Hen, Ha

 

No, not like this.
Something else entirely.

This week in class, a student asked a question about breathing.  I forget what the exact nature of the question was, but she read a passage in a book by a highly-respected master and it puzzled her because it seemed to conflict with what I’ve been saying all along.

It’s always rewarding to get questions like these from students.  It means they’re thinking about the art, taking ownership of it – they’re doing more than just coming to class and doing what they’re told.  It’s very gratifying.

I’ll have to follow up with her next week.  But what I said in response – whether it answered her question or not – is that breathing in tai chi is contextual.  In the solo form and in push-hands, we breathe normally, the deep “abdominal breathing” I went on about at length here.  When applying tai chi as a martial art, however, our breathing is different, and based on our intention.

If you’ve ever seen a karate player shout when they punch, you may have understood why; and if you have any knowledge of tai chi, you may have imagined such vocalization to be as far from what you know of tai chi as it’s possible to get.  Tai chi doesn’t look like karate, we don’t have the “comfy loungewear,” we don’t have belts, we don’t have all the rigid ceremonies you see in any dojo.  They’re not wrong, they’re just not a part of tai chi.  And most people who take up tai chi have no intention of applying it as a martial art.  So it’s reasonable to be surprised when we see it applied as such, and hear a tai chi player “shouting” when they do powerful moves.  Then again, most people, whether they know anything about tai chi or not, would be surprised to know tai chi is a martial art at all, and that we indeed have powerful moves.  Well, we do, and the “different breathing” is related to generating the power in the movement.  The post I just linked to will help understand this relationship.

In applying fajin to tai chi, we use two vocalizations, roughly approximated to “hen” and “ha.”  They relate, generally speaking, to the range and style of the movement, and the intent of the player. 

For example, an elbow strike is short-ranged, and our hand strikes (blade/tiger’s mouth/punch/hook) don’t tend to go very far.  We have tools for dealing with a “haymaker” punch, and we have things that look kind of like it, but they’re not the full-body, roundhouse punches you’ll see a boxer deliver.  Our kicks are short, low and sharp.  Our “press” is done at elbow-range.  Our “shoulder strike/check” is at “entangled” range.  For short, sharp movements like this, the power we generate is short and sharp, and the vocalization “hen” (sounds more like "HNH!") focuses our energy in generally the same way as a karate player, but at a shorter range.

By contrast, our throws take longer, relatively speaking, to execute than a punch.  Consider the difference between, for example, the punch in "Step Forward, Parry & Punch," versus the longer sweeping motion at the end of "Single Whip."  The energy for the throw is generated more like moving furniture or throwing a frisbee than delivering a blow, built up from the root.  The vocalization “ha” is therefore more like “hhhHHHHHA,” but it would be tedious to write it out like that all the time.

These vocalizations are for those times when we intend to issue energy, rather than “borrow,” neutralize or redirect it.  They’re for when we’ve “found our opponent’s center” and feel him or her to be double-weighted or “floating,” a concept we’ll discuss in the future.  As such, they’re not used in ordinary form practice. 

This is not to say you can’t use “active” breath control during form work.  If you feel like you want to express issuing energy in a movement (or in a specific part of a movement), there’s nothing wrong with coordinating your breathing so as to fit your intention.  For example, when we do “Flying Diagonal,” I’m almost always exhaling in a silent “ha” manner, for no better reason than it feels appropriate for me.  But as a rule, the breathing is “normal” during the solo form and in push-hands, the better to relax and be in a contemplative, inquisitive state of mind.

 

 

Tai Chi and the Drunk Uncle

 

What's your plan?

Everyone has blind spots.  You, me, them – everybody.  We can’t know everything and while we may add "all things considered" to our conversations, we can’t  really have considered all things.

Have you ever actually considered all things?

I was presented something I’d never considered a day or two ago, in the form of an article shared by a friend in “The Business.”

Y’know how I wrote about the difference between martial arts and self-defense?   

Between those two articles, I thought I’d done a pretty good job.

It turns out there was something I’d never ever considered.

Read the linked article above.  It’s something we’ve never once talked about.

And I don’t say this to my credit.  If we think about it, something like this is every bit as likely – perhaps much more likely – than life-or-death “entangled encounters.”

When I previously wrote about self-defense, I did so within the context of a spectrum of confrontation and options for it; everything from awareness and avoidance to lethal force and use of weapons.  The linked article presents another “spectrum” entirely, with an altogether different class of "antagonist."  More importantly, it requires a different mindset.

In the realm of disaster preparedness, there’s a school of thought to the effect that if one is ready for the worst-case-scenario, he or she is therefore automatically prepared for everything “less-than-worse.”  If I’m prepped for a zombie apocalypse, so the thinking goes, anything short of a horde of shambling brain-eaters will be a cake walk.

A moment’s thought will show the flaw in such “logic.”  If I’m ready to fend off wave-after-wave of the Flesh-Eating-Undead, that’s not the same thing as being able to recover my car from a snowy ditch after having hit a patch of black ice in winter.  Or find my way through the pathless desert.  Or repair a blown-out shoe when I need to run.  Or extricate myself from a burning building.  Or pay my gas-and-electric bill if I find myself “between jobs” through no fault of my own.  You get the picture.

