Let’s see if we can explain this without getting lost in too much theory…
(N.B. I’m writing this, to help my own thought process, rather than producing a tidy finished article, so let’s see where we go.)
Yi is one of those confusing terms in taijiquan. I don’t think you can talk about it without reference to jin and fangsong (probably qi too, but let’s try to leave that for now).
Amongst the taijiquan community there are a lot of varied ideas about jin, the “refined strength” or “trained strength” that you find mentioned in the Chinese marital arts, particularly taijiquan.
Many people seem to think that jin is about generating force maximally for whatever movement you’re doing, so a swimmer has ’swimmer jin’ or a weightlifter has ‘weightlifting jin‘.
It’s a tempting idea – after all who wouldn’t want to move with the grace, power and agility of an athlete, but I don’t think that practicing taijiquan should be looked at as some sort of shortcut to those abilities.
Athletic abilities are hard won, don’t last forever and require an awful lot of maintenance to keep a hold of. You can’t just short-cut them.
In taijiquan that is not what’s really meant by the word jin anyway, or there wouldn’t be anything different, at a fundamental level, between the training a boxer does and the training a taijiquan player does (and at this point you may actually be standing on the sidelines shouting, “No, there isn’t and difference!”, however, that’s your choice, but let me try and change your mind…)
In taijiquan we are specifically talking about ground force when we talk about jin. By ground force I mean the solidity of the ground manifested to our fingers. As the saying in the taiji classic says
The jin should be
rooted in the feet,
generated from the legs,
controlled by the waist,
and expressed through the fingers.
This is achieved by letting whatever forces we’re working with find their way to your foot to rest on the ground. This ground force can be bounced back from where it comes, turning it into something that can be used actively as well as passively.
When people talk about jin the next word out of their mouth is usual fangsong, to relax. There’s a reason for this.
The only way to let the forces you’re working with rest on the ground as directly as possible is by relaxing your upper body. (Relaxing your legs doesn’t really help much, since the weight of the body is sinking down into them). It’s getting the tension out of your upper body, by letting it dissolve down, that works the magic.
So what does it mean to ‘let forces rest on the ground’, and how do you do it?
Let’s make this a practical example.
If you’re sitting at a desk right now reading this on a laptop, I want you to pick up your laptop with your hands.
Got it? Good. (If you haven’t got a laptop, grab something of equal weight)
Now, you might think you’re fairly relaxed as you sit there holding your laptop off the desk, but what happens if you say to yourself “let the weight of this laptop go to the ground, through my chair”.
Now, if you’re anything like me you’ll notice that something invisible subtly changes inside yourself when you do this. There’s a noticeable switch of the internal musculature of your body (the qi) that is rearranging things for the weight you are holding to be supported by the ground.
I don’t know what exactly changes, because subconsciously your body just does it, and that subconscious switching is a function of your yi, which is usually translated as “intent”.
You can put your laptop back down now.
What I notice when I do this is that when direct forces to the ground my neck feels freer, my shoulders looser and space seems to open up. Mentally I also feel clearer. These are a lot of the benefits that you get from practicing taijiquan.
Your yi is activated when you imagine a direction that you want to send a force into. It does all the hard work of plotting the path through your body on a subconscious level that you aren’t usually aware of. In fact, trying to work out how it’s doing it is a sure way to mess up actually doing it.
If you see people practicing taijiquan, or other internal arts, with that kind of faraway focus that’s about halfway between open awareness and fixed attention, that’s what they’re doing. They’re not communing with the angles, they’re imagining directions for the jin to ‘flow’ in. They are using their yi while doing the form.
Now that was quite a lot of concepts to throw at you in a short while, and probably enough for now, so let’s stop there.
The Tai Chi Notebook 
Richard J’s comment compared to the one I made previously is an archetypal example of where the discussions about qi, jin, etc., go wrong. As Richard notes, many of the discussions about qi-related matters are contextual: without the right context, all the words and explanations can go flying off down the wrong corridors.
If we take the list of words that Richard J translated/explained, the primary word and where everything goes wrong is “qi”. Richard J’s comment on qi was thus:
Qi (氣) separates and mediates opposites. It enables coherence and transformation. In the body, it describes how we coordinate internally to support an action—linking breath, muscle tone, postural alignment, and external pressure. Different contexts emphasize different aspects, but what stays consistent is that qi reflects how the internal system responds and integrates.
However, I’m using “qi” to mean a layer of involuntary muscles within the skin area of the body, so we’re using the same word, but with two radically different meanings. Richard J’s meaning accords with the philosophical meaning of qi and somewhat with the extensive hypothesis extensions of Traditional Chinese Medicine that developed long after the discovery and utility of the “qi” that I’m talking about.
If you want to see an illustration of the qi that I’m talking about, Mantak Chia illustrated and described this root meaning of qi in his book, “Iron Shirt Chi Kung I” back in the mid-1980s. Chia took this idea from fairly common Chinese sources: Chia did not originate the idea.
Another, more obvious giveaway to the idea of the dermal-area qi is all the Chinese street performers and “masters” who demonstrate that their skin can’t be penetrated by spear points, blows don’t hurt them, they can highly pressurize their body inside the qi, they can induce magnetic feelings in the skin-area qi, and so on. They all announce that they are demonstrating the strength of their qi, and they are: but they’re talking about the skin-area development that I’m referring to, not an intangible product of philosophy and TCM lore.
Similarly, the arms and legs of the body are moved because the middle/dantian area of the body twists and manipulates this “qi” connection in the skin and which connects the whole body: one part of the body moves, all of the body moves.
