Tai Chi Chuan is a Dangerous Proposition

Tai Chi Chuan is a Dangerous Proposition

I’ve come to the conclusion that tai chi practice has within it a very threatening proposition.  It may challenge your sense of existence.  That is, your very sense of survival in the present moment.  The sense of “I am”.

How is this?  The longer you study, the more the tai chi form becomes about doing nothing.  Or better yet, it becomes about the other.  You still practice the form, push-hands, sword form or sword dueling.  But the essence that you are working towards is less and less and less.  It comes out of nothing.  Here is the ultimate challenge:  This nothing produces something but the intent to produce something has to become nothing.  Intent is reduced to nothing.  Having an intention to produce something is not helpful.  You may be giving up what YOU want.  The only intention is to relax and let chi move into the next posture.  Forget wanting to push.  It only gets in the way. 

Let’s go back to the beginning. When you start tai chi, you focus on relaxing the body.  Next you work to initiate all arm movements using only your body and gravity.  The body shifts and turns and the arms are moved.  Ultimately they do nothing.  Next, the very act of shifting and turning the body comes from relaxing.  There is a natural elastic response to this relaxing that transfers the body from leg to leg, but you do not have to consciously activate muscular activity for this to take place.  All you need to do is follow the body’s response.  It takes care of itself if you know how to let the relaxation and your natural structure do the work for you.  Chi begins to appear. (It was always there, but now you begin to feel it.)

Your cognitive mind disappears.  There is mind to guide your chi, but this is more the mind of allowing and observing, not words, emotions, visuals, etc.  If your hand gets near a flame, you remove your hand.  You don’t have to think that one through. 

So what do you have?  The only thing that is going on is that the mind directs the chi and the chi moves the body:  a relaxed body that moves itself and in turn moves arms that are responding to the movement of the body.   Once that spinning top is in motion, it simply lets itself spin.  It’s much ado about nothing.  But like an amoeba, you are changing into different shapes, as directed by the mind’s intent, or in response to your push hands partner’s direction.

Your body takes over and YOU become nothing.  And that may feel very threatening.  The process of tai chi is sort of insidious because no one will tell you that this is where the journey leads.  It sneaks up on you.  Few students actually get to this place.  We keep trying to do, to direct, to control, to create a perfect movement, to get in a push, to be good, to do it right, to be successful, to win.  This holding on to “doing” and tension gives us a familiar “something” to identify with.  It becomes who we are.  We will win here or there in the game of life with “doing” and tension.  But in tai chi, our “something” is whittled away.  Nothing takes its place.

Of course, this nothing leads to everything and it doesn’t mean that you don’t exist.  It opens up experience.  It allows you to see what you could not see before.  It helps you get out of the way of YOU.  It gives you new options that were hidden before.   It allows you to function without resistance to a jarring world.

And let’s face it, there is much much more to your existence than YOU.  There is the entire world.  Without the entire world, where would you be?

So what do you do to get there without feeling so threatened?  Don’t try to be “nothing”.  Our minds can’t fathom this.  Besides, this “nothing” is not nihilistic.  This “nothing” has more do with openness without boundaries.  It’s the open sky.  To start, just do less and less and less within the tai chi form.  You will learn more and more and more. 

And yet doing less and less and less is not the ultimate path.  This is a trap because you will always be in relation to strength or doing.  Less and less strength.  Less and less doing.  You need some strength or doing to have that diminishing relationship of less and less.  This is not really the goal of tai chi practice.  Something else has to appear.

What eventually has to happen is you need to jump tracks and work from a totally different perspective.  That new track is to follow the chi.  Relax, set the chi in motion, and follow.  You can’t muscle chi.  You can’t “do” follow.  You can only let it go, let it happen.  Your teacher has been suggesting this from day one.

There YOU go, and here IT becomes a spinning top, humming, “I’ve got plenty of nuthin’, and nuthin’s plenty for me.”