In the same way, being able to put a knife-wielding bath-salt tweaker in the hospital or morgue does not automatically prepare me to safely and compassionately restrain a relative suffering a psychotic break, and keep him or her from hurting themselves or others.

We are fortunate that tai chi seems almost uniquely suited to the “Uncle Joe,” “Aunt Rachelle” or “Cousin Steve” scenarios in the linked article.  Tai chi gives us a nearly infinite “menu” of available responses, most of which can be “dialed-up-or-down” to suit the occasion.  In other words, I don’t need to put Aunt Rachelle in the hospital, because I have a host of options between “strong language” and “Death-Bringer-Mega-Berserker®.”  

We’ll spend some time on this in the future.

Eating Bitterness

 

Earlier this year, I attended a seminar in Martinsville with Scott Rodell.  It was primarily about Chinese swordsmanship and secondarily about push-hands.  One of the things you discover when going to seminars and workshops is that every instructor has a different approach to push-hands. 

Some instructors are more “concept” oriented.  Tai chi push-hands is a sensitivity exercise.  Its purpose is threefold:
o  To teach us to stick, adhere, connect and follow and why this works;
o  To teach us to “listen” to our partner and why this is important, and
o  To evaluate our own application of the principles we learn in the solo form.
Push-hands gives us instant and unarguable feedback on whether we’re doing these things.

Some instructors are more practically oriented, and the seminar led by Rodell laoshi fell into this category.  How do you put push-hands to work for you when you need it?  What does this-or-that posture/transition in the form feel like when it’s correctly applied to an uncooperative opponent?  More especially, what does it feel like when it’s correctly applied to an uncooperative opponent who knows what you’re about to do and has a plan?!

One of my partners in this seminar – one to whom I’m more grateful now than I was when I was there – was a young man in his 20s who would not look out of place in Notre Dame’s varsity defensive line.  Tai chi players aren’t intimidated by size (at least, we needn’t be), but this young man was good in addition to being huge.  He wasn’t just a mass of brute strength; he was a good tai chi player.  This is a legitimately intimidating combination, and you have to be very good to counter such a fellow.

The difficulty of applying push-hands techniques with him was frustrating enough.  The smile he had on his face the entire time was, if anything, an even greater distraction.  It wasn’t smug; at least, I don’t think it was.  It was the smile of a person who knew what he was doing and knew how & why it worked, and was confident in his ability to make it work. 

Of course, that only made it worse....

The unforgiving truth is that we do not get to choose who we face.  Some people have natural advantages like size, strength and youthful vigor.  Some people have an advantage in being able to apprehend the principles of the art more quickly.  My First-Push-Hands-Partner-Ever was like this; smaller, weaker and older than me, but with a natural and intuitive sensitivity.  It’s also true that while it’s discouraging to be shown our shortcomings and inabilities on our own (as, for example, when a meal we’re preparing turns out badly), push-hands has the added frustration of witnesses – that other person you’re pushing hands with knows you’re struggling or unable.  That’s not so bad when the other person is the instructor; after all, if he or she wasn’t better than you at this, you wouldn’t be there paying them for what they know.  And in some classes, there are students who are clearly superior to us and it's okay to let them teach us.

I wouldn’t be surprised if my students felt a weird version of this frustration.  A part of my teaching style involves showing students early-on what this-or-that posture/transition does, and the ease with which it is done, by having them toss me around.  I’ve been accused of “overacting” or “faking” how much I’m being thrown or pushed off-balance, particularly by students who have pushed-hands with me.  The student may well wonder how they got away with the posture when they’re pushing hands with me ten seconds later.  What’s actually happening in that moment is that I purposely “forget” I know tai chi.  I’m in fact putting myself in the place of a person displaying a typical reaction to the forces being applied to me – no tai chi player ever got in a bar fight with or got mugged by another tai chi player unless they’re in a Chinese-language action movie.  In other words, in that moment I behave like someone who’s never done tai chi; I go back to being a tai chi player once the demonstration is complete. 

But when we’re working with someone we have every reason to believe is “at our level,” it’s the rare tai chi player who doesn’t feel at least a little frustration at not being able to execute a process properly.

The Chinese have a name for this.  They call it 吃苦, chi ku or “eating bitterness.” It’s expressed in the proverb 吃得苦中苦，方为人上人 “Only by enduring the bitterest suffering can one become a person above people.”  This blog post goes into detail about the proverb and what it means.  While there’s considerable cultural “encoding” in China that the blog post discusses – an encoding we may easily understand – in the context of tai chi it’s sufficient to accept the author’s translation of “pay your dues.”

What this means for me is that “eating bitterness,” enduring the frustration of a linebacker kid’s grin when I can’t displace or neutralize him, will cease only when I can in fact displace or neutralize him.  He has advantages I don’t – size, strength and youth – but I also have tools in my toolbox for that.  And if I don’t, I know what those tools are and must work to acquire them.

In other words, I must "pay my dues." 

This is one of the “hard” parts of what is otherwise considered the softest of “soft” martial arts.