Clocks, Lightbulbs, and Taiji - Change Your Mindset in Taiji Practice

How Do You Practice Taiji?

“How long should I practice?” This question arises so often among new students in my classes and echoes on nearly every social media Tai Chi group. Most often, people will set time goals for beginners: “30 minutes a day 4 times a week”, “60 minutes every day morning and evening”. Or, they may be told to practice their form a certain number of times. So, students go about their practice, setting timers, and waiting for them to go off. When they do, it sounds like the orchestra of clock chimes in Pink Floyd’s “Time”. You finished! Tick the box. You took another step toward your Taiji goals. Or did you just “ fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way” as the song goes?

When I started out, I would set my practice timer or count repetitions with the goal of achieving my target number. At one point I started asking myself, “What did I learn?” What is all this time and counting doing to advance my skill and understanding of Taiji? Why were the aha moments so few and far between? I wanted lightbulbs, not alarms.

From Clocks to Lightbulbs

I started to change my practice around a bit and move to a learning-centric experience. I shifted to exploration and study. This doesn’t mean I stopped doing basics or going through a form. Rather, when I did I concentrated on the finest details as I understood them. I would ask myself why am I moving a particular way and I listened to what my body was telling me. Lightbulbs started going on.

What Do I Hate and What Do I Fake?

There are no rules in exploration. The big thing is to open your mind and look deeply for clues. Delve into anything that is uncomfortable or does not make sense. Here are a few things I tried.

• If I was doing form practice, I would ask myself “what do I hate and what do I fake?” Hate is a strong word but I was really looking for any movement no matter how small that I disliked doing. At first, it was an entire posture. I remember struggling with Chen style Taiji’s High Pat on Horse. So I broke it down and listened to my bones. I would not stop until I learned what was so hard. It turns out I was not using my right elbow going back as my right hand went forward which together accelerated my waist turn. I was not sinking into my kua, loading energy into my right leg bow so I could quickly push off the ground to further help accelerate my waist turn. Fajin! There was so much more but you get the idea. I did not care at all about finishing the form. I just kept experimenting and learning how my body worked to execute this posture. Time completely disappeared during that session.

• Faking it was something else. I looked for parts of the form I just muddled through. Parts of the form I could not explain at all. I just did them to get through them. They occurred mostly in the transitions between postures. When I found a movement I “faked” I learned something important. It told me what I didn't know. Learning to ask your teacher is just as important as working through a movement on my own.

Feeling the Gears and the Ground

Having benefited from a learning-focused practice for forms, I started applying it to basics. This was harder. The movements are simple so I had to look deeper. Visualization helped a lot. I used an idea popularized by Grandmaster Feng Zhiqiang. Imagine your skeleton is an array of intermeshed gears. The main gear that drives everything is the waist. Turn the waist gear and imagine how it influences the gears in the shoulder, elbow, wrist, fingers. If you pay close attention you start to understand your body structure and how each part influences another. You learn how the waist is the commander. You start to really feel the connection and begin moving as one. No matter how small the detail, take the time to learn how your skeleton works. It is different from your teacher. I have scoliosis, old broken bones, bowed legs, tight hips. I don’t have to move exactly like my teacher and that is okay. I just have to learn to move as me. That is when the lightbulbs truly go off.

Dynamic root is another place to slow down and really focus. As a teacher I see students have the most difficulty with controlling their steps and often neglect some very important fundamentals. As one foot separates from the ground, the other must remain firmly rooted. The spine needs to stay straight, shoulders and hips aligned, head up as if being lifted by a string. At any point of a step, you need to be able to adjust where your foot gets placed down before any weight gets transferred to it. We spend our whole life falling on our feet while we walk. Breaking this habit takes deliberate focus (if you want a creative way to train this, I wrote about using golf balls and Legos in another post).

Try Some Taiji Free Play

One other cool way to practice is to liberate yourself from forms or rigid mechanics in basics. I tell my students they should occasionally “play” with their Taiji. By that I mean to explore movement liberated from form choreography. Practice different postures out of sequence. See how you can use your footwork to change direction. Try to connect postures out of sequence and do it on both the left and right side. Move freely but don’t abandon the Taiji principles you have been taught. This is also a good method for training your gaze (discussed in a previous post) as you move at will but may need to navigate obstacles. I am not advocating dance, rather, it is real Taiji practice but you get to decide how you move next. Visualize different scenarios with an opponent and move to deflect the incoming force and then release your energy. You own it when you can use it at will. Play with your Taiji.

A Final Word on Clocks and Lightbulbs

I imagine some readers will finish this post and say this is ridiculous. The only way to learn is through repetition. Set a count or a time and just do that. This is not a bad way to practice. I still do it. Repetition is needed and I occasionally make a “10,000 repeats in a month” challenge for myself. But my biggest “Aha” moments happen when I make learning the focus of a practice session. And I find that “learning sessions” last longer than repetition. So when “Time” is over, keep going. “The Great Gig in the Sky” is starting. Who would want to stop practicing before hearing Clare Torry deliver a rock masterpiece?