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WHY IS TAI-CHI SPIRITUAL?

June 13th, 20111 comment »

Tai-chi is considered to be a “spiritual” practice and many people wonder how a physical exercise can be called spiritual.  While most people begin their Tai-chi practice to improve their health and to reduce stress, they soon learn that there is much more to this ancient exercise.  As a child, you may have opened the back of a watch (when they were made with gears and mainsprings) and were amazed at what you saw.  You gradually came to understand how the watch worked and may have even embarked on a career as a mechanic or engineer.

When you understand the mechanisms that control how you behave as a person you can be more creative with yourself and improve those mechanisms.  We gain our basic skills in working with the body until every joint and muscle becomes relaxed, alive and conscious.  You feel alive like you never felt alive before. 

When you practice a Tai-chi form, you feel that each part of the body has a will of its own and wants to do the form.  As in a music band, one member may play part of the song a little differently and the other band members, hearing this change, go along with it and support it.  In the same way, part of your body may want to move differently and the other parts are consciously aware of this and support that creative change.

The result is a consciousness or feeling of self, which is evenly distributed throughout the body and not just located in the head. In some disciplines you are taught to eliminate the ego or feeling of self.  In the Tai-chi approach you just share this feeling of self with every cell, organ, muscle and bone in the body.  You become a cooperative community of living individuals who all feel they are part of the same “tribe” (which is you as a whole person).

How would this world be if all people felt they were part of the same tribe?  In Taoist theory, how all the parts of yourself relate to each other determines how you as a whole, relate to other people.  If a whole culture is taught to believe that we live in our heads and in our thoughts and our bodies are just a dumb machine, then that affects how that culture relates to other cultures.  If the head just orders the rest of the body around and doesn’t care how the body feels, that affects your relationships with other people.

When we practice the Push Hands exercise (described in detail in several other articles below), we quickly learn that if we forcefully try to push the other person over, this locks us up and actually allows the other person to push us more easily. 

If you use force, you have the attitude of force in your mind and your opponent can use that attitude to defeat you.  In a similar way, if you are the type of person who is always trying to get away with something, to take more than you give, then you are actually more susceptible to get scammed.  The internet spam emails only work if you think you are getting something for nothing.

That is why, in our practice, we always try to have even exchanges with people, to not cheat them and to not be cheated by them.  In Push Hands, where the other person comes in to push, we yield.  But we move into the part of their body which is inactive.  The balance of yin and yang is maintained but the result is that we always feel empty to the other person and we can always move into them to push.

The other person learns that if he is tense and has an aggressive attitude, then his body is really dead.  It is dead to awareness.  It is locked.  The attitude of balance always leads to maximum awareness.  The attitude of maximum aggressiveness leads to a deadening of awareness.

In this way we learn about the mechanisms behind our behavior.  We learn about balance of aggression and passivity.  We learn what deadens our consciousness and what enhances it.  We learn that the relationships with other people or with how we deal with situations, mirror the relationships among the different parts of ourselves.  If our minds are aggressive towards our bodies, we will probably be aggressive to other people.

If we think of our bodies as lowly, we will probably think of other people as less worthy than ourselves. 

Spirituality is about relationships.  It is the recognition that all life is connected and you are not more part of life than another person, another animal or plant.  Tai-chi allows you to feel that.  It speaks of the experience of “chi” (internal energy or biological energy) that connects all life. 

Some of the practices of chi cultivation require that you move your chi around in various ways, which are supposedly better than the way it is moving now.  My teachers taught me that the secret of chi cultivation is quite different and it is an important lesson in spirituality.

The body, they say, knows how to move chi.  All you can do is to interfere with chi.  By making you practice moving chi along certain pathways, you remain within an aggressive frame of reference with regards to the body.  You are whipping it into shape.

My teachers taught very differently.  Through the Zookinesis and Tai-chi exercises they taught me how my frame of reference interfered with accomplishing the task.  If I tensed up to push them I was just locking myself up and becoming ineffective.  Yet to me, pushing meant tensing the body as much as you can.  They taught me to send a pulse of energy through the body from the feet up, like a whip which remains loose as it strikes.  That required a completely different frame of reference. 

The typical student who learns this method will start with a pulse at the feet and then when the thought comes into his mind, “Push Now!” he tenses up, blocking the pulse and deadening his body.  Instead he has to release the pulse into the other person, not push his tension into the other person.  He should really say “Release Now!” and relax. 

