Greetings all,
Nice observation from Audi. My analogy with golf probably lost those that have little knowledge or experience with the sport. The nature of "song" can also be represented by its manifestation in many other high level or elite activity/sport, be it combative or not. You cannot perform at the highest levels if BOTH body and mind are not "song". Has anyone watched Roger Federer play tennis? His reaction times and court craft can seem almost superhuman and magical by ordinary standards. His movements are fluid and relaxed, there is no tension whatsoever in his body, there is no resistance to his body doing whatever his mind/intent directs. AS I see it, his mind is also in the "song" state, able to respond to any eventuality without deliberate conscious thought, just the opportunity to act on a weakness perceived and to instantly knowing how to take advantage of it, and a body capable of acting on it instantly and without reservation.
I strongly agree with the mental part of this, since I have heard Master Yang talk about the mental part of “song” during seminars and teaching on push hands and I have experienced it in my own teaching and practice. However, in a wish to be as clear as possible, I want to describe how the “song” that the Association teaches is not the same as is generally heard in sports in the physical sense. In fact, although I believe there are sports trainers using a concept similar to ours somewhere, I have never personally encountered it in my entire life in practicing sports; seen it described on television listening to discussions of professional, amateur, or olympic sports training or performance; or seen it described on Youtube or equivalent websites aimed at Chinese speakers.
I am not saying that no one else teaches our method of Tai Chi, just that it I have never heard it and that it is not the same as the relaxation that others often describe in sports or in some other forms of Tai Chi. When I look at some practitioners of other Tai Chi styles--but not all--I see them actually do it. But when I have read their books or their websites, I somehow do not see it or hear it described clearly. I even see some hard stylists use our method when applying some techniques, but again never hear or see them describing the method. My educated guess is that some methods of training will naturally let it come out, but that it is not always guaranteed.
I first understood the Association’s teaching on relaxing/loosening at a seminar in the 1990s and was quite surprised, because at that point I had read quite a large amount of what was written about Tai Chi in English and did not recall reading the precise concept described anywhere. I had also been practicing Tai Chi a number of years before this and had never been taught this method. After understanding what was taught, I was unsure whether to have any confidence in it and so searched through all the literature available to me for a clear description as confirmation that what I had heard was correct. After looking extensively, I could find such an explanation only in a short statement in one not very popular book (I think it was written by a Mr. Guo from California in Yang Banhou’s lineage) and in an article in Tai Chi magazine by
William Ting, who does not practice Yang Style. Every single other description I could find was either of a different method or was ambiguous, including books written by many of Yang Chengfu’s disciples, students, and relatives.
When people talk about physical relaxation in sports, it is almost always with reference to relaxed movement. The essence of what we teach has to do with what you should first do without much overt movement. In other words, it is not about relaxed movement, but a procedure you should apply to your joints, tendons, and soft tissue even without movement.
A Tai Chi friend of mine also told me about some new observations about the behavior of human fascia (our connective tissue). Apparently, it gets increasingly stronger in extension (until sudden failure), but not during compression. My friend described the behavior of
finger traps as a good example of such behavior. They get stronger in extension and weaken in compression.
Another difference is that people in sports and some other versions of Tai Chi focus on something you should avoid doing, whereas as we are talking about something physical to do before and during movement. Also, we talk about a range of acceptable muscular exertion that should be approached from the excessive end, rather than a point that should be close to the level of minimal exertion.
Think of playing
cat’s cradle, the child’s game where you interlace a loop of string through the fingers of both hands and pull them apart to make various patterns as you slip different fingers through the string by yourself and with a partner. To make the pattern clear, you must pull your hands apart and maintain tension in the strings. There is a wide range of tension that is acceptable; however, if it is too much, it becomes impossible to change the pattern, and if it is too little, the pattern disappears and the string can even slip off the fingers.
If you have played the game, you know that is is intuitive and obvious that it is better to maintain the level of tension closer to the maximum and adjust it as necessary than to try to go towards the minimum level and make the pattern unclear or risk the string slipping off. Our method of loosening/ relaxation as you practice form is the same. You need tension in the tendons and soft tissue within a particular range and it is better to work down from the maximum acceptable than to try to flirt with the minimum and risk having nothing to work with. Our maximum is limited by what affects the abdominal breathing, but there is no simple way to find the minimum. Again, you can do this while standing still and do not need any movement beyond what comes from extending the joints.
To teach this to a willing open-minded person takes about 30-60 seconds. It is not difficult to do, once understood. To learn to do it for the entire form as dictated by the Ten Essentials takes between 2 and 5 years in someone practicing diligently. I generally don’t see the process “completed” until people have reached Rank 5 (i.e., after 7 or more years of practice). I see some people who have practiced 20 years and still have only a limited ability to manifest this type of movement through the form.
Our method is why we do the form at a slow and even pace. If you change the speed, you have to change the level of muscular exertion and tension in the soft tissue. Since what we do is hard to put into consistent practice, we try to eliminate everything that would complicate matters, including changes in form speed. During Push Hands training, other considerations become important and then must be added on top of this foundation. Reversing the order of training would not lead to good results along our path.
There are three things that we also say about our method that others don’t seem to say. Our method is not an end in itself, but rather a means to an end. Our method is what we use to unify the body. Even though it is closely connected with the movement of energy, we do not talk about it as some basic means of generating energy. We extend all the joints and do not have a sensation of holding any of them in a particular pattern. We let the energy do that. It is an equilibrium in which we actively manipulate only one side. Gravity and the energy in the soft tissue serves as the other side. Lastly, we say that doing the relaxing and loosening in our form teaches you how to be yielding/soft. But after this, we want to focus on the appropriate concepts of coordination to make the energy hard. Then, as we learn appropriate tactics, we learn to use soft and hard together. At this point, the level of muscular exertion will vary tremendously according to what you are trying to do, but still will be modulated differently than in regular sports or in martial arts relying more on the hard use of energy.
If you focus only on minimizing or eliminating muscular exertion, I think our path becomes impossible. If you focus only on “relaxed movement,” I think you can follow our path, but will find it quite difficult and confusing. We teach through movement and applications, but the essence of what is important is independent of these. It is also only one step in a long process, rather than an all encompassing method responsible for proper use of energy.
I hope this is clear and helpful.
Take care,
Audi
