The visual language of Tai Chi

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How do the images of Tai Chi we are presented with colour our thinking about it?

My previous post about Stoicism started a few things turning over in my brain about the ‘visual language’ of subjects and how that can influences our thoughts about them. For example, the visual language of Stoicism is really populated with old paintings and ancient stone statues of dead old men. It all feels very cold, remote and ‘serious’. When, in fact, the day to day reality of being a member of the Stoic school of philosophy could have been very different. Had we the ability to travel back in time to the original Stoa in Athens circa 3rd century BC, we may have found that the Stoics were lively, warm friendly debaters. Or maybe they weren’t? But either way their daily reality would have been made up of different visual images then the statues of old men we are left with today.

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Zeno of Citium, founder of Stoicism

It also made me wonder about the visual language of Tai Chi, and how that influences the way we think about it. A good way to see what the ‘visual language’ of a subject is, is to put its name into Google and do an image search.

If we put “Tai Chi” into Google Images we get a proliferation of black silhouettes of people doing Tai Chi postures in front of dramatic sunsets. It all looks very new agey and spiritual. To me this suggests the world sees Tai Chi as some sort of mental/spiritual wellbeing system, a bit like Yoga.

And well, maybe it is. But it’s also a lot of other things too.

Stoic Mindfulness and Resilience Training 2016

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Your chance to become more resilient to the ups and downs of life

One of the reasons that so many people look East to find ancient warrior traditions is that in the West they largely died out. Thankfully, writings and manuals of Western martial arts remain, and good work is being done to recreate them, but there is rarely an unbroken teacher/student link to the past. On the philosophical side of the arts, Stoicism is one of the ancient traditions of European culture that also died out, but has seen a huge resurgence in popularity recently.

I’ve always been interested in the philosophical side of Tai Chi – particularly Taoism and the writings of Lao Tzu. In fact, that was where my initial interest in the art began. I was looking for something that would help me become more resilient to the ups and downs of life, rather than a self-defence course. More recently I discovered Stoicism, and noticed how many parallels there are with “Tai Chi philosophy”. Stoicism is fundamentally different however, and perhaps more suited to a Western mind. It is especially useful for dealing with worry and anxiety, and puts a lot of emphasis on living a better, more meaningful life.

SMRT 2016 will be starting on Sunday 19th June and continues for four weeks. If you want to find out more about Stoicism then it’s a great opportunity to do so in a practical (and free!) way, since the course contains exercises to do on a daily basis. Click here to find out how to sign up.

As an example of Stoic philosophy, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, the famous Stoic, once wrote:

“Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.”

Qialance’s Top 15 Tai Chi blogs

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A while ago my blog got mentioned in the ‘Top 15 Tai Chi blogs‘ by Qialance. Well, the lovely Angelika from Qialance did a little interview with me the other day, which should go live on 15th June. I’ll update this post with the live link once it has.

In the meantime, check out her blog for some interesting thoughts on Tai Chi, like this post about why you should practice every day.

Edit: here’s the link to the interview

 

Studying the monkey in Chinese martial arts

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A visit to Monkey World gives me new insight into the name of one of the most famous Tai Chi sequences – Repulse Monkey.

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Yesterday we had a family trip to a local ape rescue centre called Monkey World. All the larger apes were suitably majestic, and the little ones suitable cheeky. The ones that stole the show though, were the white cheeked Gibbons. In terms of dancing through the trees these guys have got it made – they look so totally effortless with their arm hanging and swinging. They have no tails, so they swing in the classic way that humans attempt when using the monkey bars, but it looks so utterly effortless for them, because their arms are extrodinarily long when compared to the length of their body and their shoulder and wrist joints are different to ours. They swing one hand at a time, like this:

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Gibbon, swinging

 

That’s when it occurred to me that this must be where the famous Repulse Monkey sequence in Tai Chi forms gets its name.

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Me, doing Repulse Monkey

The “repulse” bit I’ve always thought was kind of obvious, because you’re pushing (or striking) something away, but I could never understand what was monkey-ish about this sequence, since you are used large extended postures, rather than what I’d come to associate with monkey styles of kung fu, which are usually full of small crouching postures and darting and rolling about. However, if you look at Gibbons swinging from branch to branch, it makes sense.

