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.
