Tai Chi Chuan - Why is Push Hands So Difficult and Confusing?

Tai Chi Chuan – Why is Push Hands So Difficult and Confusing?

Many a beginner and even many a more experienced tai chi player is confused by Push Hands practice.  Many think they don’t need it.

There is a fundamental and deep reason Push Hands is confounding.   It goes like this: we are biologically programmed by evolution for Fight or Flight.  We can all see why that worked in a world full of tigers or marauding invaders.  Push Hands is based on Relax and Respond.  We are not programmed for Relax and Respond.  Furthermore, in order for Relax and Respond to have any functional effectiveness, you need to learn the skill of fusing with your partner without being invasive, controlling or manipulative.  Hence, it takes our complete attention to make this shift.  It takes great inhibition of our evolutionary instinct.  It takes ongoing practice, trial and error, and lots of failure.  Little wonder we want to avoid it.

In terms of the tai chi form itself, Push Hands deepens the functionality of the form.  You begin to understand where the functional use is on many levels, why the sinking into the feet is needed, how being relaxed and light in the upper body allows you responsiveness and agility. 

Professor Cheng Man-ch’ing told us that we should do the form as if we are defending ourselves from an attack (or something like that) and practice Push Hands as if we are alone.  The sense of this statement is that you want to let the form have energetic and functional meaning, and you don’t want to get too involved in having an intention in your Push Hands (which leads to strength.)

So even if you haven’t “gotten it” yet, and you think you never will, there are many jewels to be discovered in the process.  It is a study worth studying.

I have come to believe that looking for an end point in Push Hands study is futile and limiting. Once you have one level of mastery, you can always aim higher by letting the game become more energetic and spontaneous, your push softer while generating more power, your listening more acute.  Most likely I will never be able to handle a real fight using tai chi.  It doesn’t matter to me.

“Why do we climb the mountain?”

“Because it’s there!”

But that is not the truth of the matter.  We climb the mountain because of the many lessons to be learned in the process.  We grow as a result of the very effort itself in climbing.

Imagine pushing someone without force!  How magical!  If you have the patience and the dedication to engage this practice, Push Hands study is pure gold!  Not because you can push someone without force, but because of the many many many OTHER lessons it has to teach.

Being Open To Growth - New York Times article

Of interest.  Tai chi-ers MUST be committed to growth.  And that is what you get!  Tom

New York Times

July 6, 2008

If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow

By JANET RAE-DUPREE

WHY do some people reach their creative potential in business while other equally talented peers don’t?

After three decades of painstaking research, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck believes that the answer to the puzzle lies in how people think about intelligence and talent. Those who believe they were born with all the smarts and gifts they’re ever going to have approach life with what she calls a “fixed mind-set.” Those who believe that their own abilities can expand over time, however, live with a “growth mind-set.”

Guess which ones prove to be most innovative over time.

“Society is obsessed with the idea of talent and genius and people who are ‘naturals’ with innate ability,” says Ms. Dweck, who is known for research that crosses the boundaries of personal, social and developmental psychology.

“People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.”

In this case, nurture wins out over nature just about every time.

While some managers apply these principles every day, too many others instead believe that hiring the best and the brightest from top-flight schools guarantees corporate success.

The problem is that, having been identified as geniuses, the anointed become fearful of falling from grace. “It’s hard to move forward creatively and especially to foster teamwork if each person is trying to look like the biggest star in the constellation,” Ms. Dweck says.

In her 2006 book, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success,” she shows how adopting either a fixed or growth attitude toward talent can profoundly affect all aspects of a person’s life, from parenting and romantic relationships to success at school and on the job.

She attributes the success of several high-profile chief executives to their growth mind-set, citing an ability to energize a work force. These include John F. Welch Jr. of General Electric, who valued teamwork over individual genius; Louis V. Gerstner Jr. of I.B.M., who dedicated his book about I.B.M.’s turnaround to “the thousands of I.B.M.’ers who never gave up on their company”; and Anne M. Mulcahy of Xerox, who focused on morale and development of her people even as she implemented painful cuts.

But Ms. Dweck does not suggest that recruiters ignore innate talent. Instead, she suggests looking for both talent and a growth mind-set in prospective hires — people with a passion for learning who thrive on challenge and change.

After reading her book, Scott Forstall, senior vice president of Apple in charge of iPhone software, contacted Ms. Dweck to talk about his experience putting together the iPhone development team. Mr. Forstall told her that he identified a number of superstars within various departments at Apple and asked them in for a chat.

At the beginning of each interview, he warned the recruit that he couldn’t reveal details of the project he was working on. But he promised the opportunity, Ms. Dweck says, “to make mistakes and struggle, but eventually we may do something that we’ll remember the rest of our lives.”

Only people who immediately jumped at the challenge ended up on the team. “It was his intuition that he wanted people who valued stretching themselves over being king of their particular hill,” she says.

People with a growth mind-set tend to demonstrate the kind of perseverance and resilience required to convert life’s setbacks into future successes. That ability to learn from experience was cited as the No. 1 ingredient for creative achievement in a poll of 143 creativity researchers cited in “Handbook of Creativity” in 1999.

Which leads one to ask: Is it possible to shift from a fixed mind-set to a growth mind-set?

Absolutely, according to Ms. Dweck. But, “it’s not easy to just let go of something that has felt like your self for many years,” she writes. Still, she says, “nothing is better than seeing people find their way to things they value.”

