Becoming

 

 

Several of my previous posts have talked about what I call The Stations of the Cross – the steps we go through on our tai chi journey.  I said in one essay that tai chi should eventually transform from being something we do into something we are.  I’ve talked about several complementary arts and practices, all having the same object in view, which is balance, both internal and external.

These are all steps in the journey, a part of the process I keep exhorting us to trust.  Broadly speaking, we learn by imitating, then exploring, then creating and finally becoming.

Imitating of course is when we follow along and do as we’re told.  We may be told why we’re doing it, but we still may not understand it fully.  When learning to drive, we are told to signal our turns and we do as we’re taught.  We don’t really understand why until we have to swerve to avoid an accident because someone didn’t signal a turn or a lane change.  That’s when we start to understand.

In form work, we simply put our hands and feet where we’re told to put them, and do the sequence of postures/transitions as they’re narrated.  In push-hands, we “fake it ‘til we make it,” going through the motions and – if you’re anything like me – feel like there isn’t much point to it except proving how clumsy we are.  It’s confusing and frustrating, and we know we must be doing something wrong, but we don’t know what it might be or why.

Exploring starts to happen once we’re comfortable enough with the sequence to begin to notice things on our own.  It usually happens before we’ve fully mastered the form, but know enough of parts of it that things start becoming apparent to us that we hadn’t noticed before.  To take one “external” example, I’m not anyone’s idea of a great chef; but I learned, like most of us do, that putting too much salt in a dish ruins it, but too little leaves it bland.  I had to figure out the right amount on my own, like we all do, and like everyone else I did this before I learned a lot of other things about cookery.

In the same way, you may begin to perceive things about a posture/transition that no one has ever talked about.  You might find that shifting your weight just so makes it feel easier or more powerful.  You might find that pretending you’re doing it with a partner makes the move flow more naturally on its own.  You might find that preparing yourself for an upcoming move while you’re still in a previous one makes the later one easier to accomplish – I mentally prepare for the Separation Kicks, for example, while I’m still doing Single Whip after Cloud Hands.

As we become more comfortable with the form and don’t need to be told what comes next, the “exploring” aspect really takes off.  We begin to perceive where the qi I keep talking about comes from and what it feels like when it moves from place to place inside us.  We become aware of our partner’s qi and intention (and our own internal & external reactions to it), and the transformation of Yin to Yang and back again while doing push-hands, and we begin to experiment with the various aspects of it “y’know, just to see if it worked.”  This is normal and part of the process, but it comes with a lot of hiccups and LOTS of failures.  I’ve said before that we learn tai chi by figuring out every single way not to do tai chi, and this is especially true of push-hands.

The "Exploring" phase is where most of the "why" questions get answered. 

Creating happens next.  This is where we start figuring out new applications that aren’t “in the book.”  It’s where we decide to adapt this-or-that posture/transition from what I’ve explained; not because I was wrong or because you can’t do it, but because you know how best to do it for yourself.  It’s where you can dial-up or dial-down your intensity in push-hands to match the level of your partner – an especially important skill if you begin to teach.

Speaking of teaching, this is where you begin to think of new ways to conceptualize the art, the better to explain its many parts to less-experienced players.  It’s where you can play the “tai chi card game*” without thinking about it, because you can flow from one posture/transition to another no matter whether they’re in the “right” sequence in the form or not.  It’s where, should you ever have to use tai chi “for real,” whether in sparring or in a fight, you can’t tell anyone what you did – you just “moved in a tai chi way.”

The Becoming stage is hard to pin down, but you know it when you see it.  It can begin happening as early as the “Exploring” stage, but it becomes really obvious later.  It’s where, as I said, tai chi isn’t something we do so much as something we are.

 “Signs and symptoms” include:

• Catching yourself “moving in a tai chi way” around the house without thinking about it.  I first caught myself like this when I found myself assuming the “Snake Creeps Down” posture when reaching for something in the kitchen.
• Noticing someone in your age or fitness range who can’t move like you can.  I see it in extreme example at the VA hospital, but you see it in guys who spent an entire career in roofing or truck driving, or people who spent a career at a desk, or who have an extremely stressful job/home-life with no outlet, or who think “pushing past/ignoring the pain” is virtuous.
• Doing something “in a tai chi way,” but forgetting that this is how you do it, and forgetting you ever moved any other way.  Forgetting that something used to be difficult for you that you can now do with ease.  Forgetting that it might still be hard for other people to do.
• Realizing, after-the-fact, that you “were totally chill” in a situation that previously would have got you spun up like the turbine in a battleship’s engine room.

