Please note that there will be [NO TAI CHI CLASS] on

Thursday | Oct 9

Monday | Oct 13

We will return to your usual Tai Chi programming on Thursday, October 16. For those in the midst of their four-week beginner specials, an extra two classes will be added at the end of your month.

[M]

- Mitch

After the practice, there was much laughter, which is a good sign that everyone kept to the prompt well.

These practices range from formal drills within strictly defined patterns to completely freestyle explorations of flowing connection with your partner. The formal drills help to ingrain important principles, shapes, and ways of responding to input from your partner. Freestyle practice then allows you to test your abilities in a less formulaic engagement.

Both formal and informal practices can be approached either from a standpoint of harmonious cooperation or playful competition.

In the former, you and your partner are working together to establish and contain a beautiful, connected, flowing pattern. In the latter, you are revealing for your partner the weaknesses in their structure, the gaps in their patterns, and otherwise helping them discover where there is work to be done by putting them off balance and, once “fajin” ability is developed, bouncing them off of you or making them jump away.

Regardless of the approach, push hands interactions are characterized by lightness of touch and continuous, flowing movements.

| Revealing the Unseen |

There will be aspects of your Tai Chi that are not obvious in individual practices, but present themselves for examination during interactions with a partner.

Some of these will be simple blockages in your physical structure. A part of the body that lacks the flexibility to move through a certain path required by the pattern, for instance.

Other times, push hands will reveal a tendency to collapse, meaning that one part of the body moves too much when trying to follow or receive your partner’s movement, causing the alignment of your shape to become compromised.

And perhaps most importantly, push hands will reveal how your body responds to potentially disruptive input. Do you fight back or freeze (“ding”)? Do you flee from the pressure (“diu”)? Ultimately, push hands serves as a means of gradually purging these responses from the body, replacing them with the grand principle of “stick-adhere-join-follow”, which represents the harmonizing third option.

(See =Tai Chi Principles: A Novice Primer= for an explanation of these terms.)

| Friendly Competition |

It is good fun to try off-balancing or bouncing your partner, when doing so has been established in the parameters of the practice session. And it is a necessary exploration in order to develop the qualities and abilities on the Yang side of the art.

For some, this will be challenging to engage with simply because they are not competitive by nature, dislike confrontation, or have experienced difficult timeline events associated with physical violence. For others, the competitive aspect is overly intoxicating, and they will struggle to avoid trying too hard to “win”. For both types, push hands has the potential to serve as a balancing practice.

Push hands is not sparring in the strict sense of the term. We do not use striking, tripping, throwing, or joint locking in this practice. It is meant to assist you in developing the qualities of body and Being associated with Tai Chi practice. It is not meant to directly translate into combat ability (without the addition of truly martial practices into your training).

Therefore, when approached sensibly, push hands should be a safe practice for most practitioners.

The higher purpose of push hands is not to off-balance or discharge your partner, though it is true that these effects will arise and become available for you to manifest as you progress in the art, and it is fun to explore using these abilities. But if overcoming your partner becomes your primary goal in practice, that ingredient will spoil the soup.

(This is evidenced by the interactions featured in so-called push hands competitions, which largely devolve into wrestling and do not correspond to how we approach push hands in Black Feather.)

| Example Videos |

This first video is one my teacher, Sifu Yau-Sun Tong, often shows to introduce new students to the concept of push hands. It gives a fairly agreeable overview, and features footage of Ma Jiangbao, son of the famous Wu Style Grandmaster Ma Yueh Liang.

This next one features some of the basic formal practices that novice students learn in the Black Feather Tai Chi class, as demonstrated by Master Chen Zhenglei.

Here, Masters Chen Xiaowang and Chen Xiaoxing of the Chen Village tradition demonstrate their school’s version of the “Four Hands” pattern, an intermediate formal pattern.