Tai Chi Chuan is a Dangerous Proposition

Tai Chi Chuan is a Dangerous Proposition

I’ve come to the conclusion that tai chi practice has within it a very threatening proposition.  It may challenge your sense of existence.  That is, your very sense of survival in the present moment.  The sense of “I am”.

How is this?  The longer you study, the more the tai chi form becomes about doing nothing.  Or better yet, it becomes about the other.  You still practice the form, push-hands, sword form or sword dueling.  But the essence that you are working towards is less and less and less.  It comes out of nothing.  Here is the ultimate challenge:  This nothing produces something but the intent to produce something has to become nothing.  Intent is reduced to nothing.  Having an intention to produce something is not helpful.  You may be giving up what YOU want.  The only intention is to relax and let chi move into the next posture.  Forget wanting to push.  It only gets in the way. 

Let’s go back to the beginning. When you start tai chi, you focus on relaxing the body.  Next you work to initiate all arm movements using only your body and gravity.  The body shifts and turns and the arms are moved.  Ultimately they do nothing.  Next, the very act of shifting and turning the body comes from relaxing.  There is a natural elastic response to this relaxing that transfers the body from leg to leg, but you do not have to consciously activate muscular activity for this to take place.  All you need to do is follow the body’s response.  It takes care of itself if you know how to let the relaxation and your natural structure do the work for you.  Chi begins to appear. (It was always there, but now you begin to feel it.)

Your cognitive mind disappears.  There is mind to guide your chi, but this is more the mind of allowing and observing, not words, emotions, visuals, etc.  If your hand gets near a flame, you remove your hand.  You don’t have to think that one through. 

So what do you have?  The only thing that is going on is that the mind directs the chi and the chi moves the body:  a relaxed body that moves itself and in turn moves arms that are responding to the movement of the body.   Once that spinning top is in motion, it simply lets itself spin.  It’s much ado about nothing.  But like an amoeba, you are changing into different shapes, as directed by the mind’s intent, or in response to your push hands partner’s direction.

Your body takes over and YOU become nothing.  And that may feel very threatening.  The process of tai chi is sort of insidious because no one will tell you that this is where the journey leads.  It sneaks up on you.  Few students actually get to this place.  We keep trying to do, to direct, to control, to create a perfect movement, to get in a push, to be good, to do it right, to be successful, to win.  This holding on to “doing” and tension gives us a familiar “something” to identify with.  It becomes who we are.  We will win here or there in the game of life with “doing” and tension.  But in tai chi, our “something” is whittled away.  Nothing takes its place.

Of course, this nothing leads to everything and it doesn’t mean that you don’t exist.  It opens up experience.  It allows you to see what you could not see before.  It helps you get out of the way of YOU.  It gives you new options that were hidden before.   It allows you to function without resistance to a jarring world.

And let’s face it, there is much much more to your existence than YOU.  There is the entire world.  Without the entire world, where would you be?

So what do you do to get there without feeling so threatened?  Don’t try to be “nothing”.  Our minds can’t fathom this.  Besides, this “nothing” is not nihilistic.  This “nothing” has more do with openness without boundaries.  It’s the open sky.  To start, just do less and less and less within the tai chi form.  You will learn more and more and more. 

And yet doing less and less and less is not the ultimate path.  This is a trap because you will always be in relation to strength or doing.  Less and less strength.  Less and less doing.  You need some strength or doing to have that diminishing relationship of less and less.  This is not really the goal of tai chi practice.  Something else has to appear.

What eventually has to happen is you need to jump tracks and work from a totally different perspective.  That new track is to follow the chi.  Relax, set the chi in motion, and follow.  You can’t muscle chi.  You can’t “do” follow.  You can only let it go, let it happen.  Your teacher has been suggesting this from day one.

There YOU go, and here IT becomes a spinning top, humming, “I’ve got plenty of nuthin’, and nuthin’s plenty for me.”

Tai Chi Chuan and Two Hidden Skills

Tai Chi Chuan and Two Hidden Skills

They seem so simple, but I see very few students who have these two items.  One is a skill, the other is a method.

The first item is imitating exactly what you see.  I’m not talking about a difficult move.  I may demonstrate a certain arm position and look around and see many variations similar to my shape.  But not exactly my shape.  This seems to be a most difficult skill.  Many students simply don’t see that what I am doing is NOT what they are doing.  For some odd reason, in our culture, we can’t imitate with exactitude.  I’m not sure how to get this to change other than to remind students that they need to look more closely and seriously consider that what they think they are doing is NOT what I am doing.  Look again and again and again.

The second item happens when a student gets a correction.  Yes, they will successfully execute the correction in class.   Then the following week, they revert back to the original error.  The correction doesn’t stick.  The simple action that students don’t do is writing down the correction and then review it every day for a few weeks.  The error is assuming they have the correction simply by doing it once in class.  The reality is that they need to review it again and again and again before they have mastered it.  After all, when in error, they were in habit.  So if they don’t truly break the habit, they revert rapidly back into habit.

Both are a sort of blindness.  We don’t see that we don’t see what is right in front of us; we don’t understand that we need to be vigilant in corrections and repeatedly correct the same error until it becomes a healthy habit.  Both contain assumptions.  I assume that what I am doing is what you are doing; I assume that I understand the correction and I’ve mastered it.

So perhaps after “Relax!” we teachers need to say “Imitate Exactly.”

And then we need to say, “Write that down for review!”

Simple, right?