The "learning" that happens at each stage is like most of tai chi - from external to internal.  Imitating can be thought of as "purposeful and sincere mimicry."  It's all external.  "Exploring" starts to inquire into the things going on inside of us.  We begin to notice that when we move just so, we can perceive changes and transformations going on internally.  "Creating" reverses the process - the internal begins to show externally.  "Becoming" closes the circle; internal and external are one-and-the-same-thing, and in a real sense the distinction between the two collapses into meaninglessness.

Such long-term development puts tai chi in a very select class of martial arts.  All martial arts are skill-based, and a majority purport to develop character.  Far fewer claim to be transformative throughout one’s entire life, and fewer yet actually make good on that promise.

The transformation isn’t all sunshine, mimosas and winning lottery-tickets.  There is of course the frustrating nature of the process.  Some things seem like it's taking you forever to figure them out.  Watching other players "get it" while you're standing there clumsy and bewildered is very frustrating.  I can tell you that you're right where you belong, to relax and trust the process, but that doesn't make it any better.  Times like these, when your growth has hit a plateau and your faith in yourself is flagging, it's often best to "borrow some faith" from someone who really does believe in you and is just as invested in your success.  

I'll let you figure out who that is in our class.

There also comes a point – usually somewhere between the “Exploring” and “Creating” phases – where you come to the bittersweet realization that maybe, just maybe, you might know more than your teacher.  This happened to me about three or four months before my last regular teacher retired.  He was without question a better martial artist than me – he was in fact the best overall martial artist I’ve ever met – but I knew more about tai chi specifically than he did at that point, and it was not long after that I started to look elsewhere for improvement. 

This will probably happen to you too; in fact, I hope it does.  My job as a teacher is twofold:  teaching the art, and making sure I leave it in better shape than I found it.  If my students surpass me, then I’ve done my job.

 

 

* For those not familiar, “Tai Chi Cards” is a game we sometimes play in class.  It involves a deck of cards with the names of the postures/transitions on them.  The deck is shuffled, three cards are drawn at random, and the player has to figure out how to smoothly transition from one to the next.

 

 

 

Feelings

 

Many of the writers in my Tai ChiReading List discuss attending to one’s feelings during practice of all kinds – solo, partner etc.  They’re no longer around to ask, but it’s my impression that when the old Masters talk about “feelings,” they mean “Sensations,” “Impressions” and “Emotions” all at the same time, without distinction.

The distinctions and the connections between them are important to bear in mind, and they all relate to the “self-audit” I’ve been going on about recently.  Paying attention to “feelings” in this multi-faceted way is important both for the “civil” and “martial” aspects of the art, and lead to the internal and external “balance” which is the ultimate goal of tai chi.

I should probably explain, since that last sentence sounds uncharacteristically airy-fairy for me.  In the spirit of tai chi training generally, we'll be going from “external to internal” in this exploration, from the things that are outside of us to the things that are so much a part of us that we can't tell where we end and they begin.

We start with the “sensation” aspect of feelings.  This has to do with everything our senses tell us – from the temperature and conditions of wherever we happen to be, inward to how our clothes and shoes feel, how our partner physically feels when we’re doing push-hands, and even further inward to how our qi feels as we express the several energies emphasized in the form.  We have an excellent opportunity to scrutinize these sensations when we’re doing the form and in partner work, but there’s nothing at all saying we can’t do this throughout our day; in fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s especially important to do this “outside the classroom!”

Next is our “impressions.”  Again going from external to internal, examples include:
o the apparent state of mind of the person we’re interacting with
o the effect our movement has on our own centeredness, rootedness and balance,
o the interaction we’re having with the surface we’re standing on, be it floor, concrete, grass, gravel, flat, sloped etc. 