This is the same approach in learning a Tai-chi form.  It takes a long time to really learn the movements but at some point you must release the form to the body and let the body do the form.  Your usual sense of self just sits back and watches.  You don’t eliminate the sense of self.  That sense of self becomes the audience that can appreciate the creativity of the body.

Gradually the body, mind, emotions and all other parts of yourself become equal partners in your life.  There are no bullies within you.  Then chi flows naturally all by itself and “you” sit back in wonder.  You understand your connection to the rest of life.  You understand how all the parts of your body communicate with each other so that your actions in life become effortless and effective.

When you encounter a situation your first thought is of balance – active balance.  All parts of you are alert but relaxed.  You see the situation and the people in that situation clearly.  Just as you can now see inside yourself you can see inside them.  You understand something of their internal relationship which is reflected externally and you know how to use the principles of Tai-chi to your advantage, without taking advantage of them. 

While Tai-chi is not a religion, there is a morality – the morality of balance.  There is an empathy of understanding for the torture many people live with because you yourself extricated yourself from that internal torture.  In this way, you see that there is a spiritual path in life. 

It is not the path of maximum power of one part of you over another or of one person over another.  It is not about thinking this as opposed to that.  It is the path of discovering, understanding and then releasing useless behaviors and allowing the body, mind and emotions to function naturally and in harmony with each other and with the community of life.

The key is to let go.  If your attention is now mainly caught up in your thoughts and emotions, let your attention move into the body as water moves into a dry paper towel.  If you feel your attention ready to combat another person, first let it flow into that person and learn how that feels.  You may think that if you connect with another person in this way you are being too “new agey”.  People say, “We must be tough to live in this world.”

Remember that Tai-chi is also a martial art.  The full name is Tai-chi-Chuan (The Grand Ultimate Martial Art).  One of the most important parts of the skills of Tai-chi fighting is for your attention to remain connected to the “opponent” and to flow with him.  Flow away from his strikes and into his open areas.  If your attention disconnects from his body you are in trouble.

When your chi and your attention are connected to the situations and people around you and you remain relaxed, you are in a powerful position.  You know how to respond at each moment.  Spiritual doesn’t mean weak.

Chi is the biological communications system of all life.  When you become aware of that system you have acquired a new sense.  You can understand the mechanisms behind your behavior and the behavior of others.  At that point it is easy to let go of useless behavior patterns because you just get bored by them. 

The spiritual path of Tai-chi eliminates self destructive and ineffective behaviors as light eliminates darkness.  You don’t beat yourself up about your problems or force yourself to change.  You just see how silly the ineffective behaviors are and you can laugh at them.  There is a lot of laughter along this path.

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THE USE OF MINIMUM FORCE

June 11th, 2011No comments »
This principle applies to everyday life as well as practicing forms, push hands and self defense. It is the main factor eliminating excess tension and keeping the mind and emotions calm while still being active. In Zookinesis training, this principle is called, “Start at the End”.
When you begin an activity, you would normally  judge how much effort and time it will take, and you gear yourself up for the task. If you were to push against a heavy object for example, you might tense up your arms and body to prepare for the resistance of that object and then begin to push it.
The principle of minimum force works mechanically as follows: You approach the object, or the task at hand with relaxation. As you feel the resistance of the object or of life’s tribulations, you firm up your energy only as much as is needed at each particular second. You do not tense yourself up in preparation for what your mind anticipates. The reason this is called, “Start at the end” is that at the beginning, we usually tense up and at the end, when the task is completed, we relax. If we start the task by relaxing, we are approaching the task in the same state as when it is finished and when we can take a break.
Push Hands is a great exercise for developing this ability. The tendency is to tense up when you are about to push and this lets the partner know what you are about to do. This is called, “telegraphing”. You are expressing your intentions before you even begin the task. If you push by placing your hand very gently on the partner and then gradually increasing the pressure, it is much harder for him to deflect your pressure. You can much more easily “stick” with him and re-orient your angle of push so that your force continues to aim at his center. If you tense first, you lose your sensitivity and cannot adjust to his deflections and neutralizations.
In every day life, if we worry about the upcoming task, we wear ourselves out by anticipating every possible outcome. This means that we don’t trust in our ability to deal with the situation. We don’t trust in our power. Trusting in our power is necessary for relaxation in life. Even if you feel you don’t have much power, trusting in yourself is required to act. Otherwise, you will equivocate and create a situation in which you rob yourself of power.
But you may say, “Why act if I know I don’t have much power?” The key is your understanding of the word, “power”. Power, in the sense of Tai-chi or Zookinesis, is not raw muscular strength or behavioral aggression. Power is attention. It is the ability to pay attention to the fine details of what is going on and the changes taking place second by second. When you have the power of attention, you can adjust second by second to place yourself in the most powerful position at each second. Then you don’t need to be overtly aggressive physically or behaviorally. You act lightly but efficiently.
In Phantom Kung-fu for example, we don’t waste our time blocking the partner. That also wastes energy and can bruise our arms. We may also fail in blocking and get hit. We just quickly move away from the incoming strike and strike an unprotected area. In this way we don’t waste our energy combatting the partner.
In life we can analyze our reaction to situations and ask ourselves, “How much energy do we spend combatting (even if only in our minds) and how much do we spend actually doing something useful?” Once we see this in various situations, we can use different tactics to be more effective.
As an example, instead of creating conflicting stories in our minds and rehearsing our battles, we can pay attention to what is going on right now. This brings us back to reality and also gives us practice paying attention to what is right in front of us. If you fill your mind with combat then a lot of your lifetime will be spent in combat.
How much time do you spend in these negative mental stories and how much time do you spend practicing exercises that make you more healthy and aware? Can you transfer a couple hours of the mental combat to going to class? Minimum force means that you trust your awareness more than your tension. You trust your relaxation more than your combative attitude. Your life then becomes easier and more enjoyable.
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STOP FIGHTING YOURSELF

