HEALING AND MARTIAL ARTS BLOG

I am putting together a dvd series on How to Teach Tai-chi. It will focus on the basic principles of Tai-chi form practice and how to convey those principles to the students. While someone may be skilled at a Tai-chi form, they may not be aware of the issues of teaching. I think this series will be helpful and may inspire people to dedicate themselves to teaching Tai-chi.

I like to say, “I’ve been around the block a few times”, meaning that at 64 years old and teaching for almost 40 years, I have become familiar with how to express Tai-chi to students in a way they can grasp and to appreciate their difficulties in learning.

First of all, each student comes to the class with his or her load of tensions, misalignments, emotional fears and mental programming. Tai-chi has to be taught to each individual differently, considering what they come in with. The teacher must develop methods to become aware of the state of the student in order to fashion a teaching approach for that student.

When you are teaching a group class and are correcting postures, for example, you have to remember what approach you are taking with each student as you move from one to the other. It is like playing multiple games of chess. You can’t make too many corrections at one time because the student will become frustrated and won’t remember what you did anyway. So you have to stick with a theme of correction (e.g. “relax the hips”) throughout the class, for that student.

You realize that the real benefit of Tai-chi training is not memorizing a form or chi-gung set, but that the student has worked through all of his or her issues, whether physical, mental or emotional and come out as a truly free and powerful individual. That is what the teacher should be going for, not just to teach people to memorize yet another thing.

The teacher must know how each principle of Tai-chi achieves that. While all the students will arrive at that same free, powerful state, they are each taking different paths through Tai-chi training. If you force them to take only the path you yourself learned, then they will never really learn.

And so you not only have to learn chi-gung, forms, push hands, fighting etc. to be a teacher; you also have to learn how to teach. You have to leave the limited path of your own journey to see the whole landscape and appreciate the many ways students can travel through it. In doing this, you gain a greater insight into the magnitude of the training itself and of the genius of the thousands of teachers who contributed to it.

I am a bit fearful of embarking on this project, which would include videos and writing, because I don’t really have the time for it. But I think it could make a positive contribution and will be worth pursuing even if I accomplish only a little of it.

In my book, “Movements of Power”, I introduced this subject in the last third of the book. I will also be putting up some videos about how to teach a Tai-chi form on our youtube channel “zookinesis49”. I would appreciate your comments about whether you think this will be a worthwhile project.