Tai Chi Notes

Warm-up Exercises

Warm up exercises are needed to prepare your body for Tai Chi, thus preventing injury and to prepare your mind for Tai Chi – helping you to stay concentrated.
The warm up routine is designed to help you to mobilise all of the major muscle groups in your body by moving the joints.  The exercises follow a sequence to both increase their efficiency and help you to not miss anything out.  However, if you do miss an exercise out – there is nothing stopping you from putting it in at the end.
It is worthwhile to take notice of exercises that you miss out.  Sometimes your subconscious mind will make you “forget” an exercise that relates to a part of the bodymind that is trying to avoid a particular type of movement.  This can be useful information if you are serious about moving forward with your Tai Chi and energetic movement.
The exercises were taught to me by Christopher Pei.  I have added a few flavours of my own, to help you to work in areas that I frequently se need help.  Christopher Pei was taught these exercises by the Chen family who have taught them for many generations as Tai Chi warm up exercises.


The Exercises

  • Wrist rotations
  • Elbow rotations
  • Shoulder rotations
    • Forwards
    • Backwards
    • One forward and the other backward
    • Reverse
  • Windmill the arms
    • Right arm forward
    • Right arm backward
    • Left arm forward
    • Left  arm backward
    • One forward, one backward
    • Reverse
  • Pull the elbows back and stretch the chest
  • Torso rotation – elbows up
  • Waist rotations – in both directions
  • Rotate the trunk to swing the arms
  • Knee circles – four directions, rotating the hip joint
    • Clockwise
    • Anti clockwise
    • Forwards
    • Backwards
  • Knee rotations
  • Ankle rotations – both ankles in both directions

 

The Yang Style Tai Chi Form

The traditional Yang style Tai Chi form, “Yang Shi Taijiquan Quan Shi” comprises of 103 movements that are split into three sections.
The idea of splitting the form up is to make it more digestible – 111 movements is a lot to learn!  The three sections work in the following way:-

  • Section 1, teaches you everything that you need to know about Yang style Tai Chi within sixteen movements.  By the end of section one, you will have learned the ten essences of Tai Chi, Tai Chi walk, Yin and Yang, Eight Energies and all of the “basics” that will take you through your Tai Chi.  It is therefore vital that you should regard section 1 as “work in progress”.  Any improvement that you make in your understanding of section 1 will improve everything else in your Tai Chi because you will have improved your understanding of the basics.
  • Section 2, takes the learning from section 1 and forces you to review and improve it.  The very first movement in section 2 is actually the same as the most frequently repeated part in section one – except for the fact that you are at a different angle when you perform the movement.  This is surprisingly challenging to overcome!  Section 2 also demands that you need to learn how to move backwards and sideways as well as learning some more vigorous movement such as kicks and forward bends.  Most of the new movements that you learn will be in section 2
  • Section 3, teaches very few movements that are new when compared to section two.  What it does teach you however is a greater level of sophistication than that taught in section 2.  There are many steps that work at angles and the transitions between the movements become more subtle than you have worked on with section 2

 

Beyond

If you wanted to, you could spend your lifetime perfecting the first few movements of section one and become a very good Tai Chi player.  Some Tai Chi teachers teach in this way, using the logic that it is more useful to deeply understand a small quantity of movements than to skim the surface of many different movements.
This approach depends upon the aims and personalities of both the teacher and the student.  Personally, this method would drive me to distraction – no matter how much I intellectually understand the merits!
Within Tai Chi, there is also the opportunity to learn pushing hands, training drills, weapons such as sabre and sword and even sparring.  It is important when learning Tai Chi that you do not become like an internet user, surfing over the top of the understanding that the subject offers you.  Dig deeper and learn what the techniques are all about.  It looks fantastic to be able to perform the weapon forms but wait until you are adept with the bare hand forms first.  This will make it easier for you to learn the weapon forms and you will also be able to apply what you have learned in the weapon forms to your bare hand form if the foundations are strong.


