Tai Chi practice is a gift we can give ourselves and share with others around us. 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 goes on to offer a practice that truly is the hidden gem. It is the partner practice of 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. It 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 the 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 and especially 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 all. Working together is something that we all can achieve.
First we agree to support each other, gently discovering our own and our partners’ imbalanced over-reactions. The practice involves employing the fundamental principles of Tai Chi:
● Dantian awareness
● Relaxed alignment
● Rooted relaxation
● Full body action while in connection
● and constant free mobility
As we practice 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 the parts. We also gradually let go of thought based strategizing in favor of simple present awareness and response.
How do you do it? First you have to 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).
1. Learn, by practicing how to find your root. This means softening your legs while aligning the bones to transmit the weight into the ground. You don’t actually have to hold yourself up. When rooting happens clearly, 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. It is also essential for free movement of the feet.
2. 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.
3. 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, we soften the legs (see point 1).
4. 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.
5. When it comes to moving the legs, practice moving from the dantian. That 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 travel with emptiness, free of stiffness.
6. 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 here 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. As it turns out, I have found this much harder to imagine than to actually accomplish. This is something to play with in your practice for sure, but also during your day. Notice that when combined with the previous phases it becomes much more free and precise. This is learning to let go of (muscular) force.
7. In moving practice with the forms we can discover the subtleties of momentum in our movements, all the while maintaining our rooted connection to our ground. We discover that fluid balanced movement is based on our vertical alignment rather than simply 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.
This is the practice to prepare ourselves 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 an existential agitation that can completely unground us. Our challenge is to remain relaxed, connected and grounded.
● To practice this with a partner we must first deepen and stabilize the multi-facetted 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 actually happening.
● Greeting each other in a moment of recognition is an important step in helping to relieve the emotional stress of close contact. This is a moment to establish a bond of mutual trust.
● 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 (ie. dantian), letting go of independent thought based arm movements in favor of dantian directed full body action.
● These skills can be developed 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 some single hand exercises and eventually the choreography changes 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 another (our cooperative partner using only 4oz 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.
● During this phase we begin to notice counterproductive tensions in both ourselves and our partners. This is the key moment of opportunity where we can exercise our intention to support and help our partner in this fascinating process of 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 a patient attitude, 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-judgemental 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 can guide us through our ego reduction process and present the ground for accessing the higher states in us.
Thank you for your attention.
With love and respect,
– Greg Woodson, April 2024
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.
• Thank you to 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.
• Thank you to 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.
• Thank you to Ken Van Sickle who helped me to free my mind of particular interpretations of how I thought things should be done.