And finally, something to intrigue you and arouse both your wonder and suspicions. For it is difficult to discern between the astounding effects that real masters can manifest and the pretending of charlatans, at least until you have enough experience to be able to *feel* the interaction you are watching in your own body.

Here is the aforementioned late Grandmaster Ma Yueh Liang of the Wu Style, at an advanced age, demonstrating what it looks like when there is a large disparity in ability between the two people involved in a push hands interaction.

He is, indeed, the real deal. What you call a “High Hand” in the art.

And one more for you, where he demonstrates some more formal interactions.

How form training is understood and incorporated may vary between styles and schools. This post will explore how Tai Chi forms are approached in the Black Feather Academy, with a particular emphasis on novice level concepts.

|Training|

Although many novices begin their Tai Chi journey with the understanding that they will be learning forms, seldom do they realize that form training is the most advanced of the individual practices in the art.

For the novice, the forms are initially an entirely external endeavor, trying to learn the shapes, the movements, the sequence. And this is challenging enough for most! There is much to learn and remember, and those without a background in dance or other forms of choreography will often require a great deal of effort simply to arrive at a suitable approximation of the external movements.

But this phase represents only the very start of the journey. Really, it more resembles packing and preparing for the journey to come! For one must have some basic familiarity with the form in order to practice it at all.

Once that familiarity is established, however, the journey can really begin. At this point, you can use the movements of the form to practice qualities and principles. You take what you learn about Tai Chi theory, what you learn to experience from doing the basic exercises and drills, and you seek to invest those ideas and qualities into your form.

Working with these qualities is already challenging in the simple movements or static positions used in the basic exercises, and applying them to the more complex and varied context of the form is more challenging still. The best course of action is usually to deliberately emphasize one bit at a time (for example, keeping the feet relaxed as much as possible throughout the form), but as you advance and embody these qualities more deeply, you will be able to display more of them simultaneously.

In this way the form becomes your chief training tool for integrating the various qualities and principles you are cultivating. However, for the novice practitioner, I tend to stress that the majority of your training time is better spent practicing the basic exercises, as these are more accessible to your skill level, help you develop your abilities more rapidly, and will ultimately aid you in learning the forms as they become more relevant to your practice.

In the beginning, simply build your familiarity with the forms and try your best. The fortunate thing is that Tai Chi schools seldom teach many forms, and usually only emphasize one set at a time appropriate to the student’s level. So you will see the same set again and again, and have ample opportunity to gain an impression.

|Meditation|

Meditation is a rather loaded word that evokes different ideas for different people, according to their familiarity with the various schools of spiritual practice, as well as different practices that they themselves may have undertaken at one point or another in their journey.

Some practitioners use the word meditation to mean a very particular practice or state achieved through practice requiring a long period of dedicated work to attain. Others use the word broadly to describe many practices which emphasize certain qualities or states of mind, typically with the goal of developing these capacities.

I tend to use the word more in its general definition, as a type of practice rather than a specific state or practice. But I also use the word seldom because of the confusion which can result from its various interpretations.

Getting to the point, however, one can view Tai Chi practices in general as having a meditative aspect, meaning that certain states and qualities of mind are desirable for practice, and can be developed through training. Form practice then adds a sense of flow and journeying that can enhance this meditative experience.

That said, the serious practitioner will likely find that a separate undertaking of practices which emphasize qualities such as mental stillness enhances their Tai Chi significantly, just as the athlete undertakes strength and conditioning practices to improve the physical capacities upon which their sport relies.

|Tradition|

The forms connect us to the practitioners who have come before us in the art. This continuity has implications on a spiritual and ancestral level which I will not expound on at present, but suffice it to say that the forms are handed down like precious family heirlooms, and ought to be treated with the sanctity that such an heirloom merits.

This is particularly true if you have had the good fortune of learning the forms directly from an accomplished teacher, as they are sharing their work in the art with you, and preparing you to continue that work yourself. Doubly true if you intend on being a teacher yourself and sharing that work with others.

