A new episode of our Heretics podcast Xing Yi history series is out. This one tackles the formation of the Ming army. Episode 18 is available now.
The Heretics by Woven Energy podcast is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
One question that nobody I teach tai chi to ever asks me, but I think they should, is “how much do I need to practice between classes?” Perhaps they don’t want to hear the answer!
The quick answer is: every day. If you’re serious about getting better at something you need to do it every day. I don’t mean just tai chi, it’s the same with anything you want to do in life. Want to learn to play the piano? Practice every day. Want to learn to speak Spanish? Practice every day.
Here’s what I observe about myself when I practice the tai chi form everyday: you go much deeper into your practice, because you’re not taking one step forward one step backwards anymore. You’re only going forward. Your tai chi form gets much, much sharper if you do it every day and you are able to get deeper into your practice. If you take a day off, it takes you a day to get back to where you were last time. There are things you notice about the movement, or about the way you do a movement that you only get the mental space to notice in your practice if it happens every day.
I’m not saying that if you miss one day everything will fall apart, but just try it –, make a conscious choice to practice the form every day for a week and see how it opens up your practice.
How long to practice
The next question is how much should you practice in a session?
The answer to this I like the best is, ‘do the form a minimum of 3 times’. Once because the first run through is always terrible. Second to work on something specific, and third to finish off just enjoying it and not working too hard.
If you have more time available you can do the form more times in the middle part of your practice to work on specific aspects. Or you could break out individual moves and work on them over and over. Some people really like this – I’m not such a fan because I don’t think any move in tai chi is especially better than any other, but that’s just me. Xing yi has a different approach because it emphasises the five ‘fists’, but that’s a different martial art.
Why the same form?
You might wonder if there is value in repeating the same form each day – I mean, why not do a different one each day, or freeform something? I think the answer is that you get something unique out of doing the same form each day that makes it worth it.
The idea of repeating a familiar sequence may not initially appear to be in keeping with ideas of spontaneity, but I think when you go deeper into a form, it can still feel spontaneous. Not to mention that once you go deeper into it and start living it from the inside you realise that a form is just a series of expressions (energy changes) and you can do those in multiple ways, so it is never the same form.
As Heraclitus famously said, or was reported to have said, “You cannot step into the same river twice”. However, I think you need to be very familiar with the river in question (the form) to appreciate that.
I’ve written on here before about Mr Inbetween, the Aussie TV show centered around the character of Ray Shoesmith, a hitman for hire, that forever has a soft spot in my heart for the way it covers societies approach to violence.
Well, I recently got the opportunity to write an opinion piece “I can’t stop rewatching this dark Australian comedy drama series on Disney Plus that hardly anyone knows about” for TechRadar about Mr Inbetween, which I really enjoyed writing. It got a pretty good reaction, especially from the Mr Inbetween community on Reddit.
Anyway, I though I’d share the article here because I enjoyed writing it. And here’s a little clip on how Ray dealt with a kid who had been bullying his daughter:
This video of a lady doing Tai Chi on a balance board popped up in my Instagram feed today and I’ve got to say – not bad at all! Her balance looks fantastic. Obviously, she’s also super flexible ( she looks like she’s adept at modern gymnastic ‘wushu’, not just tai chi, to me), but that has nothing to do with how well she’s balancing.
This balance board device looks like great fun to play with! I’ll have to find one. I like doing things like that that test my balance. My local park has a play area with a strange circular rotating… er… thing?… in it. When my kids were little I used to take them to the park to play on it, and I used to try and do tai chi on it while they jumped on it at the same time:
That thing is very hard to balance on, let alone walk around on while it’s moving. It goes surprisingly fast at times.
I was taught specific body-lightness training as part of my tai chi training, and it really helps with things like this. My teacher’s notes described it as giving you ‘better than normal balance’ and when I read that I thought it was a bit of an exaggeration, but once I got to that part of the training, I realised that this was a perfectly good description of what it gives you. The training involves a chi kung exercise (internal training) as well as doing the form with weights on your ankles (external training) then combing the two. It’s the sort of thing you have to concentrate on to have: Like a switch you can turn it on and off.
Better balance is one of the things I find that people come to tai chi for. The good news is that I think the whole process of learning the form gives you significantly better balance. The specific body-lightness I’m talking about is part of the whole training process and takes time to get to, as well as time to practice before you ‘get it’. Sadly, it’s not something I can just impart to people, because I would if I could. It’s damn useful.
Simon Thakur is the founder of Ancestral Movement, “An ecological approach to movement and mind-body practice, exploring ancient ancestral patterns of movement and awareness built into our bodies, rediscovering the power, grace and ease of natural movement and our bodies’ innate connection to the rest of the living world.”
In this episode we talk about many subjects including Yoga, Chinese Martial Arts, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Tai Chi, Shamanism and more!
Hello! Happy Year of the Snake, dear reader. On an occasion such as this is would normally be customary for a tai chi blog like mine to do a little post about the influence of the snake on tai chi, kung fu and Chinese culture in general.
Snake is, after all, one of the five main Shaolin kung fu animals, one of the 12 main xing yi animals and frequently appears as a menu item in Chinese restaurants, er no, sorry, I mean, appeared in Kung Fu Panda!
But, no! I’m not going to do that; partly because it’s such an obvious thing to do that I’ve done it before, and I hate being predictable, or at least repeating being predictable, but also because I’ve just recorded an excellent conversation for my next podcast with Australian national treasure and sometimes-Chinese-martial-arts-practitioner, Simon Thakur of Ancestral movement about finding your inner, ancestral animal, including, of course, the snake, and I just need to find the time to get on with editing it so I can get it out to you lovely people.
