Tai Chi Chuan – An Out of the Body Experience
Well, not really.
Not in the way we usually think of that phrase. Actually it is the opposite.
I have this experience with regards to one of the two
sword forms I practice. It goes like this:
The Cheng Man-ch’ing form seems to be ingrained in my DNA. I could stop practicing it for a few weeks
and like getting up on a bicycle, it would instantly (for the most part) come
back without effort.
This other sword form, and I’ve practiced it for many
years, quickly slips out of my grasp if I don’t practice it. So if I miss a day of practice, the
following day I may have a bit of trouble recalling some of the moves.
When I had my surgeries last year, I dropped sword form
practice for a while. When I resumed,
form number one sprang back easily and form number two was lost in many many places. What to do?
What I did was practice Form II clumsily until my body began
to recall what came next based on what I just did. And the experience of recalling this second form
was one of letting my body teach me. New
pieces would emerge day after day. Not
only that, but sequences that had never really felt natural popped out in ways
that felt natural. Something was going
on here. My guide was the body, not some
mental instruction or carefully memorized routine. Literally, I couldn’t recall it and literally
it emerged ONLY through practice.
This has created a new path for me in sword, one that has
to do with getting rid of perfection and correctness. I now try to let the form emerge out of the
movement of the body. And of course the
core method we use to create the movement of the body is relaxation and
non-doing. I allow it to come
forth. I let it happen. I toss it around like a frisby, aim, let it
go, and wonder where it will fly…
Letting the form emerge from the body leads me down some
bumpy roads. The form is less calculated,
less controlled. But it also feels far
more natural and much more fun. I can
feel where I am in the way of the movement.
It’s an attitude and a process of discovery and rediscovery. I wonder what it will feel like THIS time
(which is worlds apart from let me see how perfect I can make it so that it always
looks exactly the same.)
My “out of body” experience is really an experience of coming
from the body. I’m letting the form out
of my body like you would release a dove from its cage and set it free. And since this is a practice of discovery, it
makes me want to do these forms again and again and again…
Maggie Newman would have us do a posture over and over and
over again. Part of this WAS perfection,
but part of this was about letting it happen so many times that the tendency to
control a movement from the outside would be replaced with feeling the movement
from the inside. The scaffolding would
drop away and pure movement would take over.
If you let it happen. And believe
me when I say resistance comes up when you repeat a movement until you get past
“correctness”. It’s boring, it’s “let’s
learn something new”, it’s “do we really need this”?
This is a new goal for me, out of the body, emerging, allowing;
giving it time to be what it might be if you gave it this kind of time and far
far far beyond the staleness of being correct…
