Tai Chi Chuan and Struggle

Tai Chi Chuan and Struggle

There is an old Japanese proverb:  Fall down seven times, get up eight.

Struggle is inescapable.  There’s no way to escape struggle.  If you have, you are out of luck because struggle builds character.  It sounds so cliché to write that but we all know it’s true.  It’s a healthy thing to tackle ANYTHING that offers you a struggle.  Working through life’s difficulties is one way to grow as a person.  Taking on a challenge you care about is another way to grow.

The fact of learning specific moves, but then using relaxation, the body’s internal connections and “non-doing” to create those moves, creates a struggle.  The student is stuck between trying to do something specific and then letting go of most of the muscles in the body to execute that something specific.  We are asked to move but not to use our muscles.  Most of us do not possess this ability.  If moving your body with minimal effort does not come easy, more practice is needed.  As Prof. Cheng Man’Ching has stated, if you lack natural ability, you just have to work harder.

I know that I have avoided doing push-hands with many players over the years because of my own fear of not being able to compete or win.  That was a mistake.  On one level, I simply did not want to engage in my own personal struggle.  I didn’t want to look bad.  I wanted to have the skill without going through the tough exercise of losing again and again and again.  I just didn’t want to struggle.  That qualm was my internal struggle of sorts – to move past the vulnerability I felt while being confused and uncertain (like most of us when we start push-hands.)  Now I’m a born again advocate who believes in engaging struggle, not avoiding it!

Some of us like to avoid the struggle with tai chi by sitting on the side lines and watching the class, believing they are learning.  Others want books or videos.  But you never learn tai chi by watching or reading.  The doing IS the learning, even if that doing is not very good.  The stumbling IS the lesson.  It leads to success.  I try a move this way and it doesn’t work.  I try a move that way and it doesn’t work.  Ah!  Now I see!  This is how you do the move!

It is not a case of “doing equals success.”  It is a case of “doing creates real understanding which leads to success.”  You really know something when you understand that one way fails and yet another way works.  You cannot understand movement and relaxation by watching.  You have to get into the pool and flounder.  This approach is similar to what a baby experiences when learning to walk.  Except babies have no consciousness of failure.  They just flounder until they get it.

Not that this struggle is all hardship and woe.  The little victories feel good and motivate us.  But after each victory comes another struggle, a process that continues for some time.  Well, forever actually.  At some point there is enough accomplishment that the enjoyment factor increases.  But the struggle never leaves.  It seems to me that long term tai chi students like the sense of solving an intricate puzzle.  From that perspective, it’s lots of fun!  Because the puzzle is endless!  It is like a wonderful mystery novel with infinite volumes to consume, each one revealing a new aspect of the drama.

In life, hard-won victories are the most meaningful to us.  Tai chi offers the added element of experiential learning: When you understand something in tai chi, your whole body and mind understand it.  This has even greater meaning to most of us because it provides a completeness and a clarity that much of life lacks.  In this regard, tai chi is like the lowly apple.  You can only understand an apple once you have bitten into it.  After that, you will never NOT understand what an apple is.  An apple is not an intellectual exercise.  Watching an apple somehow never does the trick!

The other benefit in struggling with tai chi, aside from its well-documented benefits (greater health, less stress, more balance, fewer falls…), is that the short-term defeats are rather benign.  You don’t lose life and limb, love or work.  You just have to take more time to work with it until you gain more little victories.  In that regard, it is essentially risk free.

Most students quit before the snowball of experience has taken over and real benefit or meaning appears.  But if you can accept struggle as the very tool that gives you the riches you seek, you are way ahead of the game.

Lastly, if success creates arrogance, then struggling is for naught.  Challenge needs to teach you humility and generosity!  Many of us go through an arrogant phase in our tai chi practice.  We fool ourselves by thinking small victories equals profound knowledge.  “I know more than you.”  “I’m the top!”  This attitude is not the place to end.  The place to end is knowing that there is more to learn, that learning is more struggle, that we all have our challenges, defeats, successes, joys, frustrations, talents and limitations.

When we appreciate that we all have our challenges, defeats, etc., this adds to our capacity for compassion for self and others.  My struggle is your struggle; my joy is your joy.  No, not that my specific struggle is your struggle, but the fact that we both have to work with struggling, that struggle is a given for us both.  Likewise for joy, defeats, talents and so forth. We are all in this soup called life together.

One last thought.  An admired teacher I know advises push-hands students to “give up struggle.”  The way to learn, he says, is by completely NOT struggling.  He means that if you stop trying to NOT get pushed, and just let yourself get pushed, you will learn more quickly.  He’s right.  How do we give in to what is, and learn from that situation, even as we face defeat?  The struggle here is with our egos.  There is no defeat.  There is only process….

Fall down seven times, get up eight.