HEALING AND MARTIAL ARTS BLOG

Bob Klein

These training tips for Tai-chi practice are the result of over 45 years of training and teaching. My students at the Long Island School of Tai-chi-Chuan in Sound Beach, N. Y. have told me these are the tips that are the most useful.

1. The first thing you are taught is to relax. Relaxation though, is not as easy as it sounds. After many years of being tense most people have not only forgotten how to relax, they have forgotten that they are tense. The key is to understand that to relax any part of the body, there needs to be “space” under that part of the body to sink into. If your chest and ribs are tense and you try to relax your shoulders, the shoulders have no place to sink into. First relax the muscles of the feet so they sink into the earth like wet clay. Then relax the knees, hips, ribs, etc. Allow each part of the body to sink like sand sinks into a hole you dig in the beach. The sand sinks into the hole from the bottom up.

2. When you shift weight from one foot into another, don’t push yourself into the front with your back foot. Allow the weight to sink into the front foot as though sand was sinking into the front foot from the back foot. This releases the back leg, making it “empty”.

3. When you step, don’t use the muscles of the stepping leg. Use your sinking and turning to move out the stepping leg. You can slightly straighten out the stepping foot to make the heel land first. Keeping the stepping leg off the ground is done by relaxing the rear of the pelvis so that it tilts slightly forward, slightly raising the stepping leg.

4. Keep the eyes gazing forward or at a slightly raised angle. Never look down. Imagine you are a waterfall and the water comes towards you, flowing down your eyes into your belly and then your root. You are receiving energy and NOT grabbing with the eyes.

5. Each movement starts from your center and NOT from the top of the body, head, arms or legs. Make sure that at the beginning of each movement, the middle moves first as if someone were pulling your belt. Then each joint of the body follows in sequence.

6. “Whole body movement” does not mean you keep all your joints locked. Even if you move your whole, stiff body smoothly, this is still not Tai-chi. Each joint should move, in sequence, from the bottom up and each should relax in sequence from the bottom up. Watch the way animals move. We have joints for a reason.

7. When you breathe in, your diaphragm pulls downward. So the initiation of an in-breath feels like breathing down into the ground. The bottom of the belly (below the navel) expands downwards. When the maximum downward breathing pressure is reached, then the breath expands forward and the upper belly expands (above the navel). Finally the breath then fills the upper lungs. So breathing in also begins at the bottom (at the root). When you breathe out, you relax the bottom of the lungs first, then middle and upper lungs.

8. The arms, legs and head move as a result of the breathing and the sequential expansion and relaxation of the joints. They don’t move by their own muscular power. But of course, you have to hold the arms and legs in particular positions according to your postures. You use the minimum energy possible to hold the arms in their positions, just enough so that if you used just a little less, the arms would fall down.

9. If your front expands, the back relaxes. If the right expands, the left relaxes. If the bottom energizes downwards, the top floats upwards. Each part of the body counter-balances its other side. This gives rise to the expression “power is a directed relaxation”. This means that relaxing releases power, but that power does not just dissipate. The breath directs the power. If you breathe downward and forward, for example, the power roots and from that root, moves forward. If you breathe into the right side of your lungs, the energy moves right. But if you first breath into the upper part of the lungs, the energy pulls you up out of your root.

10. Imagine you are sitting on a diner stool with wheels. You can move forward and back, left and right, but you are still sitting on the stool. To stand up you press your foot down, energizing your Achilles tendon and quadriceps, relax your back and breathe in. Try sitting down and standing up in a chair and keep your chest and back straight. Don’t bend forward. This requires that you stand up from the bottom up and you don’t pull yourself up from the top.

I will provide more if these tips in the future if you are interested. Hundreds of such ideas are in the dvd series “How to Learn and Teach Tai-chi” available at:

http://store.movementsofmagic.com/belevi.html

1. The tan-tien should feel as if it is a marble moving within the pelvic bowl. The Tan-tien is a spot about one and a half inches below the navel in the center of the body. Once it pops up above the pelvic bowl, you are disconnected from your root. If it moves beyond the pelvic bowl you are off balance.

2. As you move, each part of the body rotates, sending a wave upward and outward. The next movement begins from the ground, not from the spot the wave moved into. In this way each change of movement creates a new wave. When the wave reaches its furthermost point, let it go. Don’t let the wave pull your body out of its root.

3. The center of the body (hips, abdominal area and low back) is like a ball that can rotate in many planes of movement. In the form, these planes are changing from one movement to the next. The form takes place in this central “ball” with the movements of the arms, legs and head a result of the ball’s movement. Each action of the ball is like a pebble, dropping into a still lake that sends out ripples into the surrounding water.

4. Some Tai-chi teachers tell you to let your eyes follow your hands. This is just an exercise to allow your head to move along with the momentum of the body. You don’t really watch your hands in your form. If your neck is stiff and your head doesn’t flow, then your form will be stiff.

5. One problem students may have is that they may only use the horizontal plane of movement or only the vertical. Each movement of each joint should have a balance of vertical and horizontal movement.

6. Turn by using the hip. Don’t turn from the shoulders. The hip goes first and the rest of the joints follow in turn. Turning from the shoulders means that your attention is in your head. It should be evenly distributed throughout your body. The steps are naturally carried by the movement of the hips. You do not use the muscles of the leg to step.

I am going through my old archival footage and finding gems of Tai-chi masters demonstrating their skills. The videos are going up on our youtube.com channel which is called zookinesis49. Plug in zookinesis49 into the search bar.

Here is an example of my teacher, William Chen, performing his Yang style form with voice over. It is very old footage and the video quality is not the best. But it is really worth watching.

My students have gotten frustrated that I continue to correct their postures in the Tai-chi form. They feel their postures should be perfect by now. In the last class I explained that, while they know how to achieve perfect postures, there is an issue that is interfering with their form.