The Tai Chi Form

The following is a list of all of the Tai Chi movements in the Yang style form.  Please note that as each new movement comes up in the sequence, it is highlighted in bold text.  This is to help you see that although there are many moves, a lot of them are repeats of already known movements.

Section 1

  • Ready stance – Wu Chi
  • Opening
  • Grasping the Sparrows Tail
  • Single Whip
  • Raise Hands
  • White Crane Spreads it’s Wings
  • Brush knee and push (right)
  • Strum the Lute
  • Brush knee and push (right)
  • Brush knee and push (left)
  • Brush knee and push (right)
  • Strum the Lute
  • Brush knee and push (right)
  • Step forward, Parry, Block and Punch
  • Apparent close up
  • Cross Hands

 

Section 2

  • Embrace the Tiger and Return to the Mountain
  • Fist Under Elbow
  • Step Back to Repulse the Monkey  (right)
  • Step Back to Repulse the Monkey (left)
  • Step Back to Repulse the Monkey (right)
  • Step Back to Repulse the Monkey (left)
  • Step Back to Repulse the Monkey (right)
  • Slant Flying
  • Raise Hands
  • White Crane Spreads it’s Wings
  • Brush knee and push (right)
  • Needle at the Sea Bottom
  • Fan Through the Back
  • Turn body and chop with fist
  • Step forward, Parry, Block and Punch
  • Grasping the Sparrows Tail
  • Single Whip
  • Waving Hands Like Clouds (1)
  • Waving Hands Like Clouds (2)
  • Waving Hands Like Clouds (3)
  • Single Whip
  • High Pat on Horse
  • Right Separation Kick
  • Left Separation Kick
  • Turn body and kick with the left heel
  • Brush knee and push (right)
  • Brush knee and push (left)
  • Step forward and Punch Downward
  • Turn body and chop with fist
  • Step forward, Parry, Block and Punch
  • Right Heel Kick
  • Hit the Tiger (left)
  • Hit the Tiger (right)
  • Turn and Kick with Right Heel
  • Box both ears
  • Left Heel Kick
  • Turn and Kick with Right Heel
  • Step forward, Parry, Block and Punch
  • Apparent close up
  • Cross Hands

 

Section 3

  • Embrace the Tiger and Return to the Mountain
  • Diagonal Single Whip
  • Part the wild horses mane (right)
  • Part the wild horses mane (left)
  • Part the wild horses mane (right)
  • Part the wild horses mane (left)
  • Part the wild horses mane(right)
  • Grasping the Sparrows Tail
  • Single Whip
  • Fair Lady works at the shuttles (right)
  • Fair Lady works at the shuttles (left)
  • Fair Lady works at the shuttles  (right)
  • Fair Lady works at the shuttles (left)
  • Grasping the Sparrows Tail
  • Single Whip
  • Waving Hands Like Clouds (1)
  • Waving Hands Like Clouds (2)
  • Waving Hands Like Clouds (3)
  • Single Whip
  • Snake Creeps Down
  • Golden Rooster Stands on One Leg (right)
  • Golden Rooster Stands on One Leg (left)
  • Step Back to Repulse the Monkey (right)
  • Step Back to Repulse the Monkey (left)
  • Step Back to Repulse the Monkey (right)
  • Slant Flying
  • Raise Hands
  • White Crane Spreads it’s Wings
  • Brush knee and push (right)
  • Needle at the Sea Bottom
  • Fan Through the Back
  • Turn Body, White Snake Spits out it’s Tongue
  • Step forward, Parry, Block and Punch
  • Grasping the Sparrows Tail
  • Single Whip
  • Waving Hands Like Clouds (1)
  • Waving Hands Like Clouds (2)
  • Waving Hands Like Clouds (3)
  • Single Whip
  • High Pat on Horse
  • Piercing Palm
  • Cross legs
  • Step forward, Parry, Block and Punch
  • Grasping the Sparrows Tail
  • Single Whip
  • Snake Creeps Down
  • Step Forward To Seven Stars
  • Retreat to Ride the Tiger
  • Turn Around With Lotus Kick
  • Shoot the Tiger
  • Step forward, Parry, Block and Punch
  • Apparent close up
  • Cross Hands
  • Closing Posture
  • Completing the Routine – Wu Chi

