Taijipedia

Following on from the Fu Zhongwen Fajin blog post, we thought we’d add a bit more to the pot. Faijin isn’t just for martial arts or self-defense. Fajin can also be used to help the body heal itself, and keep itself healthy. A bit of impact every now and again helps the bone density, apart from the fact that you just feel good after practising fajin for a bit.

So, we’ve filmed a short video on how to practise basic fajin, which, at its heart is just a quick shake of the hips. The trick to it is to be relaxed enough so that the weave of power produced by the hip shake flows all the way into the limbs and fingertips. The feeling is not unlike a bounce. You’ll feel the wave of power bounce out from your core and into your extremities.

Now, you don’t need to have complete mastery of fajin to garner health benefits from it, and we believe the tradition of needing fajin being absolutely perfect stems from the self-defense days. Fajin was (and still is) used as a method of generating massive power over short distances, e.g. striking over a couple of inches. At high levels, this power would be lethal power over such short distances. In the days when there was no police force in China, mastery of fajin to this level of martial effectiveness was the difference between life and death, so it would obviously be emphasised. Fajin was after all what gave martial Taiji it’s edge, it’s what made it different and was the thing that it could do that not everyone else could.

Fast forward a few hundred years, our priorities are not so much “Am I going to walk away alive” but rather “How can I fix my back?” and so on. So, the emphasis of Taiji, and of fajin is now different. We’re all about the healing, and fajin, just like any other exercise in Taiji, will assist with that.

Just around the time we both dropped off the face of the earth with assorted life-events, we were talking about breathing, and more importantly, how breathing can help you with your Taiji practise ,stress control etc. etc. etc.

Greeny mentioned that we should answer the rather obvious question of how you should actually breathe. Now, there are lots of ways to breathe, and different schools will tell you many different things and go through lots of different techniques. There’s to name but a few, tonic breathing, reverse breathing, abdominal breathing, burst breathing, the list goes on. What we’re going to focus on here is abdominal breathing, the simplest and most natural way of breathing.

If you’re fortunate enough to have a young child or baby available, just watch them when they’re sleeping. They breathe abdominally. We can all agree that babies have not had the opportunity to develop bad breathing habits, so their bodies are just going to breathe however they want to, i.e. abdominally. If you hearken back to the post on just letting your body breathe, that’s what your body will do if you just let it do the breathing, but for you all who find this difficult (and we had quite a few emails from those of you who found letting go and letting your body breathe) this is the exercise that can help you bridge the gap between breathing consciously and breathing naturally.

A question I get asked a lot in class is how to breathe whilst you’re doing your Taiji form. It’s difficult to answer it because how you go about learning breathing in your Taijiquan form isn’t intuitive. You can’t just give a student a pattern to breathe to as it’s a sure way to see someone go blue in the face as they try to do the form with the “correct” breathing.

You can always spot someone who’s trying to breathe to a pattern, because they’re usually the ones holding their breath. A posture that takes a bit longer than normal to complete means they’ll have to exhale for a lot longer, but because they’re not so good at it yet, they exhale almost completely by the time they’re 2/3 of the way through the posture and then hold their breath for the rest. This makes them hold tension and is a little self-defeating. They’re putting a lot of effort into relaxing themselves off, only to have their breathing pattern tense them up again.

Practising form for long periods breathing like this isn’t good because the body will, eventually pick up on that habit of holding the breath and start doing it, which means more tension.

Not good. It just ain’t Taiji as there’s no continuous change in the breath.

The other reason why you can’t just take a breathing pattern and shove it into the Taiji form is because your body varies quite a bit from day to day, and one day it might find it easy to breathe in the pattern you’ve been given, and the next it might struggle. This is something you don’t have conscious control over, because your body is different from day to day. That’s just the way it is.

One of the ways to get around this is to teach the body to coordinate breathing with movement. This way, whatever your internal state, your body will just start to regulate and synchronise whatever breathing pattern is most appropriate and most relaxing with your movement. It is, however somewhat unintuitive as it doesn’t use your conscious mind. Just try it out and see how it works, even if you don’t believe me.

Practise breathing with very natural movements, such as walking and eventually your body will get the idea, so that when you do start doing Taiji form, your body will automatically breathe to the movement, you won’t have to try to “fit” your breathing to the form.

So, the next time you’re walking along to get somewhere, breathe in for four steps, and out for four steps. As you walk along, gradually increase the length of the breath to ten steps in and ten steps out. Try not to hold your breath in or out at any point. If you’re trying to take ten steps and you run out of breath by eight, then that’s your limit for that moment in time. Don’t try to force it, we don’t want anyone going blue in the face. You need to practise long and short breaths, as there are long and short movements in the form. Go as high as you can without tensing up or holding your breath and do this often, try it out when you next walk to the shops or when you’re in the gym.