Of course, Gibbons are native to south China and were even kept as pets:

“Interactions between humans and gibbons have a long history in China, as reflected in the Chinese literature and art. Especially in early China, gibbons made the objects of many literary and artistic compositions.

The popularity of captive gibbons being kept as pets appears to go as far back as written history, although a proverb by the philosopher Huai-nan-tzû (died 122 B.C.) stated: “If you put a gibbon inside a cage, you might as well keep a pig. It is not because the gibbon is then not clever or swift anymore, but because he has no opportunity for displaying his abilities” (van Gulik, 1967, p. 40).”

An example of Gibbons in historical Chinese painting:

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Unknown artist from Southern Song Dynasty.

 

Moving away from Gibbons, one unique character I observed in all the apes was a kind of nonchalance. One Gibbon came to the edge of their enclosure, on the farthest out branch and hung there for a few minutes by one arm looking at the strange humans who had come to see her. They are really unhurried and unbothered by anything. The Chimpanzees on patrol walk the edge of their territory unconcerned with all the people watching. Apes don’t ever appear stressed or worried by thoughts – they just do. Perhaps they’re the ultimate masters of mindfulness.

XingYi, the great internal martial art from China, has Monkey (Hu) as one of its 12 animals. I often find myself doing this sequence in a hurried way, since the movements are inherantly quick and fast, but now I think I’m going to try and slow down a bit and add an element of nonchalance to the moves as well. I think to really get that monkey character right you need to appear unconcerned about the attacker – after all, a monkey can often retreat to the safety of the higher branches after engaging, a luxury other animals don’t have when hunting or defending themselves. I think this nonchalant feel is be a key element to being able to master the XingYi animal in the correct way.

 

The professor

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I can’t let the new documentary on Professor Cheng Man Ching, one of the early pioneers of Tai Chi in the West, slip out without giving it a mention on this blog.

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Much has already been said about it, so there’s not too much more to add, except that I haven’t seen it yet, and I might blog again after watching it, because it will probably stimulate some thoughts.

Cheng Man Ching is one of those contentious figures who splits opinion. By being one of the very few people in the US publicly teaching Tai Chi in the 1960s, and thanks to the gushing endorsement in books by his student Robert Smith, and his ability to push big, heavy Westoners around with comparative ease, Cheng very quickly achieved a big reputation.

 

Cheng modified the Yang Tai Chi form he learned from Yang Cheng-Fu, creating one of the first short forms of Tai Chi. His Tai Chi also had a distinctive look compared to his teachers – in (I believe) an effort to stick as closely as possible to the writings of the Tai Chi classics, he changed some of the postures slightly, adopting a more upright body, and a softer hand and arm position. Some would say his Tai Chi was too soft, and his influence is responsible for the typical ‘soft like a noodle’ style of doing Tai Chi often found in the West. But if you watch  him do his form, you can see that he looks solid as hell. He exudes the ‘peng’ quality of energy rising upwards and outwards, and being rooted in the legs.

Undoubtedly he was an example of what happens when a small fish in a big pond suddenly becomes the only fish in a very small pond, but he was also a skilled practitioner of Tai Chi. Of that there can be no doubt. Was he also a world class martial artists? No, probably not. Did his students put him on an unrealistic pedestal? Yes, undoubtedly they did. But that’s what happens with human beings. We’re like that with people we admire.

You can watch the trailer here:

Wave hands like clouds

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A look at the Cloud Hands movement of Tai Chi, and what it’s really all about

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Cloud hands, or ‘wave hands like clouds’ as it’s also known, is one of those classic Tai Chi movements that characterise the art. It’s done in slightly different ways in different Tai Chi styles. Take a look at the variations:

Master Yang Jun, (Yang Cheng Fu, Yang style):

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Master Chen Zhen Lei, (Chen style):

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Master Sun Ping, (Sun style):

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I’m not comparing myself to the masters above, but here’s a GIF of me doing it, since I have that on video I might was well add it to this post:

Me: (Old yang, also called Gu style)
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As you can see, the Yang style is more of a vertical arm block, the Chen style is more of a horizontal elbow strike while the Sun style has the palms facing outwards. It’s a case of different horses for different courses, but  while there are subtle differences between them, they all involve the common theme of stepping to the side while rotating the arms in circular motions (presumably like clouds on a windy day).

