The Hidden Gem of Tai Chi

Tai chi practice is a gift we can give ourselves and share with others through our relaxed presence. It brings relaxation, joy, and a boost to our vitality. It works through conscious movement and, following basic principles, offers a way to ground ourselves, eliminating unintentional stressful habits and body dynamics that can cause us harm. It is gentle, and through practice can return our bodies to a natural open alignment with gravity. An added benefit is, while studying with others, it can offer a sense of community and connection as we learn to move together in harmony.

After we have begun to embody its core principles and alignment, tai chi chuan (the martial art) goes further to offer a practice that truly is the hidden gem. It is the partner practice of Push Hands, also called Sensing Hands. This practice gives us a physical way to maintain our relaxation even under the emotional pressure of close contact and find the same harmonious connection as in the form practice. We learn how to connect without freezing, pushing, or running. Sensing Hands also presents experiential and visible feedback on our ego tendencies and habits.

Cooperative practice can soothe us into a relaxed response to the world. The benefits of cooperation and mutual support far surpass what can be achieved in a competitive atmosphere. In cooperative practice we learn empathy, compassion and understanding. Fostering a cooperative atmosphere in partner work requires clear intention based on an understanding that we will each learn and embody more when we embrace supporting each other through our challenges. We can come to see each other as helpful mirrors, often showing us exactly what we get to discover and change in ourselves.

The intention we need is one of willingness to participate in an activity which will promote change in our point of view and our physical actions. We also get to establish an agreement with our partners to support each other in our learning, even when it is difficult. This is essential. Although these skills can be learned in a more old-school competitive environment, that style is not suited to everyone. Working together is something that we all can achieve.

First, we agree to support each other, gently discovering our own and our partners’ imbalanced overreactions. The practice involves employing the fundamental principles of Tai Chi (Supreme Ultimate Principle):

• Dantian awareness
• Relaxed alignment
• Rooted relaxation
• Full body action while in connection
• Constant free mobility

While practicing, we will deepen our understanding and embodiment of the basics as we learn to respond from a full body awareness. The key principle is to discover that we can “get out of our heads” and trust the knowledge in our body. We learn to work from dantian awareness which guides our body to respond as a whole while maintaining a relaxed grounding.

These basics are brought forward from our solo and group practice where we gradually awaken the dantian awareness that, among other things, gives us the sense of our whole body as one.

We are no longer racing through our thoughts trying to remember all the parts of the whole. We gradually let go of strategizing in favor of simple present awareness and response.

How do you do it? First you set your intention to be patient with yourself. Recognize that although you may be able to conceptualize how, you will need to experience how. That means leaving behind the ideas and instructions while you focus in the dantian to feel from the inside—rather than think about it from the outside.

You can use the following points to conduct an inquiry into how many of the basics are in your body. Remember, patience is key and self judgment is not helpful. These basics don’t just show up magically but require good old-fashioned personal effort, continued attention, and practice.

• Learn, by practicing how to find your root. This means softening your legs while aligning the bones to transmit your weight into the ground. You don’t have to hold yourself up. When rooting clearly happens down through one foot, the other foot feels empty and free. There are phases here; root exists in any weight distribution; but “single-weighting” is the clearest start. Single-weighting is also essential for free movement of the feet.
• Your relaxation will happen most easily from the top down. It feels like emptying your upper body of heaviness. Let your shoulders, arms and hands relax. Feel the weight of your arms traveling down through your body to the ground rather than outside your body.
• Make sure that your body is untwisted. This takes a while, since any habitual postures we hold in our body, even unintentionally, become hard to perceive. You will begin to feel freer and emptier, especially when you relax all around and within the pelvic cavity and loosen your hips so they are free to move. To do this, you soften the legs (see point 1).
• You will find that you habitually lean on yourself, often when feeling tired. Your challenge is to embrace the openness that comes from “unwinding” and standing with relaxed alignment.
• When it comes to moving your legs, practice moving from the dantian. This means moving the center of your body to move the feet. Release the legs so that they follow the movement of the center of your body (dantian) and can travel with emptiness, free of stiffness.
• Simultaneously, we learn to allow the arms to be moved in this same fashion, from the center. Although we have and constantly utilize muscular control of our arms independently, our challenge is to let them be moved with only soft support and guidance from the muscles. In other words, we learn to move our body to move our hands. I have found this much harder to imagine than to accomplish. This is something to play with in your practice, but also during your daily life. When combined with the previous steps, it becomes much freer and more precise. You learn to let go of muscular force.
• With all the forms we can discover the subtleties of momentum in our movements, all the while maintaining our rooted connection to the ground. We discover that fluid balanced movement is based on our vertical alignment rather than only horizontal movement. The feeling is like moving down instead of horizontally. Or like keeping our weight below the floor while we move with complete freedom and lightness above.