Whereas the "sensations" are straightforward - simply a matter of observation - "impressions" involve as much discerning as they do perceiving.  In this aspect, we don't merely notice the impressions, we also figure out what to make of them and how to respond to them; whether we should interact, take advantage of, embrace, neutralize, "just keep an eye on," ignore and so on.

Finally, our own emotions. 

Before we go further, I think it’s important to lay a bit of groundwork.  The first thing I want to emphasize, and this is critical, is that we don’t immediately pass judgment on whatever emotions we’re feeling.  This holds true for when we’re in class as well as every other time.  I just read a passage that resonated with me, related to our emotions, and speaks to this business of being forgiving with ourselves while simultaneously evaluating how we feel and why we feel as we do:  

"Your mind is a machine that makes emotions.  You can inspect those emotions for quality assurance."

I’m not giving away any State Secrets when I say that I know there are times when we would prefer doing something other than coming to class, yet we do.  There are days that are difficult; we face challenges at home, at work and throughout our lives that we never talk about, yet we bring them to class with us.  I hope our class is a welcome respite from the stresses of the day, and I try to keep it thus.  But there’s no denying that if our boss was unreasonable, our partner demanding, our creditors hounding and our car is “acting up,” we sometimes come to class with an “unclear mind.”  That’s just life.

Even in class, it’s sometimes challenging to just be content and receptive.  Sometimes I don’t explain myself well, and the concept is difficult to grasp, but we don’t feel comfortable stopping the class and saying “Hey, could you clarify what you meant when you said such-and-such?”  Or we feel like we’re not “getting” a posture/transition for whatever reason.  Or we find working with this-or-that partner difficult or even unpleasant.

Many of us can confirm this last feeling.  When we went to a seminar a few years ago, one of the other students was a fellow who was, to put it bluntly, a pain in the ass to work with.  He was more of a grappler than a tai chi player, and often put the person he was working with into painful positions.  He had a different approach to tai chi; and while I won’t say it was outright wrong, it certainly was uncommon – tai chi players tend to try to avoid making their partners wince and grimace in pain.  We all agreed he was a prick, and this affected how we interacted with him.  I'd be lying if I told you I didn't hope I'd run into him again at a future seminar – something I don't say to my credit.

It's valuable to take a moment, as we’re going through our form work in class and at home, to examine how our emotions – those we bring into class and those we discover as we practice – affect what we’re doing.  It sometimes takes considerable effort to do this.  We might discover bewilderment, frustration, maybe even dread (i.e. when we’re about to do a posture/transition we’re unfamiliar with or that might be painful); we might feel intimidated by a partner or by a concept.  We might feel uncomfortable with an application (“Wait – the hands in “High Pat on Horse” are doing WHAT?!”) and so on. 

There’s no right-or-wrong answer as to what to do with those emotions when you discover they’re there.  I won’t tell you that it’s incorrect to feel intimidated, or frustrated, or confused.  That’s not how emotions work.  What I will tell you is what I do.

When I find I’m “feelin’ a certain kinda way,” I acknowledge it.  If I’m practicing at home, I’ll often stop and try to puzzle out why, then see if I can map out how I can get to “what I’m feeling now” to “what I want to feel.”  In class, I can’t do this, so the “processing” gets compressed a bit.  Sometimes it’s just fleeting and undifferentiated; in which case I just acknowledge it & let it pass, kind of like I acknowledge my irritation with a jerk driver on the road. 

But sometimes I'm stuck in traffic with the "jerk driver." And in like manner, sometimes the emotions I'm dealing with in class are persistent and risk becoming a distraction.  At those times, I try to let the feeling accompany me.  This is very similar to the Buddhist practice of “inviting Mara to tea.”  I let the unpleasant or distracting emotion stay with me as I work through the form.  In this way, I get into the habit of recognizing that “I'm not this emotion – I’m the one who sees it.”

Sometimes this is easier said than done.  But it does get easier the more I do it.

It’s usually the case that the distracting emotion, much like the chattering “monkey mind,” gets bored and goes away.  Of course it’s not a being with its own volition – it’s a metaphor.  But it’s uncanny how, treating it as such, it behaves as such when we don’t give it what it wants.  It wants us to engage with it, give it all our attention and do whatever it is that it’s used to seeing us do when we’re consumed by it.  But when we simply acknowledge it and let it travel with us while we do whatever it is we really want to do, it presently gives up and goes off wherever bored emotions go to.  It’s a trick, but an effective one, and the Buddhists have been using it for a long time.  There’s much we can learn from them.