June 9th, 2011No comments »
My students say that the most important effect of Tai-chi and Zookinesis training for them is that it helps them to understand other peoples’ behavior. They can understand the turmoil going inside other people and can see their outward behavior in context. They understand that if someone is aggressive towards them, this behavior probably has very little to do with the students but is just an outward manifestation of the other person’s inner problems.
If they then react to that person as if that person were actually not aggressive, the student can calm down the situation. Most people are so unaware of their own behavior that they judge their own behavior by other peoples’ reactions to them. If you act as if they were not aggressive, they may come to believe they are not being aggressive and will calm down.
The student has the confidence to calmly face the aggressive person because they see the situation clearly and, through Push Hands and self defense training, they know they can protect themselves if the other person does become physically aggressive in spite of the student’s efforts.
In order to develop the ability to “see through” other people into their inner workings, you must first see into your own inner workings. You begin by discovering every instance in daily life where you use too much physical tension to accomplish a task. I advised one of my students last week to notice how he holds a pen. How much physical tension is actually needed to write? He discovered that he tensed up his hand and his whole arm as he wrote, using a tremendous amount of energy. By keeping his arm relaxed he was able to stop fighting against himself as he wrote.
Many students realize that they hunch their shoulders during the day. They get better and better at catching themselves doing it. Then they simply stop hunching. There are many behaviors we do during the day that don’t make sense. Once you discover the many ways you are fighting against yourself by using excess tension, you can see that same process in others.
There is another benefit to discovering these unneeded behaviors inside yourself. As you peel off these behaviors you notice that some of the behaviors deal with purposefully ignoring experiences of life. You purposefully tune out these experiences. One of the reasons we all do this is because our culture does not recognize some experiences. One of these is the sense of chi (internal energy) and the dynamics of attention itself.
As students of Zookinesis and Tai-chi, we need to develop a great awareness of these experiences. In many Tai-chi schools, you are told that the experience of chi is like a tingling in the fingers. Actually that feeling in a beginning student is the blood moving through the fingers as you move them. When the momentum moves through the body, it stimulates blood to flow.  And indeed, the word chi is sometimes used as a substitute for the word blood.  
The clue to really experiencing chi is that it is easiest to experience as it moves out from the body and connects with the chi of the environment (like tentacles moving out and feeling things). It is the release of energy from the body that is the students first true experience of chi. In order to achieve this release, you must stop fighting yourself. If you are filled with internal tensions and battles, the chi is locked by these battles.
As you end your battles, the chi naturally wants to flow out and connect with the environment. You can then exerience your environment by more than looking and listening. You can vividly feel everything around you. This is not done through purposeful exertion but by letting go of the unneeded internal battles. This process of simplifying your internal behavior allows you to perceive realms of experience you may not even know existed. The result is that the world is greater and makes a lot more sense.
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