Martially speaking, I think of this movement as intercepting an opponent’s strike and throwing the attacker out, or applying a lock to their arm through the action of turning your waist. To the attacker it should feel like they’re putting their hand into a blender – it gets caught up and crushed and it shouldn’t feel easy to retract your arm once it’s trapped.

It’s easy for beginners to make the arms ‘flat’ in this posture – instead they need to be continually projecting outwards. I think of them as being like the antlers of a stag, or the branches of a tree – they grow outwards, and are slightly curved. If you’re going to intercept your opponents strike with this technique, then it’s going to help ‘catch’ their attack if the intent in your arms (your antlers) is to project outwards.

The real lesson of Cloud hands though is to turn the waist. It’s a common mistake to not turn the waist enough in Tai Chi, and I find that, for the beginning student, a breakthrough in this area often only comes about through a study of Cloud Hands as an isolated technique, repeated over and over. Notice that if you removed the stepping from Cloud Hands then it wouldn’t be a million miles away from the stationary silk-reeling exercises that go along with Tai Chi, with one hand performing a clockwise circle and the other an anticlockwise circle. Indeed, performing Cloud Hands repeatedly can serve a similar function to basic Silk Reeling exercises.

As it says in the Tai Chi classics, the body should be directed by the waist at all times, so as you turn from side to side in Cloud Hands (let’s not worry about the stepping for now) your arms should only be moving because your waist is moving. If your waist stops, then your arms should stop too. This especially applies at the crossover points, when you’ve turned all the way to the side and the arms swap position, so that the lower one becomes the upper one, and vice versa. This is the point that beginners usually drop the principle and use some isolated arm movement, instead of keeping it all coming from the waist. It’s usually a revelation to the student here that you need to turn the waist a little more than you think you do to keep it as the commander of the movement – you should feel this using muscles in your lower back you normally don’t reach.

Remember, in Tai Chi you’re looking to continually maintain a connection (a slight pull) from the toes to the fingers, with movement directed by the dantien like the spider at the centre of a web. If you keep this connection (or slight tension) and the waist control at these crucial crossover points in Cloud Hands then you’ll be well on your way to keeping it throughout your whole form performance.

Don’t push the river, listen to it instead

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Bruce Lee was onto something with his water analogies…

I recently read the phrase, “Don’t push the river, listen to it instead”, and it resonated deeply with me because it’s a great way of summing up my approach to jiujitsu’s rolling and tai chi’s push hands. The water analogy was famously used by Bruce Lee and also crops up a lot in the Tai Chi classics, for example “Chang Ch’uan [Long Boxing] is like a great river rolling on unceasingly.”

The flow of water is analogous to the flow of energy, or movement, when performing a Tai Chi form, or between two people engaged in a martial activity . In both jiujitsu and tai chi your ultimate goal is to ‘go with’ this flow in such a way that you come out on top. You want the opponent to be undone by their own actions.

In jiujitsu that might mean not using excessive strength to press home a collar choke from mount if your partner is defending it well, and switching to an armbar instead, then switching back to the collar choke (and hopefully getting it) when they defend the armbar.

In push hands it could mean not resisting your partner’s push and using Lu to let it pass you by, then switching to an armbar to capitalise on their over extension.

Of course, this is for when you’re engaged in the ‘play’ mode of both these arts, which is the mental space you need to occupy if you want to get better at either of them. This is the relaxed practice that nourishes the soul. It kind of goes without saying that in competition or in a self defence situation you’d be better off in Smash Mode. But when winning isn’t the only thing that’s important you need to open up your game a little and keep it playful. Or ‘listen to the river’ as the phrase has it. It takes a lot of expertise to be able to be that relaxed in a real situation, but as your experience in the art increase so too should your ability to remain relaxed under increasing amounts of pressure.

