Martial Tai Chi™

De-mystifying the Mysterious

A few years ago, a community centre manager placed the keys to the centre in my hands. "Well you have to trust people, don't you" he said with a smile. That moment has stayed with me ever since, teaching me to treat every new situation as a new situation and not letting myself be jaded by negative experiences with people past. Every new face is worthy of trust.

Sometimes while teaching I find myself wanting to tell students simply to "trust me" and that is why I have written this article. I am very often happy to explain or demonstrate why students should trust me, but not every single time I tell them to do anything - there wouldn't be time. So this article is dedicated to the dying art of trust.

Rules are made to be... obeyed

There's an old cliche, or maybe it is a contemporary saying - I'm not sure who first coined the phrase. Could it have come out of the French Revolution or the Garden of Eden perhaps? The saying goes "rules are made to be broken". Whoever first said it, they were doing none of us any favours. It certainly isn't a good rule to live by.

Most of us know that life wouldn't really be better if murder was legal or if there were no traffic laws. Those who suspect life would be better have not really thought it through - either that or they have designs on being the next gangland boss.

There is another rule which is fairly universal and this one is at least true. That rule is:

Abiding by the rules so that you may be transformed by them

Whether you are obeying the laws of the land, following the ten commandments, practicing the "ahimsa" of the Hindu / Jain / Buddhist traditions, entering into the religious life, practicing Martial Tai Chi™ or digging the garden, it is necessary to "abide by the rules so that you will be transformed by them". From there, you will learn to appreciate the rules and why they exist - you will realise the wisdom of them.

If you reject rules from the outset, simply because they are rules, you may never know the wisdom of them. If you insist on going your own sweet way as some kind of perverse matter of principle, or because you harbour delusions regarding the extent of your own uniqueness (by and large human bodies are built the same), you may or may not one day learn the hard way, but you will almost invariably waste much time on the journey. One day you may come to realise why those rules exist, but if you are especially stubborn, you may end up carrying your rebellious streak to an (early?) grave.

Rebel without a cause

By now, those of you who are of a more liberal or radical bent may well be screaming at the page. Yes, there are times to break rules too - when your conscience knows that obedience is morally wrong, but here I am talking about breaking rules as a perverse matter of principle - I'm talking about being "a rebel without a cause", or being a rebel first and finding a cause later. I'm also talking about the dangers of pleasing yourself - that thing our culture relies on us doing in order to make a buck.

In our consumer culture, people expect to be sold on an idea first. Frankly, we are encouraged to be skeptical in many of the wrong places. We expect the wisdom of rules to be proved to us first and from there we will decide whether, or to what extent, we'll abide by them. The problem with this sort of attitude, is that it closes our minds to the wisdom of anything that does not fit in with our current world view.

Sometimes, simple obedience is necessary first - we must first "do" before we can "know". It is called "having faith so that we might understand".

Our consumer-driven culture so encourages the idea of "customers" trying out a "product" to "see if it is for them" that students might just miss the fact that martial training involves personal transformation. The question therefore should not necessarily be whether or not a given martial arts "product" is right for the "customer", or even whether or not the "customer" is right for the "product", but whether that student "customer" can change his or her self to suit the "product". Can they let it do its work and be transformed by it?

Sure this mechanism can be and often is exploited by all manner of unscrupulous teachers, but no one said life was easy. We have to learn how to exercise true discernment: to differentiate between those who truly want what is best for us and those who just tell us what we want to hear so that we buy their product. We have to discern between those who want what is best for us and those who want what is best for themselves.

Of course, if we currently think that right is wrong and wrong is right, we may not always be the best judge ourselves. Trusting oneself only works when one is trustworthy. The human heart can be very fleeting, so it is frequently untrustworthy. That's why whenever we convince ourselves that we'll be content if only we could have that new (insert as applicable), we never are. And sometimes when things get tough, all that is required is to tough it out. Very often, we'll be glad we did: persistence brings rewards.

I'm not advocating that people stop trusting their intuition in times of danger, but I am pointing out that our feelings can be wrong, especially in less than dangerous circumstances. It is important to know yourself well enough to be able to discern between intuition and ingrained fears or prejudices.

When am I going to get to martial arts? Well, I have been talking about martial arts all along. The point of this article being here is to apply these principles to our martial training.

From knee to toe and back again

Sometimes we tell you how to stand during a warm up and tell you that things like maintaining correct knee-toe alignment is "a rule for life". We tell you that you must obey the same rule even when you are standing at a bus stop, going up and down stairs or even when you are in the bath or lying in bed. This rule is important so that your body will be transformed from a body with flat feet to one with healthy foot arches. Little things like this are things that you need to be able to rely on without conscious thought. We aim to actually change the structure of your body so that you will be virtually unable to stand incorrectly and will be able to almost take your correct alignments for granted. I say "almost", because we fall into bad habits easily and the reality is that we do need to maintain our bodies, our movements and our postural alignments by practicing correct movement regularly too. Knowledge alone is not enough.