If you do this often enough, your body will get the idea of co-ordinating movement with breathing and it will automatically start do regulate your breathing during your form practise.

This is the last posture in the first section of the Yang Taiji 24 Form.  It’s not quite as complex as some of the transitions you’ve already seen, so if you’ve got through those you should find this a bit easier to do.

Things to remember are to make sure you do a half step and not a full one, and to relax the shoulders as the hands lift.  Try not to hold your breath as you do this posture.  Holding the breath makes you hold tension in your chest, and the last part of this posture is all about a relaxation of the whole upper body, so it’ll help if you breathe out at that point.

Happy practise!

This is something of a shameless plug, I do Taiji for back pain. That’s the main reason why I do it, and why I’ll carry on practising. Not having to live stabbing pains and terrible stiffness in my lumbar region is all I do Taiji for. Back pain is an affliction of modern times. If you’ve not suffered from back pain, you’ll probably know someone who has.

So, in this video post we cover the most common causes of back pain, why poor posture causes problems and say why it happens, but more importantly how the simple act of relaxation and the retraining of your back muscles into good habits can fix it. You can use almost any method to get your back to relax, lying on a wooden floor, going to a bodywork professional or chiropractor. We’re Taiji people so we recommend doing Taiji for back pain.

Now, the easiest thing to do is to just do Standing Meditation. Standing practise is very easy to do, but ruthlessly effective at getting you and your back to relax. You can find the first lesson on Standing Meditation here.  Standing is very effective at getting your back to start relaxing.  It’s what I started doing to fix my back as it’ll start the process of making your body aware of the misalignments and start re-training your back to hold itself correctly.

Or you could learn the Yang Taiji 24 Form.  It’s a dinky little form that ‘s easy to learn.  This will gently flex and stretch your back and stop it from stiffening up again, so it’s a good “maintenance” thing to do.  Tai Chi instruction on the form can be found here

This little Taiji video clip was almost a blooper, but repeating the “Watch Me, Follow Me, Show Me” drives a good point home.  If you’re trying to learn Tai Chi online from our videos or from a DVD or other video, this little tip is something we think is going to really help you.

This model for learning movement is effective, and I have it on good authority that they use this method to teach Olympic gymnasts new moves.  As far as movement goes, gymnastics is pretty difficult, and to top it all off, you can’t break down a Geinger, Tkatchev into a straddle handstand and teach it by the count.  You kinda got to teach those things as complete movements.  Gymnasts can only watch, then try the whole movement, however complex it is, and it works for them.

So if this method can be used to teach gymnastics, it’ll be all the more powerful where you can break a movement down into a count, like in Tai Chi. Online videos on this site all have counts to them so it should make the process easier.

So we’ve structured this week’s lesson as a “Watch Me, Follow Me, Show Me” session, you can find it here.

If you already know this transition, I’d urge you to watch the lessons anyway to see for yourself how the method works, or you could check out some movement you don’t know and apply the principle to learn it

If anyone out there is following our videos and learning Tai Chi online, we’d love to hear from you! We’d love to see how you’re getting on.

This question came in from one of our students of Tai Chi online. They asked “What is Chi?”

Taijiquan, Bagua, Xingyi and all of the interal arts are riddled with references to “chi”, or qi, ki, prana and so on. Now, this esoteric and fiddly thing that everyone calls “Chi” is many things, it’s an energetic phenomenon, a concept of life-force amongst other things.

Chi is a big part of Tai Chi, online searches for this will give you lots of different answers for what it is, and this confusion is something we’re going to see if we can clear up for you here and now.

Tai Chi online resources will also have you believe that Chi is a bit like money, everyone wants more of it, it’s never clear how to get more and when you have more it’s never enough.  The other difference is that Chi has something of a mythical image within the Taijiquan and martial arts community.

Now, most people who practise Taijiquan for health aren’t interested in going through hours of research to figure out what this esoteric property of Taijiquan is.  So to cut a long story short, we’re going to tell you exactly what you need to know about Chi.

It’s all just a feeling

As you get more sensitive to the feelings within your body when you practise your Taijiquan, you will start to notice more and more about the way things work and some sensations are very much like flowing energy from one part of the body to another.  Well that’s your Chi working.  The good news is that you don’t need to figure out exactly what it is, knowing that it’s there is more than enough, and feeling it is even better. It’s something inside of you, so no definition of it in books or on resources for Tai Chi online will be able to show you what it really is or means.

Finishing off this.. er.. last week’s big idea on purpose, here’s a few more ideas on what you could do to focus your purpose.  Any principle from the Tai Chi classics can be a purpose you can practise, and we introduce the idea of “psychic bandwidth” to help you with your practise.

Books are good places to find out about the classics of Tai Chi.  Online articles are also easily found when you go google “tai chi online classics”.

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!