When I was younger, I did a pretty good high kick. With a bit of energy and just enough stiffness, mostly it looked good. But mostly it was a Glob. Lingering in the back of my mind has always been the question: How does one do High Kick using relaxation and only relaxation?
In Glob mode (and I am shamelessly using my teacher’s word here!) there is not much specificity. Given the startling High Kick, even a Glob looks good. It’s fast and spontaneous, but as a Glob, it loses clarity. As a Glob, luck and strength are your best friends. If you don’t have luck, you can add more strength. That’s the problem of being a Glob.
So, to not be a Glob, you need to look closely at the posture and note every millimeter of movement and gain understanding of the sequence: what causes what. Once you have that understanding, you can return to the whole posture and let that sequence happen naturally.
I was now required to replace luck and strength with relaxation and timing. I needed to examine how relaxation creates the High Kick.
Old me: fling myself to make the turn happen and grab myself quickly when I hit the place I need to be before the kick itself. Fling, grab, jam myself downward. This sorta works.
New me: Like a bow and arrow, I now think that the aim of the turn should be held in mind BEFORE you turn. So what does that feel like? I have been practicing turning small amounts and aiming (in the mind) at where I want to land. The actual turn is roughly a turn of 135 degrees. To gain some mastery of this, the actual number of degrees does not matter. You are turning to kick some person. That person could be anywhere. So when I am in correction mode, I play with that concept. OK, let me turn 5 degrees. Now let me turn 25 degrees. Now let me turn 10 degrees. Now let me turn 95 degrees. The number of degrees does not matter. It is aligning my mind with where I am going and spontaneously aiming the arrow and releasing it. I don’t actually LOOK at where I plan to land, but my mind has the target clearly in mind. This has helped a great deal with control of the turn. It feels more direct and even simpler than before.
From the classics: It is said “First in the hsin (mind), then in the body.”
As I practiced this, other flaws appeared. Even a small turn of 10 degrees had me toppling forward. What was going on? There were two big errors. The first one was easy to correct. My hands in front of my body were slightly lower than they needed to be. This was making me top heavy in the hands. They were subtly pulling me forward and then down. I needed to make sure that the hands are placed a bit higher. They curve upwards a bit. You can actually feel this by standing with your hands in their circular position. If they are lowered a bit, they pull you forward. If they are lifted upward, at a certain point this allows them to be supported by the center (tan t’ien). The tan t’ien is now under them and the weight of the arms falls into the body, now resting on the ground. Of course, if the arms are held too high, you use strength.
The next thing I noticed is even more subtle. The lifted leg itself has to fall into the pelvis and be supported by the ground. I had it dangling in such a way that it was pulling away from me and therefore adding to the forward fall of the body. I had to glue it into the pelvis, not let it hang out there in space. The limbs need to support the balance, not create internal warfare. I work on this by feeling a slight internal rotation of the femur (upper leg bone, the thigh) into the pelvis. This creates a leg that is relaxing into the ground through the pelvis. Just a little, just enough. This can’t become a contortion, but just enough to help it stay attached to the pelvis and the ground. Adding too much strength in doing this will lead to tension. Once you are ready to do the actual kick after the turn, that femur is falling in the right direction – into you, not away from you.
Pause. The main point of this laborious discussion is to encourage us to look at all postures in tai chi and see what is needed to make relaxation the guiding force. I’m not 100% committed to my comments above - this is a work in progress. But this kind of work feels better to me. My old Globby High Kick is slowly being replaced with points of relaxation. Execution does not rely on strength or luck. The balance is better. The aim is better. If I don’t work with these ideas, I topple forward much more often and I feel the need for luck and strength coming back into the picture. I’m still looking at it for more clues.
Look closely at what you are doing. See where relaxation makes it work. What are you doing if relaxation is NOT what you are using?
De-Glob yourself!
Sweep the Lotus Kick, here I come!
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