SECRET MESSAGES IN THE TAI-CHI FORM
The movements of Tai-chi encode lessons of how to bring power back into the body. Each principle of movement is like the chapter of a book, explaining how to keep the body young and the mind creative. A teacher must explain how to read this movement book so the student can discover its secrets. The most striking feature of Tai-chi forms is the smoothness of movement – an unbroken, even current, ebbing and flowing.
In order to achieve this movement, the mind must also flow smoothly, rather than jump from one point to another. In this way mind, rather than being at one point at one time, must expand, filling up the whole space within and surrounding the body.
As you breathe out, you sink into the ground, and as you breathe in you rise up. Each joint relaxes as you sink. Each joint expands as you rise in a sequence. There is a corresponding effect on the mind (attention). Your attention flows downward as you breathe out, following the momentum as it sinks into the earth. Your attention expands upwards as you breathe in, following the momentum as it flows upward and outward.
Let’s just take these dynamics of movement and attention and understand what information is being conveyed that may help us to improve our lives. Too often our attention gets caught up in the specifics of what we are doing and we forget our overall goals in life. Our attention becomes like a pinpoint – one dimensional. We need to be aware of the totality of our lives – what we have been trying to achieve, what skills we have gained, lessons learned and how we can continue to be creative with our lives. Otherwise our minds will be in a bus someone else is driving.
If our bodies are smoothly flowing and cannot be jerked about by our own patterns of thoughts and tension, then surely our attention cannot be jerked around by the forces around us. When the news tells us that what is going on is that one group is fighting another, the news is creating an agenda in our lives. It tells us what we should be paying attention to. The news is driving our bus.
The Tai-chi student learns that the conflicts we see or read about in the world around us, superimpose themselves inside of us, so that our minds are filled with conflict. The mind and body seem to be in conflict as the mind tries to make the body do what it wants (and usually fails). Our relationships and everyday lives seem to consist of one conflict after another.
At a certain point in our training it becomes obvious that we have adopted the mode of conflict we see around us into the very essence of who we are. But what would it be like if conflict was not the basis of every level of our lives? It would be like the Tai-chi form. This form is a movement code for a harmonious mind and body, a harmonious human being living a natural way of life. Indeed if the form were done with conflict, with tension, with jerkiness, it would not really be Tai-chi.
So the smoothness of the form tells us to look at nature for flowing harmony and let nature control your bus. Just as our attention flows into the earth and sky with our breath, you can also control whether your attention moves to conflict or to harmony. In this way you learn to drive your own bus. You learn to become the harmony that others can learn from.
By expanding your attention so that it fills your whole body and surroundings, you learn that your surroundings are really part of you. Your sense of identity moves from a set of opinions and a pattern of emotions to a whole living body and vibrant, creative awareness. From there, it expands to your natural environment, your community and to all life. At that point, conflict is hardly possible.
You had to be convinced that you are completely separate from nature and from other people in order to be trained into a life of conflict. When you cast that illusion aside your life regains its natural power. Even your past and present seem to unite as you remember how the dreams and hopes of childhood gave you enthusiasm for life. That enthusiasm still lives inside and can return home. When you forget your dreams, you lose your power. They tug at you when you sleep, fighting their way up through the layers of conflict that have pressed them down.
When conflict no longer tears you apart, when your dreams of power become part of your life, then you physically experience your connection to the biological aliveness and consciousness of the world you live in. The shell that seemed to contain you dissolves and permeates into the world around you. You have come home to that world, you are well known in that world, and you are loved by that world.
