Chen Weiming showing transitions to "Rollback" and "Press"
Go from right-to-left
I’ve
probably said it before in class, and I’m sure I’ll say it again in class, but
it’s worth putting up here so I can say I’ve done it. Put very bluntly, the transitions – the
movements we make from one posture to the next – are as important as the
postures themselves.
It’s one of the more immediate challenges for every beginner. It’s hard enough to remember all the postures
and their names (“Psst, hey! Did Phil just call for ‘Gold Stork Craps on Lotus’
or are we at ‘Monkey Twiddles His Thumbs’?”) – now we gotta learn all the stuff
in between the postures?!
Before you get the impression I’m being all judgy, I can assure you I had just
as hard a time learning the postures and transitions as every other student. It’s practically one of the “Stations of the
Cross” every tai chi player goes through.
When we begin learning, we move from one posture to another as though they were
camera poses. This is understandable;
especially when one of the best resources we have for learning the form, Yang
Chengfu’s “Essentials and Applications of Tai Chi Chuan,” has
photographs of every finishing posture, and only verbal descriptions of the
transitions.
And yet, the transitions are what make the postures effective as a martial
art; it’s what makes them flow smoothly and elegantly, one posture to the next; it's where our qi (the sum of all the energies we have in us at any given moment) is generated, "dispatched" and felt,
and it’s how we learn to use our bodies in a balanced, healthy and efficient
manner. “Single Whip,” for example,
makes no sense whatsoever if you just “assume the position;” however, it’s the
movement from wherever we were before into that finishing posture that gives
the posture its meaning.
After Grandmaster Yang Chengfu passed on to his Eternal Reward in 1936, his
disciple Chen Weiming added to the body of knowledge of tai chi by producing a
series of photographs of himself performing the transitions as well as the
finishing postures. He understood their
value and underwent the additional trouble & expense of publishing this
addendum to Yang Chengfu’s important body of work. Paul Brennan translated this work a few years ago,
and we are fortunate to benefit from it.
Chen Weiming's Additional Taiji Photos
I wish I’d had access to this volume earlier in my progress – I’d have spent a
lot less time unlearning bad habits!
When we’re beginning, it’s less essential to get every point perfect than it is
to just keep practicing. We don’t become
experts overnight, and we should – as I’ve often said – trust the process and
work to improve every day. The
transitions will grow if we work at them, and we soon forget that we ever did
our tai chi any other way.
