Why Do You Study Tai Chi, Xingyi or Bagua -- Peeling the Layers of the Onion
June 27, 2024
When I teach, I try to give a lot of detail, especially about the body mechanics that make the internal arts so powerful. Sometimes, however, it's not good to overwhelm students who are just learning a form. We all occasionally need to take it one layer at a time when it comes to complexity.
I spent many years studying Taiji, Xingyi and Bagua without being taught some crucial details. The reason I wasn't taught it? Because my teacher didn't know the details. A lot of times, we think our teachers are masters because they say they are. Especially before the internet, there was no real way to know for sure. We just took a teacher at his word. That's not enough anymore.
The truth is, the internal arts can be as simple or as complex as you want them. If you want to do them for health and fitness, you can just learn the choreography and that might be enough for you.
I try to start every student's learning with the six key body mechanics that I identified after studying Yang style for more than a decade and then studying Chen style. In Yang style, there is a famous list of ten requirements for tai chi, but in my opinion, they are not the most important things at all. Let's face it, does it really matter if your head feels as if it is suspended on a string if you have no ground path or peng jin? It might be important in the overall scheme of things, but in my opinion, if you don't have ground and peng working together, it doesn't matter at all. But the ground path and peng jin are not included in the list of top ten things that are taught most often in Tai Chi.
I think at the bare minimum you need to know how these mechanics and principles are used in each movement:
- The ground path
- Peng jin
- Opening and closing the kua
- Dan T'ien rotation
- Whole-body movement
- Silk-reeling.
If you understand these six, you can begin doing quality internal arts. And you can step into any teacher's Taiji class and you might even know more than the teacher. But these six concepts are just part of the big picture. When you keep learning, you keep peeling back more layers of the onion. You learn how to be in a relaxed state of readiness. You learn to sink your "chi." You learn how to close the legs. You can also get deeper into the kua, and learn the subtleties of shifting weight. You learn how to lift the energy to the crown of the head.
Something might seem like a "small detail," but it could have a big difference on quality. For example, when you see someone shift their weight from one leg to the next, are their hips moving a lot in space, or are they using the kua to shift weight? The difference between those two concepts just might be a big difference between "external" and "internal" movement. Look at YouTube taiji videos and you see a lot of hips moving in space. You see hips turning in ways that throw you off-center. You see knees swimming in space, too, and knees collapsing during movements. You see stress being put into the knees when the person is stepping or shifting weight forward.
If you want to get deeper still, you can start thinking of the jin that is in each movement -- the "energy" and the intent that particular movement has. Within one movement, such as "Buddha's Warrior Attendant Pounds Mortar," many different "jin" can manifest from one part of the movement to the next.
That's one of the reasons I think it's important to learn the self-defense applications of movements. It's a great way to learn the true intent of a movement, and the energy and body method used.
"Flash the Back" from the Chen 19 is a movement we worked on in class yesterday. Now, if you just learn the choreography, you step the left foot back and chop the right hand down between your legs. But if you go a bit deeper, you feel the movement in the body, including the closing of the torso and ribs, that you would feel if you were doing a hip throw on an opponent.
Go a little deeper and you feel the legs closing and you connect the movement of the hand with the turning of the Dan T'ien with the closing of the torso and the spiraling/closing through to the foot.
So I tend to teach the movements first in a simple way, but soon I fill in details. I do this for two reasons. For one thing, I am interested in the detail, and when I teach, I'm also practicing.
Reason number two is because maybe a few months from now, you'll be working on a movement and suddenly "DING!" -- the lightbulb will turn on in your mind, and you'll think, "Oh, THAT's what he meant." And you will take another step forward in your insight. This has happened to me many times. The steps forward often happen when I am alone, practicing a movement and "feeling" through the body mechanics.
Actually, there is a third reason I teach the details: because it took so long for me to find teachers that knew those details. I want to save my students a little time and a lot of money.
But it doesn't matter what depth you learn if you don't practice. All these mechanics are difficult because they disrupt the way we have learned to move. Of course it's difficult. As Chen Xiaowang says, "If Taiji were easy, everyone be master!"
It doesn't really matter why you study these arts. Fitness, self-defense, self-discipline, goal-setting, health -- there are plenty of reasons. And sometimes your reasons might change. I didn't realize Taiji was such a great fighting art when I first began studying. The more I learned, the more fascinated I was at the self-defense applications of these gentle movements.
But step one was simply learning the movements -- one by one, in order, and knowing where my hands go and where my feet go without messing up. Just practicing the movements can be good for your health, flexibility, leg strength and concentration.
And if you want to go forward after learning the basic movements, this is a pool that gets deeper the farther you dive down. I have been practicing Taiji, Xingyi and Bagua for 37 years and I'm still working, trying to learn more, and trying to improve as I practice and teach. And sometimes, when I learn something of higher quality, I change the way I have been doing things. It's what you have to do if you are going to develop your skills. It's all part of the process of peeling back the layers of this internal onion.
Contact me if you have any questions about practicing or about what you should study next.
--by Ken Gullette
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