Tai Chi Chuan - True Relaxation

Tai Chi Chuan – True Relaxation

I was practicing push hands with a good beginner who hasn’t yet discovered how to relax his arms. You can feel him immediately and this error gives me the upper hand, at least in a slow game. You might think stiff arms would be an asset, but not so in tai chi. It locks you in and limits your choices should you be attacked. You are pre-stuck.

I tried to get him to relax his arms more and to reengineer his understanding of what push hands “stick and follow” is.

By holding his wrist and allowing his arm to just hang, we were testing to see how much he could simply let me hold up his arm. He couldn’t do it. He HAD to hold up his arm, even though I was already holding it up at the wrist. Eventually he did let go a bit more. There were a few more ideas that helped as well. But in our play, he didn’t really get it. Not to the extent that we could then focus more on to the next issue, that of function.

His question to me was: Is there an exercise to get a handle on relaxing the arms? The answer is basically NO.

The feel of relaxed arms is more or less an experiential understanding of relaxed arms. That understanding comes from the many ways that you use the body and how you conceive of relaxation in physical terms. Many elements are at play. And until you get a feel for it, well, you don’t know what you don’t know. That is why to tell someone to not use strength or to simply relax often doesn’t really help. Such advice has to tap into their knowledge base and if they don’t have it already, the knowledge base won’t help them now. (As I’ve stated before, this is like telling an angry person to not be angry, or an uptight person to stop getting worked up.)

What are some elements?

Allowing the body to melt into the ground.

Relaxing into the leg you are on before you shift to the next leg.

Elbows that are non-doing, non-held and sinking or heavy.

Letting the hands be weightless and floating.

Supporting the arms with the whole body.

Using the ground to support the whole body.

Moving everything at the same time (even if one part LOOKS like it is not moving.)

Allowing the spine to hang and the tailbone to be heavy.

Rest the arms in space; rest the elbows on a table top (that isn’t really there.)

Activate the whole chi of the body in moving the body and therefore the arms.

Keep the elbows relating to the hips/waste and dropping into the hips/waste.

No doubt there are more….

To understand relaxation, you have to keep chipping away at the stone to create a new sculpture. There is no simple one thing that you do. It is a complex of things that you do (or don’t do) that allows this relaxation to manifest. One fellow student sees the art of relaxation as a lifelong endeavor.

One general approach is to keep looking for ways relaxation moves the form. We look to increase relaxation and see how it functions. We don’t focus on the tension and try to get rid of it. Let relaxation grow and consume tension. These are two sides of the same coin, of course, but one way is that the glass is half empty; the other the glass is half full. Denial notwithstanding, which feels better to you?

Hey, you can always go back to using tension. But why bother? Ever look at someone who thrives on conflict, anger, force, hostility? Once relaxation enters your life, these folk look foolish.

Needless to say, this is a life challenge for all of us. We are sculpting ourselves into a new reality that opens many doors.