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.

Fear

 

What Are You Afraid Of?

Seems like an odd thing to bring up in a tai chi blog.  It may be that "fear" - or perhaps we might better think of it as "aversion" - is one of the things holding us back from growing in the art.

We're going to dive deep into push-hands in the coming weeks & months.  We've worked with it before, and some of y'all have, at times, come to me and been open about the fact that this new area of exploration is scary.  I try to treat such self-disclosure as a gift - something valuable one person is giving to another - and do my best to respect how valuable such an exchange really is.

"And now the ugly bullets come pecking in the dust,
And no one wants to face 'em, but every beggar must."
- Rudyard Kipling, “The Heathen”

Validating our fears is not the same thing as letting them take control of us.  The soldier is afraid yet does what he must for reasons which are more important than fear.  The new mother is afraid the first time she goes into labor, but she does what she must for reasons which are more important than fear.

Sometimes our fears are perfectly reasonable.  For example, the fear of injury during push-hands is reasonable.  My job is to create a physically safe learning environment.  We need to feel and be physically safe in order to be open to the lessons push-hands can teach us. 

Creating a “physically safe learning environment” means the risks are no greater than the everyday risks of just being clumsy.  Every one of us can be a bit of a klutz at times – it’s a part of being human.  We stub our toes, turn our ankles, bang an elbow against a countertop and so on.  We accept this as a part of life and just move on, if a bit more cautiously.  Push hands should be no riskier, physically, than our everyday clumsiness.  We should not fear serious physical injury - the kinds of things we’d go to a doctor or E.R. for.  We have a reasonable expectation, because of the nature of the class, that we will not experience the sort of “sports injuries” common to martial arts like karate or Brazilian Jiujitsu, nor the repetitive injury and risk of disfigurement that can happen in the more extreme Shaolin arts.

This applies to most other martial arts.
It should not apply to tai chi.

We may experience the discomfort of a joint-lock or the disorientation of being sent off-balance; but at the same time, we must be able to trust that when we communicate “enough” or “stop” to our partners, they respect this and abide by it.  When I say “Don’t Break Your Training Partner, because you won’t get a new one,” there’s an “Or Else” attached to that rule.  Put very simply, I reserve the right to ban someone from class if they show disregard for such a simple and sensible directive.

Setting physical injury aside, we may have other fears as well.

Past trauma or abuse can trigger panic and painful memories.  Push-hands can easily be seen as confrontational.  At some levels, it is.  We're confronting a partner who is presenting us with a problem.  We’re also presenting our partner with problems, and seeing (and feeling) their reactions as they try to resolve those problems.  We're confronting the fact that there's a right way and a wrong way to do tai chi; push-hands tests this, and gives us nearly instant – and unforgiving – feedback both when we’re wrong and when we’re right.  We're confronting elements of ourselves that may be painful to explore deeply.  We may simply be afraid of being seen as incompetent, or being judged as inadequate.  We may find our inability to grasp a concept frustrating. 

We may also be afraid of something within ourselves.  We may be afraid of a partner “pushing the Berserk Button;” that is, setting something off inside us that sends us out-of-control.

These fears are just as reasonable and valid and worthy of respect as those related to physical injury.  And in those cases, my job is the same as before - to create a safe learning environment. 

In this second sense, “a safe learning environment” means “a place where we can explore and examine the feelings associated with interactive martial arts without fear of psychological harm.” 

Several years ago, someone whom I don’t know and therefore can't give credit to developed a model for training that consisted of several “zones:”

I don’t know what the original context for this training model was.  It could have been combative martial arts.  It could have been skydiving or downhill skiing or gymnastics or public speaking or Who-Knows-What.  It is enough that it’s applicable to our art, and worth spending time exploring.

The “Comfort Zone” is the default state – where we spend most of our day.  We do things that are familiar, see people we know well or, if we don’t, our interactions with them are predictable (“Hi, welcome to BurgerBarn! Would you like to try our Hayloft Combo?”); we go places we’ve been to before, we eat foods we’re used to and so on.  We spend most of our day in the Comfort Zone, and it’s perfectly healthy that we do.  We can stay there indefinitely, though we’ll never grow if we do.

Skipping a step, the Panic Zone is where nothing is familiar, things feel disorienting and dangerous, we have no idea what we’re doing, we’re overstimulated, “operating outside manufacturer’s recommendations,” and little rational thought beyond “I Want Out!” is occurring.  It is in fact impossible to learn in this zone, because the learning parts of the mind get shut down and the coping/enduring/survival parts get activated.

I've never gone skydiving.  Skydiving might put you right in the Panic Zone; whereas for me, it would be close enough to the time I spent on Jump Status in the Army that it wouldn't be completely unfamiliar.  Scuba diving or waterskiing, on the other hand, would send me straight into the Panic Zone and keep me there – not just because I've never done anything even close to these activities, but also because I don't want to do either so it would only be under duress and protest.

The middle section, the “Learning Zone,” is the environment I try to provide for the class.  It is a mix between the two previous zones – we review many things we’re comfortable with, that help us integrate and retain the new things we’re exposed to.  We avoid the “Panic Zone” by keeping the new things as safe as possible and related to things we already know.  We keep the stimulation to a minimum through a calm & quiet class environment, as well as limiting how much new material is presented/demonstrated/explained/practiced.  It’s beyond the Comfort Zone, but still close enough to it to be able to sort of “look back over our shoulder” and lay hold of things we’re familiar with.

At least, that’s the ideal.  I suspect there are times each of us has gone beyond the “Learning Zone” and simply stopped taking in new things at some point in a class.  It’s my responsibility to make those times as rare as I can.

I’ve said over and over that my job as a teacher is to get you to the point where you need a better teacher than I am.  I’ve also said time-and-again that when you go to one of the Grandmaster’s seminars, you’ll only retain ten percent. of what you’re presented, but that this ten percent. is more than I’ve ever taught you.  It’s quite easy to get into the “Panic Zone” at one of these seminars, because of the sheer volume of information being presented.  You can easily begin to feel like this:

It's important, when that happens (and it still happens to me at some of the recent seminars I’ve been to), to keep in mind the fact that you’re safe, that you don’t have to remember everything (so don’t bother trying), and that you can always “tap out” if you need to.  And it's my job to make sure that when you do go, you're as proofed against falling into the "Panic Zone" as I can get you.

Same thing goes for my own class.  If you feel unsafe, speak up immediately.  If you’ve met a limit where you’re not retaining anything more, say so and we’ll review, refresh or take a breather.  And you should never – in my class or with anyone else – feel pressured to do something you genuinely don’t want to do.