our perpetual mental busyness. It is mainly due to our distinct lack of body awareness/skill and an incorrect, intellectual understanding of the human form that we do not experience the body as a homogeneous, harmonious whole and thus capitalise on these attributes.

A very important point is that tactile cues and posture corrections are essential for students to learn how to stand properly. One’s habitual posture is usually so engrained that without regular feedback from a teacher’s hands-on body adjustments it is very difficult to perceive. If your teacher doesn’t give you tactile cues then you should immediately find one that does. Standing facilitates a number of key developments:

• Due to the absence of deliberate movement it allows one to gradually perceive, build and use the body as an interconnected unit rather than as coordinated disparate bits.
• Releases and stabilises the body and mind at the most fundamental level.
• Provides an opportunity to learn how to build basic mind skill. 

Learning to practise meditation is one of the most useful life skills that anyone can invest their time in. However, many people are physically incapable of sitting in meditation properly so as an excellent alternative and precursor to seated practise we can practise and develop and learn about our physicality as we do so.

Simple movements

“The general consensus has been to think of only one or two muscles participating in any given movement but no matter how common this misconception may be the reality is that any movement is essentially a whole-body movement. For movement is not simply the mere coordinated bending of separate hinges but instead expansion, repositioning and contraction of the tensegrity of the body as a whole via the fascial web” Steven Levin

Simple movements build upon all the preceding basic exercises and offers us the chance to discover and learn how good movement flows smoothly through the whole body (amongst many other skills) Simple doesn’t mean easy, but training simple whole-body movements gives one a chance to get into the nitty gritty of what one is doing and most importantly how one is doing it. Practising in this way offers a chance to discover and iron-out the almost incessant deviations in one’s basic movement patterns using all the preceding work as a tool for accurate cross referencing.

Conclusion

When people develop real body skill they become calmer, physically capable, confident and independent. From here they can use their new skills to train Tai Chi or IMA properly without being a slave to dogma, weird beliefs or irrelevant intellectual details. Forms training should be initiated only once a certain base level of body skill is achieved – that level is much higher than most people think. Building such skill is hard work but extremely rewarding. Hard work tends to put people off – most Tai Chi teachers prefer to teach sloppy, floaty forms, or pretend martial arts routines otherwise they wouldn’t make any money from their classes. Either that or they don’t know any better having always been a ‘follow along’ student themselves.

I first came across the term ‘Heuristic’ in Nassim Taleb’s book ‘Antifragile: things that gain from disorder’. It comes from ancient Greek meaning to find or discover for oneself. In Tai Chi we have the general principles, or rules of thumb, and it is through dedicated and open-minded tinkering in the laboratory of real training that one can discover and realise them. 

Heuristic: Serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation. Encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems on his or her own by experimenting and evaluating possible answers or solutions or by trial and error.

I teach my students to learn from their own body in real time rather than thinking about things. As soon as people start thinking they get into trouble, get confused and forgo their real-time experience in the here and now. Unfortunately, this is the default setting for most people. Many people’s felt bodily and sensory experience is very limited – because of this the mind takes over to fill in the gaps. Similarly, we live in a culture dominated by mind-stuff. That’s one of the reasons why people crave details, special techniques, in-depth theory and spiritual mystery rather than relying on their own down to earth practise and bodily experience. Since we are so used to being endlessly spoon fed information from external sources it can be quite a big step to let go and become more independent – but it is in this direction that true freedom, happiness and skill lies.

For Sam’s local teaching schedule see: Sussex Tai Chi

For Antonia’s schedule see: Antonia Stringer

 ©The Internal Athlete 2023