I want to give a brief introduction to this article about Taichi. I love Taichi and love what it has contributed to my life over my years of study. If anyone is interested in learning Taichi and begins to look into the art of Taichi they quickly discover that Taichi is often depicted as bestowing superpowers on its adherents, examples of effortlessly throwing somebody across the room are everywhere on YouTube.com. In today’s entertainment landscape, superheroes developing superpowers are common and enticing. Wouldn’t we all like to become a superhero with superpowers? But, is it possible to develop what looks like the superpowers depicted in Kung Fu films by learning Taichi? My answer is “Yes, but…” I add the “but..” because it is necessary to look past an illusion. What you see happening does not occur the way you think it does. It may look like a Taichi player effortlessly throws somebody across the room, but in reality, the one being moved is moving himself. I know this is a mind-bender but the advanced Taichi player efficiently returns force back to the person who is trying to move them.
I have found to learn Taichi that I have had to learn to think and move differently than I ever expected.
I continue my lessons with Olesya Amacker at WhiteCrowTaichi.com who generously, efficiently, and regularly destroys my illusions so I can learn authentic Taichi skills.
I hope you enjoy this article, it is about how I began looking beyond illusions to find the Taichi I had been seeking during many years of practice.
Have you ever been in a boxing or even a friendly sparring match? If you have you know, if you haven’t imagine things flying toward your face or body almost more quickly than you can perceive and so fast that it is difficult to respond. At first, this can be pretty scary and the opposite of magical Kung Fu you see in the movies.
So why would anyone subject themselves to this? Sometimes we want to learn to defend ourselves against a physical attack; police and soldiers need this training. Sometimes we want to learn to feel safer in case we were to face an attack or feel safer after we have been attacked. Sometimes we want to feel powerful and cultivate good physical conditioning. Sometimes we want to have fun.
So, how do we learn to be comfortable during this overwhelming, confusing situation where a hand, fist, elbow, knee, foot, or body can fly at you from any direction?
For years, I knew of only two ways to learn how to box (I am referring to Chinese boxing, one aspect of Kung Fu); learning patterns of attack and response and hoping you can apply these patterns when you need to, then practice, practice, practice.
The problem is that most of these patterns aim at hurting an opponent to stop the fight quickly, making it difficult to gain experience, so sparring is not much fun.
After years of training, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I opened a book, The Theoretical Basis of T’ai Chi Chuan, Robert Amacker, which had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while. In this book, I discovered another way to learn boxing that could make sense of the chaos and was also fun. In addition to taming the chaos, its goal is to create something called Long Boxing, where the action goes on and on and only stops when one of the participants makes a mistake. I had studied Wu style T’ai Chi for 40 years, nevertheless, I gave it up to learn Yang Style T’ai Chi Chuan at https://whitecrowtaiji.com.
While the name of this martial art style is Taichi (evoking the Yin/Yang symbol), I had never been shown how to use a unifying principle to balance the forces of advance/retreat, much less how to do this with every potential point of contact between my opponent and me simultaneously. A balance of advance/retreat can be made at eight points of contact between me and my opponent.
To employ this method I learned how to turn my body into a physical structure resembling a mobile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_(sculpture)), so my mind/body could use the principle of equilibrium to balance all the kinetic forces between me and my opponent simultaneously. Instead of figuring out what my opponent will do next, I learned to focus on balancing all the forces between me and my opponent and feel the system follow his lead. This requires no thinking, happens instantaneously, and ensures my responses are accurate and well-timed.
The eight taichis I learned to balance are rotation around the center of my body’s mass, the space between my center and my opponent’s center, the palms of both hands, a point between both of my hands, a point between this center of both hands and the floor, and the balls of both feet. Making and balancing all these taichis simultaneously informs the moveable, responsive system.
So, simply balancing the forces of all these points between the ground and my opponent no matter what he does instead of trying to strike him or defend against her strikes is the essence of how a Taichi boxer trains to box. I still need to practice, but now it is fun.
And, you know…the weirdest thing is that it works.
My guiding principle now is “Balance all eight taichis and wait for the magic to happen.”