I correct their postures to get them to achieve an “emotionless state”. This means ending the battle of the mind and emotions in which the natural, relaxed state of body feeling is disturbed by the worries and fears of the thinking mind. This battle then gets represented in the postures of the body. The body is expressing the battles of the mind and emotions.

In the “emotionless state” you are still feeling things such as your connection to the world around you, your energy and enthusiasm, etc. But your body is not being used to express internal battles.

When students try to remember the proper stance in a particular part of the form, they try to remember the feeling associated with that stance and duplicate the feeling, hoping that will make the body assume the proper shape. But they are also dragging along all sorts of other emotional expressions. It is difficult to remember the proper “stance feeling” cleanly without other emotional expressions hanging on.

Instead, they need to “clean house” by freeing every joint and muscle of the body from emotional control and letting each part of the body “sit” comfortably and yet be fluid enough to move in any direction at every moment. It is a “suspended” state in which the body is open to anything – to any sort of response. It is that openness; that relaxed and suspended state that they need to use as a reference.

They already know the right way to hold their bodies for a particular stance in the form. But they need to be free of conflict in that stance. This is something they can do by themselves. If they depend on me to correct their outer form all the time, they will be depending on me for the rest of their lives.

Now that they know the form in and out, they need to know themselves in and out. They need to know when their inner emotional state is trying to take control of their body postures and instead let their postures be controlled by proper body mechanics (which they are also very familiar with by this time).

In other words, it is time for them to correct themselves. The Tai-chi forms were developed to serve as a tool to teach you to end slavery to your inner conflict. Once you have learned the form, the real work begins. The teacher teaches you the tools but only the student can use those tools for his own progress.

One of my students is an actor. If he has just finished one role and must now begin working on a completely different role, there must be a time in between where he sheds the first role before taking on the second role. At this time he has to be neutral – not one role or another role. He can clean himself out of the first role so that he can be open to something completely different.

We try to remain in this “neutral state” throughout the form. The form is not a movement from one attitude to another but must be free of attitude throughout. In this way the body and mind are always open and ready for anything new. The mind does not cling to any frozen state or feeling. It is a state of non-attachment.

During the last class, my students expressed their frustrations that they are not progressing as fast as they would like. When frustrations build to a head, the students are usually ready for a breakthrough. They are ready to let go of the conflict of mind and emotions. Their frustration is an expression of the last gasp of that conflict.

I used to spend a few months at a time in the jungles of Central America, hunting for unusual reptiles.  They were used for research programs to study how to develop captive breeding colonies in case the species became extinct in the wild.  When you first walk through a jungle you don’t see the animals.  They are camouflaged.  It takes a while to recognize them.  Once you are used to seeing them, you realize the jungle is filled with animals.

There is a similar problem in working with your attention.  When you practice Tai-chi and Zookinesis, attention is perceived as a force which energizes the body and connects it to all living things.  The development and refinement of attention is a large part of the practice.  But we usually associate attention with the head, specifically the eyes.  To most people, attention just means what direction your head is aimed.

To detect the camouflaged force of attention, the Tai-chi forms require that the head remain in an aligned position with the rest of the body.  This means that you cannot look from side to side or look down to see where your feet are going.  Yet you must pay attention to your stepping so the foot will land up in the correct position.  To do this, you pay attention to the flow of momentum going into the leg, to the feeling of weightedness of the leg and to the way in which the step affects the joints of the body so the body stays aligned. 

You can do this with your eyes closed because you are paying attention to feeling instead of to seeing.   When you begin to step you do not focus your attention on the sight of the foot moving to the floor.  You focus on how the momentum flows through the body and how all the muscles and joints of the body participate in sending out the leg.  Each movement of the Tai-chi form requires this same whole body attention.

The forms also require a certain type of breathing.  You generally breathe in as you move forward and expand and you breathe out as you shift your weight back and sink into the ground.  The timing of the breath must be paced exactly with the timing of the movements.  Your attention must be on the relationship of all the muscles and joints of the body as well as on the breathing. 

When the momentum sinks into the legs, it moves down past the feet into the ground, then circles and comes back up.  When you rise, the momentum flows out through the head and arms.  Your attention follows the momentum as it moves out of and back into the body.

In this way you break free from the attention being disguised as the head and eyes.  You now experience it as a force mediating all the actions of the body and the breathing and connecting you to your environment.

You practice strengthening the attention.  You practice making the attention agile so that it can actively mediate all the parts of your body to keep you properly aligned.  Attention becomes a living force.

Your attention becomes so strong that it cannot be controlled by outside influences that are vying to control you.  These influences may be other people, advertisers, politicians, religions and philosophies.  You remain free and independent. 

You also start to perceive how these various groups are in a battle to control your attention and you begin to understand how people can be made to do things they would normally not do. 

Simply by requiring you to keep your head aligned and to keep your eyes looking forward, Tai-chi starts you on a path that eventually leads to your ability to see dynamics at play in our society, which you never noticed or understood before. 

There are many subtle aspects to this training that yield big results.  It is important for the student to understand these underlying principles.  It is even more important for the teacher to understand them.  If you do not understand then you are learning and you are teaching blindly. 

Once you can detect the patterns and qualities of attention of other people, you can understand them better.  You see how their patterns, which are usually habitual and not free and spontaneous, control their behavior.  You can say to yourself, “That pattern is them.  It is not me.”  You can avoid playing into their habitual patterns of behavior.

The Tai-chi and Zookinesis teacher consciously teaches with these principles in mind in order to lead the student to freedom and to personal power.  One of the purposes of these weekly “lessons” is to remind both students and teachers, of these underlying principles so they don’t think of Tai-chi and Zookinesis as just memorizing movements.