I think that what Simon says about our human connection to snake-style movement is probably more valuable than whatever I’ve got to say on the subject of our slithering cousin. So, I’ll leave the snake talk until the podcast comes out!
In the meantime, while you wait for that podcast to properly percolate (all the best things take time) I’ll leave you with a thought. “Tai Chi is more than the techniques, it’s the jins that make it interesting”.
If you listened to my last podcast with the esteemed Alan Wycherley of ‘In Defence of the Traditional Arts’, you might be forgiven for thinking that I’m all about training tai chi techniques. Now, while I’ve no objection to practicing a Repulse Monkey or a Part Wild Horse’s Mane (or two), or even a Snake Creeps Down, I definitely agree with the statement that tai chi is more than the moves. In fact, I think we can probably agree that tai chi applications aren’t that great as martial techniques. There are (shock!) other martial arts that have more effective techniques. Hello, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I’m looking at you. Hello, Choy Li Fut. Hello, Western Boxing. Hello, Muay Thai, stop hiding at the back! Yes, all these martial arts have techniques that I would probably put ahead of anything found in a tai chi form, regardless of style. They’re practical and effective. And yet, I practice tai chi. So, why is that?
What tai chi has, and emphasises over techniques, are the eight energies – the jins: Peng, lu, ji, an, etc.. What you are doing when you practice a tai chi form is emphasising energy changes using these eight over technique. Flowing from one to the other a bit like a river flowing along smoothly. Sometimes there are fast bits, sometimes there are slow bits, sometime the river turns one way or another, but its energy flow keeps going.
When I practice other martial arts, my emphasis is more on technique. When I practice tai chi I can relax and get more inside the movement and concentrate on the energy flow.
And of course, in tai chi push hands you get to interact your energy flow with the energy flow of another person in a live situation, and that’s extremely valuable for developing martial ability. Techniques are another thing.
Now, if the analogy of a river doesn’t work for you then think of something else… perhaps, a snake? Snakes can flow along smoothly, they can change direction sharply and they can be incredibly powerful or incredibly quick, as well as slow and suffocating. They’re a great example of energy changes.
In preparation for my next podcast allow me to recommend a documentary by professional paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin called Your Inner Fish. (He’s written a book of the same name, if you prefer to read about him). Snakes come out to play in episode two. Here you go:
My latest podcast with Alan Wychereley, who was as student of the late UK tai chi legend Dan Docherty inspired my listener/reader Steffan Stringer to track down Dan’s autobiography “Wild Colonial Boy” (I have to admit, I’d heard of this book before, but never read it, and in my mind it was always called “Wild Caledonia Boy”, which, I think, given the Scottish-centric design of the cover would have been a far better title!)
Steffan has written a review of the book on his blog, Blackwater Tai Chi, which is well worth a read.
The book’s blurb reads:
“In 1975, Dan Docherty, a young Scots law graduate and karate black belt, left Glasgow to spend nine years as a Hong Kong police inspector.
As well as serving as a detective and vice squad commander, he also took up Tai Chi and won the 5th Southeast Asian Chinese Full Contact Championships in Malaysia in 1980.
In 1985, he was awarded a postgraduate diploma in Chinese from Ealing College.
He travels extensively teaching Tai Chi and has written four books on the subject.”
When I started Tai Chi in the early 90s everybody had heard of Dan Docherty, and he was something of a big name, not only because of his competition success, but also because of his reputation for unmasking frauds. I remember him gaining a lot of notoriety for pouring a bottle of water over the head of an ethnically Chinese Qigong teacher who was doing seminars on Ling Kong Jin or “Empty force”. Dan’s reasoning was that if he could move people without touching them then he should be able to deflect the bottle without the need for physical contact. It didn’t work. He was also famous for “getting into it” with one of the Yang family representatives in the UK, who ended up leaving the UK after their encounter.
Sadly Dan Docherty died of complications from Parkinson’s disease in 2021. I never met Dan in real life, but his impact on the UK tai chi community continues to be felt long after his death. That’s probably the best legacy a tai chi teacher could hope for.
Also read: Phil Brown remembering Dan Docherty.
In the last episode of my podcast episode with Alan Wycherley about fantasy vs reality in tai chi we mentioned a subject that might have been unfamiliar to some of you – the ecological approach. This is a training method that is finding a lot of familiarity with BJJ right now, but I believe it has always been a part of tai chi training too, since tai chi contains push hands as a training method, which has the potential to be a free and playful exploration of movement.
Rather than try and explain the ecological approach myself, I thought it would be better to hear directly from the guy who made it famous in BJJ, Greg Souders. As you’ll discover, he’s not afraid to say controversial things about the learning method adopted by most BJJ academies!
So, here he is on a no punches pulled episode of the Grappler’s Perspective podcast. Have a listen and see what you think:
So, my podcast has appeared in Feedspot’s latest rankings for the Top 60 BJJ podcasts and the Top 15 Tai Chi podcasts (I’m number 7 and 3, respectively)
Thanks to everybody who has listened to The Tai Chi Notebook Podcast over the last couple of years! And, if you were wondering, I’ve got a new episode already recorded and coming out in a week or two…
Thank you FeedSpot.
I had a chat with Alan Wycherley from the In Defence of the Traditional Martial Arts YouTube channel for my podcast and the episode is now live. We talk about how Tai Chi can be used as a realistic self-defence system and Alan’s encounters with traditional martial artists from different kung fu systems.
The Tai Chi Notebook 