First a Personal Note:
It’s been a while since my last post. As I mentioned before, I’ve been suffering from a rotator cuff injury in my right shoulder. This has made it quite painful to type. Moreover, the exercises my physiotherapist has prescribed have also added to my discomfort. This has meant that the last two months I’ve been in pretty much constant pain, which has made it quite hard for me to do the sort of thinking I need to do to produce both the Backgrounder and the Weekend Literary Supplement.
This still continues, but I’ve made some slow but steady progress in recovery. This means that while I still have constant pain, it has subsided to the point where I can now start to work at this blog—though at a reduced rate. Hopefully this will continue and eventually I’ll be free of pain altogether and able to get back to my old productivity. With that in mind, here’s the first Weekend Supplement in a long time. I hope it’s as good as the ones I produced without the constant, aching pain in my right arm. :-(
As I explained before, it’s extremely important for taijiquan players to accept that it isn’t per se a form of exercise, but rather moving meditation with health benefits. Part of what that means is that people need to do it in silence. You shouldn’t do it with music or a podcast in the background, and you shouldn’t talk to people either.
Years ago I was at a workshop where people were supposed to be deepening their understanding of a two-person exercise called ‘push-hands’. What you do is have two people pushing at each other in turn, while their partner learns how to sense the direction of the push and redirect it away from the centre of their body.
If you can picture the situation, there was a room filled with people grouped into twos and all of them were chattering away with each other. The teacher stopped the practice and told everyone that they needed to be silent to sense the other’s ‘energy’. When they started up again, almost everyone just went back to chattering away.
This isn’t to say that the people who kept on nattering were ‘bad’ people in any way. But I would suggest that a good teacher will understand that if someone’s consciousness is so ‘scattered’ that they simply cannot remind themselves to keep quiet for even a few minutes after they’ve been told to stop talking, it means that they have a hard time focusing their attention on what they are doing. And, if you cannot concentrate while doing taijiquan, you will not be able gain as much from the form as you would if you did.
This means that students need to remember to approach taijiquan seriously.
One key part of what I mean by that is students really do need to practice a lot on their own. Just importantly, they need to be both thoughtful and creative in their practice.
I was lucky when I started because I had the benefit of having a very good music teacher years before I started to study taijiquan. He really emphasized the need to, as he said, “put in my time in the woodshed”. In addition, he said that to get really good, you need to “play around” and “break the rules” when you practice. I was very young when he taught me this, and I only lasted a couple years under his teaching---but those two lessons stuck with me for the rest of my life.
Years later I took up music again and learned how to play the flute in high school. I really worked at it and put hours into practice most days. In addition, I really worked at his idea of “playing around” and “breaking the rules”. I learned how to play a transverse flute while holding it vertically, upside down, and, backwards. I also practiced while doing a yoga shoulder stand, while smoking a pipe, and probably even more things that I’ve since forgotten.
I got pretty good at playing the flute, but because I couldn’t generate sufficient interest in music theory, my learning curve got stuck on a plateau. This is why I gave it up when I got interested in doing taijiquan. But those lessons I learned from music were easily transferable to taijiquan.
Once you have learned to do the basic form more or less the way you were taught, it’s important to stretch yourself by adding on new things to learn. There are a wide variety of ways to do this.
You can experiment with doing the form in different settings. See if you can do it on a rough field where the grass hasn’t been cut for a while. Or on the side of a hill. Or with a strong wind blowing. Another option is to do the set backwards. Or, do the ‘mirror set’ where you change which side you do each form. (Think of it as a ‘left-handed’ set.) Another is by learning how to do an entire set in the a space two metres square. There are two ways of doing this. You can do something like Michael Jackson’s ‘moon-walk’, or, you can alter the order of the set. (Either way, this comes in handy because it means you can practice just about anywhere.)
If you can find someone else to practice with (I never could), you can learn to do ‘push hands’ and practice that regularly. If you get any good at it, try doing it ‘live’---that’s where you actually try to knock over or lock the joints of your opponent for real. Think of it as ‘taijiquan sparring’. If there is a teacher available, you can also try to learn a weapons form. If you gain any proficiency with the above, you might want to consider doing some ‘friendly matches’ with people from other martial arts. They’ll probably wipe the floor with you---but if you have the right attitude you’ll learn a lot.
At this point readers might wonder why the above fits under a title that says “Doing the Form is Meditation---”.
Many folks believe that ‘meditation’ is about ‘zoning out’ and is akin to a type of sleep or hypnotic state. I don’t doubt that some people teach it this way. But my experience has been through Daoism and for me meditation is ‘thinking about thinking’ and it is the exact opposite of ‘zoning out’. Instead, it is about being hyper aware of your environment---both outside of you, and, inside both your body and your mind.
There are a variety of different ways Daoism teaches a person how to meditate, but one of the core ones is the practice of ‘kung fu’. That’s the process of practicing some specific activity diligently and thoughtfully to gain real insight into what you are doing. That’s what my first music teacher was teaching me---the kung fu of playing the euphonium! Once you learn how to practice a kung fu, you can then apply it to other aspects of your life---like the flute I studied in high school and the taijiquan I’ve spent the last 40 years of my life working on.