- This topic is empty.
-
Posts
-
I wonder if somebody with a lot of experience can express a real answer here.
I have seen very interesting material detailing Peng and other fundamental movements. Somewhat esoteric dealing with layers of reality beneath that normally experienced by mankind.
However I wonder what really is the point.
Please don’t say health fitness or fighting depression and being more confident … yes, yes, that’s not really what Tai Chi is about, you can just go to the gym for that.
Does anyone actually know ?
If you ‘master’ all these things, what happens then ? What do you become ?
If you have practiced enough surely you would have felt the difference between the time put into taichi and going to a gym. If not continue with your training, which maybe your not doing because its not just about reading and watching videos you actually have to train to experience what you can get out of it.
Tai Chi is something you’ll never experience if you have to ask someone else what it is.
Well, that was a rather cold answer.
But it’s true.
There is no “point” to doing tai chi.
You are not trying to “become” anything.
If you are doing tai chi as an exercise to become something different, you are already separating yourself from tai chi, from yourself.
You are assuming that you don’t already have tai chi energy.
You will move further and further away from yourself.
Instead, in tai chi you become aware of yourself, you explore your self, you express yourself.
No need to compare yourself with others or some external concept.
You are deep and infinite.
It started as a flash of light–radiant zinc ions emitted when your father’s sperm penetrated your mother’s egg.
You already are tai chi, you’ve always been this tai chi, you always will be this radiant tai chi.
You don’t need to get it, to get the “point,” to “become” something else.
It is not mystical.
You just express it; slowly, gracefully, continuously, artfully.
Smile to your own tai chi.
In Month 13 of the “Old Yang Style Tai Chi Edition” released online May 6th 2016,
Bruce explains that religious Taoism and Martial Arts view “seeking stillness within movement” in slightly different ways.
I see “tai chi” as using “seeking stillness within movement” from more of the religious view of allowing you to be aware of the spiritual nature of what you are doing.
Hi Robert
I am a longtime student of the path, my question is not simplistic.Are you able to express what tai chi is, or talk a bit more about it ?
What occurs within after several years of tai chi practice ?
What occurs within the practice of a form ?
I have heard there are a number of fundamental movements, like ‘Peng’. What is the significance of them ?
If you study a form for several years how does it affect your state and your life, specifically. For instance if you study one particular movement, how does that affect your life ?Thanks
Greetings ride,
Tao is beyond words (Tao te Ching).
I, too, have been on the path for a long time
(but that doesn’t make me an expert).My answer is simple: Nothing.
You have to find your own answer.
I am not able to express what tai chi is.
(But I can talk a lot more about it.)I’ve practiced tai chi since 1993.
I’ve sampled many styles and forms.
An old saying is that you should dig one well and dig it deeply; digging many small holes won’t reach ground water.
So my “well” is the Yang Style Long Form.
Any one movement can deepen tai chi–
“Waving Hands Like Clouds” is the best example.
It, of course, contains “Peng.”
(Grains of wheat were found in Egyptian Pyramids. After thousands of years, when exposed to light and moisture, they still sprouted–Peng.)After several years of practicing tai chi I became aware that there was “something” there.
Then when touching in with masters I experienced “Peng.” Being launched across a room is an unmistakable manifestation of “Peng.” It has to be experienced to believe it.Once you experience it and believe that it exists and become aware of it in your own body/mind you begin to play with it.
Most important is finding how your Qi connects with the energy of the earth and the energy of “Heaven.”
The Long Form progressively plays with the Qi.
Section 1 of 3 warms it up.
Section 2 amps it up.
Section 3 triples the effect.You begin to feel this Qi in your Lower Dantien.
An “Inner Smile” (the Mona Lisa smile) helps identify it.
The warmth of Qi then can be used in any facet of your life.
Specifically for example, just lately, even though I’ve been happily married for over 50 years, I’ve noticed that my wife’s voice aggravates me.
(causing me to babble some snarky nonsense which I know presses her anger button.)
Using the principles of Qi, tai chi and an inner smile, I can now process this negative feeling better–much more effective than wise cracks and quickly retreating to my “man cave.”