This view of tradition matters more for me than the cultural context out of which Tai Chi was born. The art was born in China, but it was also borne out of that land long since. We as practitioners ought to have gratitude for the cultural origins of the art, but it is not necessary to affect an overly Chinese aesthetic. That said, I do not think it is wrong to delight in the Chinese roots of the art, particularly if that cultural context truly resonates with you, or is part of your heritage or circumstance.

My own teacher is very proudly Chinese, and he has introduced me to a great deal of Chinese culture during the years I have been learning with him. However, I consider this to be more important as a component of learning Tai Chi from him specifically, rather than a requirement for learning Tai Chi in general. This Chinese influence will have its echoes in the experience of learning Tai Chi with the Black Feather Academy, but I also intend for my school to represent my own cultural heritage (Atlantic Canadian), and function as an entity within the context of the land where it resides.

The seed came from China, but it has grown in the soil of the West.

Today I encouraged my dear colleague EL to try maxing out on Rack Pulls at the physiotherapy clinic where we work. We had just taken our good employer JS through the process a week prior, to assist in convincing her of the safety and utility of our new strength training equipment.

EL has a good understanding of the basic pattern for deadlifts, but I got the impression from speaking with her that she has never gone through a serious period of training the movement.

On one hand, I was simply curious how much she could lift. On the other hand, I suspected she was probably stronger than she thought she was, and that it would be very satisfying to assist her in discovering that. (Plus, if I happen to awaken a sudden desire to embark on a strength training journey in a friend, all the better, I say!)

Admittedly, it didn’t take all that much coaxing to get her to try. I merely floated the suggestion (in the guise of an eventuality) a few times over the past couple weeks that we should see how much she could lift, and eventually circumstances aligned such that it happened.

And EL lifted an impressive 185lbs! Not bad, I say!

Then, a little miracle of strength training happened.

CC, one of my physiotherapy colleagues who was watching the spectacle (which had gathered a small crowd of staff by the time of its zenith), declared that she wanted to be the next to try. She managed a solid 135lbs before bowing out (though it was clear to me that she was still stronger than that). And then JM, who works on the front desk and had previously assessed the bar alone to be very heavy when it first arrived, joined the party and lifted 95lbs!

So, my initial desire to have JS try her hand on the barbell last week resulted in four women at our clinic who are not regularly engaged in barbell training all testing their max rack pull! Each one of them added inspiration to the next. It was catching.

And I thought about how empowering it can be to show people that they are actually much stronger than they give themselves credit for, and that engaging with the tools of strength training doesn’t need to be intimidating.

This whole event brought me great joy.

Yin and Yang represent the apparent duality expressed in the material world. This is seen in such pairings as light-dark, hot-cold, up-down, and the like.

Yin refers to the “negative” category of things. Negative does not mean bad, just as the negative side of a magnet is not morally inferior to the positive side, and zero is not evil compared to one. Yin governs things like darkness, cold, receptiveness, softness, calm, etc.

Yang refers to the “positive” category of things. Again, not a judgement or value statement. Keep that firmly in mind. Yang governs things like light, heat, assertiveness, firmness, vigor, etc.

These paired qualities are part of a rich tradition of Chinese philosophy called Daoism, which has many forms and is associated with many spiritual and physical health practices.

The art of Tai Chi Quan is ultimately the quest to cultivate the balance of Yin and Yang within one’s being, both physical and otherwise. It is a quest for *Harmony*.

|SONG|

Pronounced like the English word “song”.

Song (sometimes anglicized as “sung”) is part of the core triad of Tai Chi principles. They are expressed as simple words or phrases, but represent profound concepts that a student will continually refine and redefine as their practice deepens over time.

The Chinese word means something like “relax”. While this does reflect the meaning on a surface level, we tend to use the word “release” in our practice. What we are releasing is unnecessary tension in the body.