Anyway, my previous comments about Graham’s laptop example are based on the idea of qi, jin, intent, etc., are based on the skin-area qi. I learned about this more practical idea of qi from Chen Xiaowang and one other of my teachers, back in the 1990s, and I’ve developed my own qi, accordingly. It’s real and demonstrable. And yes, I can easily feel in my own qi sensations under skin why the term “energy” would have been used in a more primitive time.
What I’d suggest is that people begin to understand that the “qi” is not the intangible they’ve always thought, but take a look more closely at the skin-area qi examples that can be found in videos (although, of course, caveat emptor … some of those exhibitions are fake, naturally, so you have to be discerning).
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Thanks for the thought-provoking blog—and for the equally perceptive comment thread. I’d like to offer something that might slightly reframe the conversation and, I hope, remove some of the obstacles to understanding terms in Chinese martial arts, such as li, yi, qi, and jin.
These terms are context-dependent.
Many Chinese terms don’t have fixed meanings. Their meaning depends on context—what’s happening in the environment, the task at hand, or the body. We encounter this kind of language in English too.
Words like:
Tension can describe emotional strain, muscular effort, or structural load between two points.
Focus might refer to where attention is placed, how a lens converges light, or how intensely someone works.
Connection could describe a relationship between people, components of a machine, or alignment between body parts.
In each case, we don’t fully understand the word until we know what it’s relating and in what situation. The word gains its full meaning from its use in a specific context.
Similarly, to understand some Chinese words, we not only need to know the subject, but the discipline, the art, the style, and even the lineage. For example, in Daoist alchemy, acupuncture, and martial arts, qi can mean very different things. Yi in Xingyiquan might take on a different emphasis than in Taijiquan. There may even be differences between Yang and Chen styles in how certain words are applied.
These terms describe relationships.
In addition to being context-sensitive, this class of words points to relationships between two or more things. In English, tension always exists between two or more points. Focus involves a relationship between attention and object. Connection always links parts of a whole. These aren’t just features—they describe how things relate.
This idea can help us better understand classical Chinese terms like li (力), yi (意), qi (氣), and jin (勁). Though they appear in many different training and application contexts, they consistently point to specific kinds of relationships:
Li (力) refers to muscular force or effort. But it’s always relational—force in relation to structure, leverage, gravity, or an opponent. Misapplied li can break structure or leak energy; well-applied li aligns with the body and transfers through it.
Yi (意) isn’t just abstract intent—it’s the relationship between your attention and your movement. When yi is directed downward, forward, or inward, it changes how the body organizes itself and responds.
Qi (氣) separates and mediates opposites. It enables coherence and transformation. In the body, it describes how we coordinate internally to support an action—linking breath, muscle tone, postural alignment, and external pressure. Different contexts emphasize different aspects, but what stays consistent is that qi reflects how the internal system responds and integrates.
Jin (勁) is the expression of force that results from correct relationships—between intention and alignment, ground and hand, center and limb. It’s not raw power, but structured, connected, intentional force.
Before the 20th century reforms and the modern era, words like qi and jin weren’t “mystical” or “energetic.” They described how the body worked as a whole—how power moved through alignment and timing. These ideas came from observing nature and everyday labor, not from abstract science. The body was understood more like a living system—like farming, weather, or water flow—than a machine.
These words appear across different practices and are used to describe different things, but they consistently describe how parts of a system relate to each other. The body—and the world—doesn’t work through isolated parts. It functions through chains of relationships. These terms help us describe those processes.
That’s why somatic experience is essential—and why your laptop exercise was so apt. It helps us sense which context we’re in and what kind of relationship is being expressed. Without feeling the difference between using muscular effort to hold up an arm and allowing the ground to support a structurally aligned arm, these terms remain abstract. With experience, they become practical and precise. These words might only start to make sense when the body begins to show us what they mean.
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The problem I have is doing everything, everywhere, all at once…
I look for that strength, that relaxation, that mentality and my form goes out the window.
Focussing on bringing that form back into line throws something else out.
Relaxed doesn’t mean floppy.
Strength doesn’t mean rigid.
It’s a work of contrasts and contradictions and I love it!
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Graham, your example of holding the laptop has nice utility. First, you’re holding the laptop with the focus/locus of your strength in the arms and shoulders, which are mounted on your torso. Then, when you willfully let the weight of the lap sink through you and rest either at your soles or at your sit-bones, you do indeed notice some micro-adjustments taking place in your body … and yes, those micro-adjustments are the “qi”.
The ancient Chinese didn’t have an understanding of involuntary tissues responding to directions from the subconscious mind, so they called the process the qi. The mental imagery you used to sink the weight of the laptop down through your body (that’s all “sink your qi” means, when you cut to the chase) is what they mean by “yi” or “intent”, in the focused discussion about these matters.
So, you have qi referring to processes involving the subconscious mind and involuntary tissues. Even the phenomena where you “feel something magnetic” or “feel raindrops hitting my skin” are considered to be part of the effects of the subconscious mind and those involuntary tissues (most of which are in the skin area). The “yi” refers to the willful imagery you need in order to convince the subconscious to try and satisfy your pictured scenario. The change in forces from your shoulders/arms holding your laptop to the weight resting on the ground is the change from “Li” (muscular force) to “Jin”, the force arising from manipulating the qi in your body so that the ground or gravity ends up doing all the work. You can see why the formal definition of jin says: “jin is the physical manifestation of the qi”.
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