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Source: www.greatrivertaichi.co.uk |
Tai
Chi is a beautiful art, no doubt about it. As with good Karate Kata or
Taekwondo forms, the transitions from one posture to the next can become, with
much practise, aesthetically pleasing to perform – and to watch. As with music
of a superior quality or as with great visual arts that have the power to draw
you toward them, there are no bystanders watching from off to one side when
great Tai Chi is being performed because the performance and its surrounding
always become one and whether someone watching is aware of it or not, the
onlooker always becomes part of the Tai Chi stream.
Tai
Chi was originally developed out of a series of combative postures. Yes, the
rhythm of the art is built around the transitions between the postures, and in
most cases nowadays, the speed of the transitions is about middling slow, an
unhurried pace but one that tends not to linger around one posture too long. So
the Yang Style 108 movement form may run in practise anywhere from about seven
to fifteen minutes or so. Yes, the postures are indeed connected by transitions
but often, especially in Tai Chi applied as a martial art, the transitions
themselves are just as important as the postures.
I’ve
heard it said – and have also experienced it – that the slower the pace, the
deeper the awareness, nurturing, maintenance and final issuing of internal
power, to the point where it seems ages for a practitioner to even pass through
the first few movements of a form. For someone watching this at 5:00 a.m. from
the window of a hotel room overlooking a park in Singapore, the experience
might be less than a wakeup call from the front desk downstairs than an
encouragement to press the snooze button and crawl back into bed. However, for
the person down in the park, the experience will probably feel like this –
1. A deep and sustained
root, first established while in a standing position, which now, due to the
extreme slowness of the pace, will carry on from posture to posture right up
until the closing movement. Moving too quickly, without the patient process of
establishing root, results in a skimming over the surface of what Tai Chi can
truly be. It might be pretty but there is no martial depth.
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Source: www.dietas.net |
2. An awareness not just of energy coursing through
the body but of the connectivity of the mind and body to the surroundings along
with the ability to source additional energy from the air, the trees, the sky,
the ground…An obvious extension of such awareness building is the development
of a sense of the currents and spirals that abound around a practitioner, so vital
to martial arts. Case in point: Aikido, and the plugging in, so to speak, of
the practitioner to the advance disturbance in both ki flow and air current
within the environment. The same
holds for ippon kumite in Karate practise. That’s why there is, at first,
absolute stillness at the brink of ippon kumite, time enough to read the
opponent’s intentions…before the attack. Yet another obvious example lies within
the art of Kenjutsu. Absolute stillness before the drawing of the sword, or
before moving from the first position. But I digress from Tai Chi…
3. A heaviness and fullness, especially in
the arms, and, paradoxically, a lightness in those same arms right out to the
fingertips, all of which are absolutely essential to high quality martial arts.
Some of the advanced internal instructors believe that it is unnecessary for
practitioners to constantly strike objects to develop an iron hand; heaviness
and fullness, they believe is all that is required.
4. A chance to massage the internal organs,
both physically and mentally. For example, moving all the organs within the
digestive conduit helps reduce stagnation, insuring proper balance and flow.
5. Time enough to consider and be aware of
every aspect of the Tai Chi Classics, and put them into practise down to the
smallest cell in the body. When a Tai Chi practitioner slips across a field of
postures at a good pace, that indeed is a healthy form of exercise. However, the
forms exist to teach you, and they should be listened to, right down to their
depths.
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Source: www.taichisurrey.co.uk |
6. Time enough to begin the long process of
developing an “iron” body. Again, some of the advanced instructors of internal
martial arts share the opinion that one doesn’t have to building a heavy set of
external muscles to withstand forceful blows; chi, both heavy and light, will
lead you to this state, plus specific internal exercises and some traditional
Chinese medicine.
7. Time enough for the mind to come to the
aid of the body and help heal injuries and illnesses, sometimes through
sustained work between just one posture and the next. Also time enough to work
on eliminating pain in various parts of the body. Some forms of pain can be
allowed to wander out of the body within a minute by certain states of mind and
the movement of chi.
8. Time enough to let go of time and operate
inside extended dimensions of time and space, essential as well for advanced
Aikido, Ba Gua, Judo, etc. I already covered that in example #2 but I am
tempted to repeat this bit of advice since it is, after all, fairly important.
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