Taijipedia

I’m shamelessly ripping off Stephen Covey. This week’s big idea is “Purpose”. Taiji training has to have an aim, a goal, a point to the training. Before you start, you should have an idea what you’d like to achieve, you should decide on your purpose.

Purpose focuses your training. It’s your own personal Taiji google

Purpose will focus you in a way that “just doing the training” cannot. In fact, it’s like your personal Taiji-sphere Google search term. If you’re interested in healing a back, then that intention will naturally lead you to filter out any information relevant to healing, exactly like Google brings back the most relevant information to your search term.

Imagine what it’d be like if you were searching for “blue widgets” but had to wade through all the information on the web. Given enough time you’ll find it, and you’ll also learn a lot of other cool stuff in the meantime. Howevever if all you wanted to do is heal your back, that’s a lot of time sifting through material that’s not helping you achieve your purpose.

Purpose applies at all levels of training.

Your high level purpose for training Taiji might be healing a damaged back, or improving your health, or it might even be curiosity. You’ve probably already got one of these if you’re training.

You can also drill down to a finer level, and get more specific, to a purpose of training a movement, a posture, or an awareness of a certain feeling within the body.

You can make it finer still, by making your purpose to train a specific skill, such as body connection, relaxation, or specifically train a limb or joint so that it is strong enough to let you do the form comfortably.

There’s also a ripple effect, your finer detailed purposes will all naturally lean towards helping you achieve your high-level purpose. The filter will apply at all levels of your training, making you focus on the information that will get you the results you want.

With a purpose you know that everything you train will be helping you achieve it.

It’s a way to ensure that you make progress as quickly as you can towards your goal and the easiest way to get one is to start your Taiji training knowing what you want to achieve in mind.

For your next bit of Taijiquan instruction, here are the details of the footwork on Part The Wild Horse’s Mane (posture 2). The reason why we used Greeny for this is because his size 12 flippers would make it easier to see how the feet are placed. The lines on the floorboards help you see how the feet are placed relative to each other. This detail is important as it really makes the balance of the posture work, as well as making sure you don’t put any twisting strain on the knees, which is common for this Taijiquan posture.

If you can, find a place where there are straight lines on the floor so you can practise the Taijiquan walk.  It’ll really help with getting the details on this posture together.

Posture 2 of the Yang Taiji 24 form. This picks up where The Opening of Taiji left off. This Taijiquan posture is done to a count of five so you can “join the dots” as you’re learning it. Each movement has a rhythm, and the count expresses the rhythm to make it easier to learn and remember.

It really helps to break down any movement in Taijiquan that can be broken down into chunks that you can do to a count. That way rather than having to remember the whole Taijiquan movement, all you need to do is just remember the “dots” as it were and it makes the form a lot easier to learn.

Back to basics! Here’s the first in our series of videos on the Yang Taiji 24. We’ve kept it short so you can watch it easily again and again.

The opening of  Taijiquan is a movement that you should use to centre and ground yourself, the slight sinking of the knees and the gentle rise and fall as the hands go up and down are there to help you slip into a flow state that is so important in Taijiquan practise.  You can also use this movement as a qigong (They call it “threading the nine pearls”) exercise and a very effective one it is too.

The emphasis of this Taijiquan posture is not the movement, but the state that you are in when you do the movement.  This the emphasis of this Yang Taiji 24 opener is not what is going on outside yourself, but what is internal.

The second video Greeny took on more advanced ways to practise moving from your core.  If you’re already moving from your centre, here’s a few things to think about to develop the idea a little further.  It’s worth noting the way the creases on Greeny’s t-shirt move.  You can tell the way his centre is moving from the way the creases arrange themselves.  Enjoy!

Continuing the theme of connecting to centre started in this post on the movement from centre cliche,  here’s a quick video Greeny put together to give you some simple ideas on how to practise this connection.

The ideas he’s going through are the important thing, not the movement, as you can take that idea that he’s getting at and put it into your own practise, whatever your style of taiji is.

Hope you enjoy it and till next time!