Tai chi considers all these feelings – sensations, impressions and emotions – as something worthy of study and worthy of integrating into our practice.  It’s a “next-level” practice, appropriate for when we’re comfortable with the form and how to do it.  The benefits are obvious and straightforward – enhanced awareness, better “presence in the moment,” clearer thinking, the increased ability to self-audit and self-regulate, and so on.

Does Tai Chi Get Easier?

 

I don't know what she's trying to solve for, either

No, it doesn't.

Now that we have this depressing answer out of the way, let’s break it down... 

It may be difficult to remember the challenges you faced at the beginning of your tai chi journey – the things you thought were difficult at the time.  This is normal.  As I said in an earlier post, we don’t remember a time when we couldn’t walk or speak or hit our mouths with a spoon.  Since we learn tai chi the same way we learned to walk, we tend to forget a time when we weren’t at our current level.

You’ll sometimes hear me refer to this tendency obliquely in class when I say “That’s not a beginner-level mistake.”  

The hardest part of tai chi is the first section.  Everything is new and unfamiliar.  There’s a LOT to learn in the first section.  Once we learn the first section, the next two sections are easier, despite being longer. 

The first reason is that the second and third sections already contain many postures/transitions we already know.  The second is that we’ve already learned things like the Ten Essential Principles, Yin/Yang Theory and so on.  Once these fundamental principles are learned, they apply across-the-board.

Once we know the Traditional Hand Form – at least well enough to follow along but ideally well enough to do it all on our own at home – we enter a different level of learning.  The things we were challenged by at first are no longer difficult, but we’re learning new things such as internal energy, sensitivity, maybe some of the philosophical aspects of the art, and other more esoteric aspects.  We’re not “making beginner-level mistakes” anymore, but the challenges are as real as those we experienced at the beginning of our journey. 

Going “back to basics” is a part of every tai chi player’s journey.  This too is normal and healthy.  It’s a given that over time – no matter how good a player might be – lazy habits tend to creep into our expression of the art.  Going “back to basics” is a healthy reminder of things we’ve forgot or lost sight of.  We have opportunities to do this when new students come to class, or when we attend a seminar – as I said elsewhere, every time I go to one of the Grandmaster’s seminars, there’s always someone there who’s doing tai chi for the very first time.  Everyone – from that brandie-brand-new student to Certified Instructors to Disciples – takes the same class and we all benefit from it.  We don’t all derive the same benefits, of course, but our tai chi journeys are intensely personal.  There’s no point in comparing ourselves to anyone else.

And this is all within the context of the empty-hand form – working with weapons is like “starting from scratch” all over!

So while it's true that we've left the old challenges behind, it's also not quite true that tai chi “gets easier” as we advance.  It’s just that the nature of our challenges change.

In other words, we grow.

This is similar to real life.  Think back to the last time you saw a toddler or young child have a meltdown over something trifling.  I once watched a 4-year-old at my daughter’s birthday party come completely unglued over the fact that a balloon was a certain color.  The child may have been overtired or overstimulated.  She may have an association with the color – good or bad – that she didn’t yet know how to effectively manage.  It may simply be that she expected it to be one color and was frustrated that it didn't meet her expectations.  The cause doesn't matter a bit – the bottom line is that the child was presented with information she was unequipped to deal with at that point.  

We might scoff at the child’s overreaction to something so insignificant.  “You think that’s bad – wait until you’re our age and start dealing with real problems!”  But of course we don’t say this (at least if we have any decency) because no 4-year-old can conceive of problems like work deadlines, "having more month than money," dealing with adult relationship or family conflicts, getting unwanted results back from the quacks and so on.  

We do our tai chi at our present level and see new students struggle with things we’ve already figured out, and I'd hope we realize that we had those same struggles when we were new students, just like 4-year-old Us might have found a pink balloon too much to cope with.  I don’t know about you, but tai chi has taught me as much about grace, generosity and empathy as it has about balance, coordination and focus.