Having bad habits is like being in a pit with slippery walls - it is easy to slide down, simply by doing nothing. If we are to avoid such things, we have to constantly strive to climb up the sides. The moment we stop climbing, we start sliding down. This is merely a reflection of life itself - survival is a battle. To live, we must exercise our bodies and eat regular, healthy meals. If we fall into bad habits - if we just sit around and forget to eat, or if we insist on eating the wrong things, we will get ill and die.

Many paths up the mountain

Sometimes students come with preconceived ideas about what Tai Chi should be about or with ingrained habits from other martial styles. There's no need to ask whether or not the different arts are compatible because they are not. Different styles have different ways of moving. If people come to our classes with ingrained habits, it will usually take them longer to learn.

Investing in loss

It is necessary to arrive at our classes as an empty vessel, or with the willingness to become one. Anything you already have must be left at the door and the more you already have, the more you'll have to give up. This is called "investing in loss".

We don't doubt that many will consider that they have too much to give up, but we can guarantee that trying to blend what you have with what we do will not work. You will merely end up with something that is not just less than the sum of the parts, but probably less than an individual style done on its own. We may be wrong, but we haven't been wrong yet. You may be a martial genius, but you must commit yourself fully to what we are teaching you before you will be able to truly discern what is useful and what is not. There is no room for willfulness.

My journey

Some people may be wondering how I can possibly be making such statements, having myself studied various different styles. But the truth is that anything I learned that does not fit with our systemisation of Martial Tai Chi™ has been jetisoned.

My first art was Baguazhang and I learned certain movement principles well there, rules that should apparently be true of all Chinese martial arts. I learned about whole-body connection and about the importance of constant "reeling silk" rotation. Everything I learned subsequently had to fit those rules. If it became apparent that a style required me to diverge from those rules, then I gave up that style and set about erasing those contradictory movements from my mind and body.

When I learned Taijiquan, I learned some additional rules - rules that made around half of the movements executed in most martial arts illegal. I'm talking here specifically about the concept of "double heavy" and "double light" postures. I had to decide - either the rules were wrong or the styles were wrong. I tested those rules in relation to the single most important criterion - optimal martial function - they were not wrong.

Adam Hsu points out that all Chinese martial arts should obey the rules laid down in the Tai Chi Classics. As Zheng Manqing said "if the styles disobey the Classics, the styles are wrong". To realise the truth of this I had to be prepared to realise that Chinese martial arts are a mish mash of useful and useless methods - methods that stick to the rules and ones that disobey them. That, in itself, was something of a leap of faith.

Physician heal myself!

It seems that no article I write these days would be complete without my mentioning the concept of "qi" somewhere. I mention it here in order to pre-empt any would-be detractors who might accuse me of hypocrisy over my known rather radical rejection of the concept.

Firstly I need to point out that I have tried using the rationale and methodology of "qi" both within and outside of martial training. In my case, I tried the rule and was transformed by it in the sense that I came to realise that it was an obsolete concept - despite all the hype, there were other explanations and rationales that could produce better results. But I had to try it to arrive at this conclusion. I wish there had been someone else I could have trusted to tell me that it was a useless concept and to explain why, but as I did not have that luxury, I had to find out the hard way. Luckily, I trained hard enough to be able to afford to waste thousands of additional hours on the irrelevant and the esoteric.

Secondly, all I have rejected is "qi" as a concept - I have not rejected any tangible phenomena or physical principles it is used to explain. I merely differentiate between them and explain them in different and more precise ways - ways that are less prone to misunderstanding. In recognition of the fact that "qi" is an intrinsically vague and esoteric idea that is the cause of much inaccuracy and exploitation, I have rejected what is useless and deciphered what is useful, hopefully leaving less room for inaccuracy or exploitation.

To those that insist that I reject "qi" because I don't truly understand it, or those who argue that my radical stance is unnecessary if it is merely a question of language, I fully maintain that it is they who do not understand it, because the concept of "qi" gets in the way of understanding how bodies really work. I have broken the concept of "qi" down into more useful component parts and in so doing, made the vague and esoteric precise and understandable. There is nothing real that is explained by "qi" that cannot be explained better without ever resorting to the term.

Conclusion

So what can we conclude from this? Find the right teacher, do as you're told and don't ask too many questions. Hopefully the teacher will explain things to you in such a way that some of your questions will be unnecessary. And how do you find the right teacher? Well that is one decision I can only help you with if you are prepared to take my word for it, and for that, you'll need to exercise a little faith. If you are the sort of person who is shouting "why should I?" we wouldn't get along anyway.