Rickson Gracie said, ‘you can’t control the ocean but you can learn to surf’ and that’s the heart of what I’m talking about.

To be aware of the way the river is flowing, and not waste futile energy pushing it in a direction it doesn’t want to go you need a degree of self awareness, and the ability to be aware of the situation you are in. And to get that you need to slow down and stay calm. Or, as the ancient Taoists said:

“Do you have the patience to wait

Till your mind settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving

Till the right action arises by itself?”
Lau Tzu, Tao-te-Ching

Ironborn: Grayson Perry Hard Man

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Men of martial arts! If you’ve ever stopped to wonder why you spend your free time getting punched in the face for fun, you might want to watch this.

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There are lots of articles written about women and martial arts, but relatively fewer about why men do it, since, you know, they dominate the martial arts, so why bother writing about them? I therefore like it when I read an article that looks at what it is that drives men specifically to do martial arts for purely selfish reasons, since I often wonder why I’ve had this lifelong attraction to martial arts myself. I know there’s The Professor in the Cage, but I’ve not read it because I’ve heard it takes a reductionist argument that everything comes down to evolution. I think it’s more complex and nuanced than that.

Then last night Grayson Perry came out (ha!) with a TV programme that addressed this very issue. Playing up to stereotypes, he went to the North East to find the toughest of men the UK had to offer, the Ironborn, to see what makes them tick. But ignoring the obvious problems of playing up to caricature, the programme is excellent. I was going to blog about it, but my friend Paul Boman (who comes from the North East) beat me to it, so you might as well read what he wrote instead here. To be honest, he wrote it up better than I could anyway.

If you’re in the UK (or know how to browse with Tor) you can watch the whole program on demand here.

Rollback – the unfinished technique

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Here’s the best thing to do after you’ve applied Tai Chi’s rollback.

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One of the things that comes up a lot in Tai Chi push hands training that’s geared towards the martial side of Tai Chi is what to do with the opponent after you’ve done Rollback. Rollback uses Lu energy to lead the opponent in and control them, with their arm kind of locked, but not to the point where they’d tap. In the Yang form there’s no ‘finish’ from this position – after controlling them you strike with Press (Ji). This is ok, but to me it seems like you’re giving up the advantage you have over them because of the control that rollback affords in exchange for a quick strike. It looks like this:

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There are several alternative things you can do – turn it into a push away (into a wall?), turn it into a takedown where you keep the pressure on the arm and shoulder, forcing them into the ground, or you can go for my preferred answer, which is to turn it into a standing arm bar as shown in this video:

Key things to note:

1. He puts his elbow over the top of their arm and makes sure the locked arm is snug in his armpit.

2. On the locked arm the little finger edge is pointing to the sky.

3. In the finish position he rotates his wrists around the opponent’s wrist so that both his thumbs point upwards – this gives you maximum leverage on the arm.

4. Once the opponent is controlled you can look around and watch out for further danger from somebody else.

I like this solution because it’s a really powerful arm lock and you can move into it from the end of the Tai Chi rollback posture fairly easily. You can feel it would be easy to break the arm from here, and the opponent is pretty much helpless. Obviously, in a self defence situation the level of force you exert needs to match the severity of the threat you feel you are under, so don’t go breaking the arm of people who have innocently patted you on the back, and also take care of your training partners. Don’t break your toys!

 

Ruby Wax – Frazzled, live

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A Tai Chi teacher reviews Ruby Wax’s latest show

My wife and I went to see Ruby Wax doing a promotional tour for her new book, A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled.

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After her previous life as a TV personality ended up with her crashing and burning into a breakdown and rehab, Ruby looked to science to provide the answers to depression and found them in mindfulness, which seemed to be one of the few alternative therapies that showed real scientific results of success. She got a masters degree in Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy from Oxford University and went on to write Sane New World about her experiences, and got an OBE for her efforts to remove the stigma that surrounds mental illness, and have it accepted as an illness, just like any other. I have not (so far) suffered from a mental illness, so I did feel like a bit of a fraud sitting amongst the audience, but I have meditated and felt the benefits of doing so, so I was interested in seeing her show. Tai Chi, after all, is a mindfulness-based practice, but more of that later.

