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.