I can move the Qi with an Inner Smile out of my Lower dantien and smile to my wife–
can you imagine the discovery that after 50 years you never really have before smiled to the inner being of your life partner!The particular movement that specifically triggers this is simply shifting weight from on leg to the other.
All tai chi movements involve shifting weight from on leg to another–take your pick.“Cloud Hands” for example, step laterally to the left.
Shift all your weight to your right leg.
Move your left toes to the left a few inches and then settle your weight onto your left leg.
Draw the Qi of the Earth into Kidney #1, the “Bubbling Well” point, up the inside yin surfaces of the left leg to the lower dantien.
You’ve now filled the Lower dantien with heavy/water-like yin energy.
(The Chinese character for Qi is a kettle of water with a flame of yang fire underneath, with steam rising above the kettle.)
The drive your Qi down the outside yang surfaces of the stretching, empty/weightless right leg to your right heel.
Like light being reflected off a mirror, the yang energy rebounds up to the lower dantien, placed underneath the yin water, Qi steam is produced.
Now with the “Yi” (your heart-mind–not your conscious rational mind) you move the Qi for specific purposes–martial arts applications, healing, meditation, smiling to your loved ones.This is merely my own personal paradigm–to my knowledge no master even suggests this.
It works for me–undoubtedly it will not work for you.But after 40 years of daily Zen meditation, just sitting, 20 years of combat as a Marine, yoga, legal practice, teaching school, tai chi, bagua, inner smile qigong, 15 years as a tai chi instructor, this is where I’m at at the moment.
Good luck on your own journey.
My humble opinion is that tai chi chuan, for the good and the bad, is a martial art and a complete bodymindspirit health program invented by humans for humans.
I don’t buy the “thousands of years old” stuff. Tai chi in its current form is quite new art, but its roots can of course be tracked back many millennia. The basic principles (and even more advanced theories) of qigong, internal works and meridians/acupuncture are documented thousands of years ago and the theories have been implemented together to form “a perfect martial art” and health program at later day to help keep the people safe from bandits and healthy against diseases and to live long and satisfied lives.
But it’s still much much more than just physical training and repeating semi-simple movements for the sake of “health fitness”. The combination of correct kind of relaxed bodymindspirit practice, like tai chi, is very effective way to condition the whole bodymindspirit-entity to work in natural, effortless, balanced, relaxed and still very efficient way in any kind of situation it might find itself during its life. The correct kind of practicing tai chi chuan should include static practices, moving practices, practicing with partner (not “opponent” as it’s not a competition, but helping each other practice stuff that is pretty much impossible alone, feeling of pressures/forces/directing them etc…), practicing with weapons and of course form work.
During the work you learn to align your body in correct way, and you learn how the different body parts actually affect each other part of your body, you learn your own personal biomechanics and the natural and effortless ways to use your own body. This sounds very simple, but in reality the way of using your muscles in that way, that all the muscle pairs work in perfect harmony and not work against each other at all, is pretty much never ending quest, you can get to 99% quite easily, but its the last 1% that takes the rest of your life. (Many great masters have said, that one lifetime is not enough for mastering tai chi)
The action of keeping your mind in focused, attentive, and even in meditative state while doing the previously mentioned practices, trains your mind, along with your body, to keep calm and work in “correct” way in pretty much any situation life might throw at you (Correct as in, not contradicting or working against itself, in any way) . Be it external or internal difficulty, it doesn’t matter, your bodymind is ready for anything.
I like my own master’s way of teaching tai chi with his five steps; structure, movement, energy, mind and spirit. First you develop and train correct structure, then you learn to keep it intact while moving it in different ways, then you integrate your breathing to the whole body movement, then you intergrate your mind/intention in the movements, and the last step requires a lot more practicing for me to elaborate any further.
You cannot skip steps, you have to gain pretty solid understanding and actually begin integrating the step to your being, before you can really understand and work with the next step in any truly meaningful way on a deeper than intellectual level.
After you are familiar enough with actual workings, structure and feelings of your own body and mind, then by touch, you can begin to “listen” or “sense” the other person’s structure through your hands. And when you can “sense” the structure of another person, your mind is not restricted in your own personal structure anymore and you can start working with the whole structure-to-structure system.
