Tai Chi Chuan - Release into Form, Form from Release

Tai Chi Chuan – Release into Form, Form from Release

There are two crucial qualities that we always balance in tai chi: Releasing into space on the one hand, and maintaining the external shapes of the postures on the other. Both are accomplished through non-doing.

First, we are releasing into space and ground at the full part of each posture. We let go into air and ground such that the mind and body extend outwards, filling the space outside of our physical boundary. It is like letting go of a flock of doves from your body and letting them fly off into the clouds in all directions. The body joins that sense of release and expansion.

Try this: grip your arm and fist, then open it, relax it and follow the dove flying outward with the mind. Imagine this going out from your tan t’ien in all directions. The body will naturally follow that outward expansion, stabilized by the use of ground. This is the infinite.

(That use of ground, incidentally, is much like a dove gently and carefully landing on the ground. This reminds me of where the classics suggest we “walk like a cat.”)

But there is a form that impedes this following. We don’t just flow and release like some improvisational dance. We don’t lose our “form”. Postures don’t fall apart. Or become erratic.

Why?

I’ve stated that the form is a way to test the process that we are exploring. But there is more to the form than that.

In part, tai chi is about the gathering, concentrating and circulating of chi. We don’t let it fly away as I have suggested in the previous paragraph. The body and the shapes of the postures form a vehicle or container to store and circulate that chi. The “capture” of chi via postures is a natural occurrence.

This is more like swallowing water, something that happens with just about little or no effort and just the right amount of particular muscles. The channel is built into the physical body and the postures themselves. Another analogy would be the way that a river bed captures and channels water to create a directed and energetic current. Water does not leap out of the river and travel up the side of the mountain. This is the finite.

The form is a balanced container that cradles this energy. The chi itself is creating the shape of the posture (not muscle and bone). The posture gives us a boundary that surrounds the chi and prevents the chi from escaping. In order for this to happen, the postures must have no gaps, hollows or projections (according to the classics). Gaps, hollows and projections in a posture will impede the chi or let it escape from the body. As you develop your skill, the form itself becomes more and more precise, fuller, more substantial, more internally open, more polished and relaxed.

Currently, I’d say that only in the martial art aspect do we release chi from the body in order to discharge someone. This is the ultimate expression of opening and releasing chi from the body into space.

These are two end points in a continuum where ultimately you have ONE experience. The experience of release endlessly expands into space, but our physical body fills up and becomes the precise posture it wants to embody. We don’t put a lid on that releasing quality because this is one way (amongst others) that we increase our chi and increase our relaxation. The container gets fatter, thicker, more grounded and balanced, more substantial, more round and complete.

We release into space and into the ground, and the postures bloom into great yang energy. The boundless experience and the postures (container) are now fused into one gestalt.

To sound “new agey”, we are fusing our tai chi form with the whole universe, the finite with the infinite.

To be more humble, we are grounding this experience of expansion in the here and now, within our bodies, the infinite with the finite.

By “capturing” it, we become it.

By “becoming” it, it is ours to use.