Firstly, the show was at the Playhouse in Weston-super-mare, which is a seaside town, so you’re probably conjuring up images of sunny Brighton in your head. Stop. It’s not like that. When he heard I was going to Weston at the weekend one of my friends said – “I really like Weston because it can’t get any worse. It’s kind of at the bottom, and doesn’t pretend to be anything its not.” That’s about it, really. The beach is very long and sandy, and there are lots of shops that sell seaside tat, like candy floss, sticks of rock and buckets and spades. There’s also a lot of drinking. By 5.00pm in the evening on a sunny but cold April day several packs of bald, intimidating, tattooed men and shouty, even more intimidating, drunken women were trawling up and down the strip looking for the next table to land on to keep the party going. Occasionally two packs would meet, and the outcome would be pretty horrendous.

In the midst of all these people blatantly doing their best to drink themselves into oblivion and escape from reality, we were going on a talk on mindfulness, which is blatantly an attempt to return to it.

The show itself took the form of a question and answer first half, where Ruby was ‘interviewed’ by her friend (whose name I can’t remember, but she used to be in Grange Hill when she was 14) who asks her a series of clearly prepared questions about mindfulness that she answers in an entertaining way while trying to make it not look like these are rehearsed answers. We all play along, because that’s what you do. There was a little bit of audience participation where she’d get us to discover our senses by clapping our hands, or sniffing the scented flier she’d thoughtfully left on each seat.

In the interval she signed books then returned to the stage for a second half where the audience got the chance to ask her questions. Interestingly, most of the questions revealed that the audience hadn’t really been paying attention to the first half, as everybody seemed to have a view on mindfulness which wasn’t exactly the same one that Ruby had. “That’s not really what I said…”, was a common refrain.

I think that’s often the problem with ‘mindfulness’ – it gets treated like any other ‘thing’ on offer to distract us from doing the hard work of coming back to face our lives as they actually are, which is what it’s really about. Instead we want another book to read, another movie to watch, or another phone to check. Everybody already has an idea of what mindfulness means to them, and it’s going to take a lot of mindfulness to change it.

Anyway, Ruby disappeared off into the Weston night, and so did we, which was utterly terrifying as by the time we left the theatre the walking dead were out in full force, tottering from pavement to road and back again, and then into a bush to be sick. There wasn’t a police man in sight. They’d either given up on Weston and abandoned it to the shadows, or they were all too scared to come out of the police station. We scampered back to our hotel and hid in our hotel room until the shouting and screaming stopped, then we could sleep.

I did enjoy Ruby’s show. It wasn’t anything amazing. Nothing extraordinary happened but, as she repeatedly said, a life without highs and lows, where you just maintain an active presence is really our best hope of being sane and healthy. The mindfulness practice she introduced, where you focus on your senses, and just keep coming back to them instead of letting your thoughts steal ‘you’ away and keep you captive, reminded me a lot of Tai Chi. This is what Tai Chi practice is – if you let yourself float away in your thoughts while doing the form then you lose half the benefit of practicing Tai Chi. You need to be in your body, feeling its movements, aware of its fluctuations and shifts. When you get caught up in your thoughts about Tai Chi you stop doing Tai Chi, so you need to keep coming back to the body.

It says in chapter 3 of the Tao Te Ching (an ancient book of Chinese wisdom, which has influenced Tai Chi)

“Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties
their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens
their bones.”

Again, it’s the idea of getting out of your head, and into your body, if you want to successfully govern yourself.

I imagine a lot of Buddhists and Taoists have their nose put out of joint by the popularity of mindfulness, which has essentially taken the core bit of their practice and stripped out the religious elements into a kind of Buddhism-Light. But so what? If it works, do it.

Anyway, I bought her book. I’m sure it will distract me for long enough until there’s another one on mindfulness for me to buy. Or I might even sit down, shut up and practice it. Let’s see what happens.