You’re finally going to do a solo practise session

You’ve got up early, your mind is full of new bits of things to practise. It’s exciting, you gotta start somewhere right? And you’re starting today, now, maintenant, aujourd’hui. You get ready, you breathe..

And your mind goes blank

For the life of you, you can’t remember what you’re trying to practise. It’s like all that momentum you built up suddenly hits a wall as your brain has a hissyfit and forgets everything you might have learnt about Taiji. You might start thinking that you’re a poor student, and that you need to practise harder, attend more classes and so on.

It’s not your fault. It’s your brain’s

You see, the brain is an associative organ. It will associate the movement with the training hall you’re in, the presence of a teacher and also, you’ll get a lot of cues to the movement from the people around you.

When you practise on your own, all the hooks and cues your brain depends on to kickstart the form just aren’t there anymore. It can’t make that first leap into the movement because none of the things it needs to get going are there.

So how do you get over this hump? It’s rather demoralising not being able to start.

You just need the first step

Get the first move of the form so well understood that you could do it blindfolded standing on your head locked in a cage underwater. You have to remember the first move and the rest will start to follow.

Find a place to practise, and always face the same way when you start. Your brain will make associations with the room all over again, and it’ll be easier to start.

You also need to give it a bit of time for your brain to make the associations with the new place you’re practising in. Anytime you start doing your own training, the first two or three sessions are going to be spent re-orienting yourself to the new surroundings. Even if you spend a lot of time just thinking what comes next, it’s not wasted time. You’re building associations in your brain, you are training. You’re just not training quite what you think you are. Stick with it and before you know it you’ll be doing the form.

It’s an old cliché of Taijiquan. You hear teachers all over the world honking on about this again and again.  “Move from Center!”

But what does it mean?

In theory, it’s easy to understand this, the whole body is connected, and so if you move your centre (or the dan tien) the rest of you will inevitably move.

Of course, when you practise your Taijiquan, it’s a totally different ball game. Most of the time when you first try to move from your centre, you move from just about every other part of you.  You start the Yang Taiji 24 with the best of intentions, but all you really get is a bunch of rather vague movements that are unidentifiable as any form you might have been taught.

So, you’re scratching your head. I certainly did, right up until the point I thought that I’d been conned. I really thought the old Taijiquan master who made that principle up was looking down on all of us trying to do it and laughing his head off. It really felt like a multi-generational practical joke.

Movement from centre is only half the story

Let’s take a step back. The principle talks of movement from centre from the perspective of someone who can already do it. So it’s a loaded statement. We can never really know what the master who invented that principle took for granted. What we can do, however is reverse-engineer a question.

What do I need to make my movement start at my centre?

That’s a far more useful question to ask. Here’s four answers:

- I need to be aware I’m moving my centre: When you first try to move from your centre for the first time, you end up moving everything else BUT centre. Get someone to watch you. If your hips don’t lead the movement, you need to keep working on your awareness of centre.  When you get it right, they’ll be able to tell you, and remember how that feels, you’ll be needing that feeling again later.

- Minimal unnecessary tension: You don’t want to carry any more tension than you absolutely need to. If you’re standing up, you can’t be 100% relaxed, as you’re going to need some tension in the body to hold you upright. Study your postures to see if you can minimise or eliminate all the tension that you don’t need to stay upright.

- Structure and alignment: You can’t be so relaxed you’re like a jellyfish. Every movement must have structure and the body must be properly aligned.   The body is too complex a thing for you to constantly be thinking “Adjust elbow 1 inch, move kneed ½ inch.” If you tried (and I have), your brain would explode (and it did). Structure is something you get from doing lots of standing practise, or going through the form very, very slowly.

- Connectedness: This is perhaps the hardest to get. Being connected requires the right balance of tension and relaxation in the right places to allow the movement of the core to manifest in the limbs. This is something you can train, and the Chen silk reeling exercises are a great example of a connectedness (amongst other things) exercise. The good news is that any posture can be a connectedness exercise.

Ask the question:

How can drive the posture’s movement from my hip wiggles?

It’s a bit like riding a bike, it takes a while to get it, but once you do, it’ll be with you forever.

Photo by bilco