For most of us, our bodies harbour an unfortunate amount of stiffness and tension. What we do with our bodies, what we neglect to do with our bodies, emotional timeline events (trauma et al.), habits of gesture and expression, daily stress and anxiety, and many other apparent and hidden factors all leave their residue in our flesh.

And that residue accumulates over time. We experience discomfort or pain, we lose flexibility, we become progressively corralled into a narrow range of available physical movements and stereotyped behaviours.

Tai Chi practices seek to melt down this stiffness, clear the body of these residues, and gradually give rise to a body that is capable of a rich range of movements and self-expression, feels graceful and limber, and is generally more pleasant to abide in.

The cultivation of qualities like Song is accomplished through consistent practice over long periods of time. Though this may seem daunting to the prospective novice, the rewards that arise along the long path will provide much incentive to continue, and are themselves worth striving for.

|PENG|

Pronounced like “pung”.

Peng is the quality of fullness in the body. It is a quality that inflates the softness achieved through cultivating Song, giving it strength and integrity. Much like a well-inflated balloon, Peng implies expansion in all directions, but also suppleness and springiness.

|ZHONG DING|

Pronounced like “Jong Ding”.

Zhong Ding is typically translated as “Central Equilibrium”. It is the balancing of Yin and Yang within a being. At a novice level, the understanding of this principle will pertain to being able to maintain one’s balance and physical alignment, as well as maintaining emotional composure in the face of challenge.

As a student matures down the path of cultivation, the term will come to be associated with harmony and spiritual equanimity. These are very easy words to say, but qualities that are very seldom attained in truth. (I certainly lay no claim to their attainment, myself!) Nonetheless, for students who want to incorporate their Tai Chi into their spiritual practice, these qualities serve as worthy ideals for which to strive.

|SPIRALS|

Tai Chi movement is characterized by curved and winding patterns. We gradually cultivate a way of moving that is smooth, flowing, and connected.

There are two major types of spirals that are expressed in practice. The first consists of the paths your body takes through space as you move. The second is contained within the body, and is expressed by the body itself twisting and winding as you move from one posture to the next.

Spiral movements cultivate health and integrity through the muscular and fascial networks in the body, wringing tension from the frame and unlocking the segments of the body so that they can move with freedom and coordination.

|NO DIU, NO DING|

Diu is pronounced like “dee-oh”, and Ding is pronounced simply like “ding” (as in “ding-dong”).

The concepts of Diu and Ding represent undesirable qualities which arise in our bodies during practice, and which we seek to gradually purge. They are most obvious in the context of push hands (partner practice).

Diu arises when you break connection with the partner, as would occur if you retreated suddenly away from your partner’s advance. Instead of following and flowing with your partner’s movement, the retreat creates space that your partner is able to flow into, further compromising your own position.

Diu is an expression of “flight”.

Ding arises if you clash with your partner, causing the interaction to lock up. In this instance, instead of following and flowing with the partner an attempt to force the other person to move in a particular way or a heavy-handed attempt to off-balance them causes your body to stiffen up. This creates an opportunity for a skillful partner to put you off balance, but more importantly prevents you from cultivating flowing movement and a graceful body.

Ding is an expression of “fight” or “freeze”.

These undesirable qualities can also arise in your body during individual practices, though they can be harder to detect. Parts of your body that are behaving in a “floppy” or disconnected way during movement are expressing Diu. The parts that are stiffened up or stuck together, unable to conduct flowing movement, are Ding.

|STICK-ADHERE-JOIN-FOLLOW|

Instead of Diu and Ding, we attempt to cultivate a third option. When engaged in partner practices, we follow the principle of Stick-Adhere-Join-Follow.

At a basic level, this means that your movements should flow along with your partners. You learn how to flow into their “empty” places by expanding. You learn how to lure them into intentional emptiness yourself. Gradually, you learn to connect your body to your partner’s, which allows you to gain control over their balance without resorting to overpowering them.