The preceding practices prepare us for partner work. When we work with a partner it is essential that we bring all these skills with us. They need to be embodied, because the stress of contact may very well blank our minds with agitation that can completely unground us. Our challenge is to remain relaxed, connected, and grounded.

• We must first deepen and stabilize the multi-faceted awareness available from the dantian. We don’t have time to remember our body intellectually. We get to be awake, in the moment, and able to respond in balance to what is happening in real time.
• We can benefit from starting with a moment of recognition, essence to essence, before engaging in Push Hands practice. It can help us release emotional stress that may be present and allow us to confirm our intention for mutual trust and cooperative learning.
• We learn how to follow the movements of our partner, while maintaining our awareness and balance.
• We learn how to move our point(s) of contact with our whole body center (dantian), letting go of independent thought-based arm movements in favor of dantian directed full body action.
• These skills can be developed by practicing the “butterfly touch sensing hands” exercise.
• When we sufficiently embody these skills, we change to a different level of contact using the “4-ounce touch.” We continue with single hand exercises and eventually change to using two hands and more points of contact, while employing the same basic movement skills as before. Here we begin to discover that we can ground the pressure of our partner using only 4-ounce contact through the same alignment we have learned to ground and relax our own weight in movement.
• We further develop the movement skills necessary to maintain substantial contact while redirecting the incoming force away from our center, without introducing force of our own.
• We begin to notice counterproductive tensions in both ourselves and our partners. This is a key opportunity where we can use our intention to support and help our partner in this fascinating discovery of how to relax. With a softness of spirit and a gentle touch, it becomes easy to help your partner notice their tension and, with patience, for us to recognize our own.

Push Hands or Sensing Hands practice is a key part of what has been called “self-cultivation” in the world of tai chi. The essential aspect is to cultivate a non-verbal, non-judgmental awareness available from the dantian. Awakening and stabilizing dantian awareness becomes the center of our tai chi practice. It is our physical access to a silent witness that supports us in our growth, our ability to objectively see ourselves, to make necessary changes, and to promote harmony in our relations with everyone we contact.

Thank you for your attention.

With love and respect,

– Greg Woodson, April 2024

Greg playing Push Hands with Ken Van Sickle in May of 2021

Acknowledgements

Thank you to:

Patrick Watson for his patient teaching, allowing for discovery, and his brilliant, embodied demonstrations of Principle. He pointed out that we can be rooted in almost any position, but that alignment is the way to learn it.

Oscar Ichazo and the Integral Philosophy of his Arica School^® of Knowledge which teaches extensive practice of Kath (dantian) awareness as the basis for grounding across all Realms to support the process of ego-reduction and as the basis for experiencing the Higher States of Consciousness.

Dr. Yang Yang for pointing out the simple possibility of relaxing and rooting while standing, sitting or lying down, and demonstrating that root manifests in the alternate foot positions used in Chen style tai chi.

Ken Van Sickle who helped me to free my mind of interpretations of how I thought things should be done.

© Tai Chi Foundation 2024