The ways of working with your own structure and structure of others, and delving deeper into the details and intricacies is, at least for me, all the time more and more interesting task to getting know myself (and others) better.
So I suppose, if one could master everything tai chi has to offer 100%, one would be master of oneself, and slave to nothing.
Very lovely description.
I would just like to contribute something quite different. I am a student of a number of disciplines.
In Advaita or Zen we begin with the sudden realisation of I Am. This is the sudden sensing of the ultimate reality, the discovery of it, and one begins the process with this discovery. After that there is a long process of maturation and settling into it which takes many years. However at the beginning you already clasp the endgame.
In Tai Chi there is not this sense. It is a progressive development, to 99%, then 99.9%, then 99.99% and so on.
It is very different. In Tai Chi there is a sense of continued polishing, like many other aspects of our human lives we polish and polish and polish.
But in Advaita or Zen it is not like this. It is 100% from the beginning.
These 2 different channels of development represent different possibilities that have been explored by humans. They are different.
Being able to manifest- concretely- the different “energies” creates a mind-space that sees/expers (and can then act from) that is different.
[Thus the watering-down of all those that write-teach that peng is a posture and/or one-thing the body does mechanically.. vs something a pt can do, on an arm, in a meridian-line, out in a spot of my “aura” ~personal-space.. or even in the depths of my “mind”.. what is it that is in common-amongst all of these? only seen in these different settings, can what that transfer is.. and only then can one understand what it is.. ]—like how the 7th EnergyBody “essence” of whatever- of a person, or of an energy-shape (like peng), that “substance” that can be shaped into many different forms- it can’t be a certain quality, as not only different personas.. even male or female, even non-human.. an animal, or even ‘stellar-flux-field plasma form’… what “essence” could be any of these forms- and the same in each? (like molten glass that can be shaped into many different bottle shapes/colors. or better plastic into so many formats/uses.. but the stem-cell source).. only able to sense- recog that, than one can start to comprehend in each of its forms.
To become free, one first needs to discover in how many ways one isn’t free (but thinks one is); all the robotic-programmes that we follow on auto-pilot (even if we sense, and act contrary-to, trying to rebel- we are still just responding un-free.. following a knee-jerk reaction, even if layered.. both consciously “habit” … as well a subcon-stirring habit…)
___________
To be able to Navigate- steer this way and that, zoom-in or get some distance, on aspects of our exper- we need to learn ways to experience the source-code directly… (this is what actually understanding what the moves are.. of course most doing the “fundamental movements” are just thinking thoughts as they do certain choreographed posture-moves)….
bringing to this the understanding of Time, and causality, (as I just posted in another comment on this forum) -might be of interest. Choice? deliberateness…? (this being a big issue in what is named “deliberate practice”.. ) to do in “Self-study” but what does it mean to deliberately do, TaiChi moves or whatever, if our movements are at the macro-programming level.. and we just do by rote.. chosen to do? from where (in mind)?Thus the issue of meditation (contrasted to ‘meditative”)- where meditation is working-with and upon the the stuff and substance that forms shapes and movements that result in our thoughts and experiences.. (no thought or experience can step-backwards and see, just as nothing on a movie screen can show those watching the movie projected.. and yet there is no need to do so.. as that mind-stuff is “closer than breathing” (much closer than what is perceived, but only if one isn’t caught up in the conceptual story.. as our culture-world is…)
“Please don’t say health fitness or fighting depression and being more confident … yes, yes, that’s not really what Tai Chi is about, you can just go to the gym for that.”
Yes, that is what Tai Chi is all about but it’s much more than that. You cannot just go the gym for that.
Tai chi is the slow movements in coordination of slow, long and deep breathing. In the gym is fast and vigorous movement and fast and heavy breathing which is completely opposite of Tai Chi. In the gym, the body consumes energy and cause the body to be fatigued. In Tai Chi, the body generate and conserve energy continuously. The internal energy vitalize the body cells and enhance the functions of the internal organs. It’s good for the aspiratory and circulation systems.
Correction:
In the above post, the word “aspiratory” should be replaced with “respiratory”.The last statement should be corrected to read as follow:
It’s good for the respiratory and circulation systems.
This is an archived forum (read only). Go to our active forum where you can post and discuss in real time.