 

Body Alignment and Position

Possibly the most important aspect of Tai Chi is a good understanding of body alignment and position.  Without understanding these factors, it is impossible to progress with your Tai Chi development.
The traditional method for teaching body alignment was to make the student practice for many hours so that the student’s muscles eventually relaxed and something like the correct body position was achieved.
Whilst there is no substitute for time spent practicing Tai Chi, most modern people just do not have the time to dedicate to this sort of practice.  There is however a quicker route towards achieving the correct body positions required for Tai Chi.    To learn more quickly, you need to take responsibility for your own improvement – you cannot leave everything to your coach to correct.  This means that you need to spend time thinking deeply about your body position and how you are training.  Read books, question your teacher and other students, and watch other styles and sports.  The more that you put into your understanding, the more accurate that your training becomes.
For instance, look at a first class archer.  You will see much kinship with Tai Chi such as relaxed shoulders, straight back, deliberate weight distribution and coordinated movement throughout the whole body.  Why is the archer doing this?  What are you seeing him or her do that correlates with your understanding of Tai Chi?  Dig deep, the answers are all there!
Conversely, look at mistakes and learn from them.  When you watch sport on the television or live and something goes wrong, try deconstructing what happened.  Apply the rules of Tai Chi and learn from other peoples mistakes.
You will find that some sports and pastimes do not follow the rules of Tai Chi.  Why is that?  For instance, in some style of horse riding, it is a requirement that the shoulders are pushed back slightly.  This is counter intuitive to a Tai Chi player because in Tai Chi, the chest should be rounded – not the back.  The reason for this is to do with how the body is used in the saddle.  Not everything follows the rules of Tai Chi, but a lot of things do.
This sort of research helps you to integrate what you see outside the world of Tai Chi into your Tai Chi and vice versa.  Sufficient exploration will result in you being able to feel within a micro second if your body alignment is wrong – whether you are doing Tai Chi or just taking the dog for a walk!


The Ten Essences

Background

If you have ever looked at other Tai Chi books or Tai chi web sites, you will have come across many different formulae to help the keen student understand their Tai Chi better.  Examples are “the thirteen postures”, “the eighteen loci”, “the song of the eight ways” and so on.  Usually there is a number in the title to remind the student how many points there are to remember.
I had studied Tai Chi for a number of years before I met my current teacher, Christopher Pei.  I was aware of these formulae and had actually got around to reading some of them.  Just reading something is different to understanding it though and none of these formulae made very much impact on my Tai Chi.  At least that is until I learned the “Ten Essences” from Christopher Pei.
Coach Pei has studied Tai Chi for many years with some of the top masters from many different styles of Tai Chi along with other martial arts and acrobatic styles.  He also has the advantage of being able to talk to the Tai Chi masters with whom he has studied in their own language, so that the nuances of the teachings are not lost in translation.
This experience brought him to the conclusion that the Ten Essences, originally devised by Yang Cheng Fu, contain much of what the Tai Chi practitioner needs to understand if they are studied in depth.  Coach Pei did however rearrange the sequence slightly so that they flow through the body and actually give ten levels of understanding for your Tai Chi.
Since those early days of being introduced to the Ten Essences, I have also done research around the subject and have found no better methodology than the Ten Essences to way mark progress and assist in the understanding of the form.
I have also found that if you can understand the Ten Essences, other systems like those quoted earlier and many more besides will actually be saying the same thing in a slightly different way.  We shall take a look at the Ten Essences and also a look at another concept that that is sometimes called “quartering” and see how they relate to each other.


Understanding the Ten Essences

If you are serious about improving your Tai Chi, you need to understand the Ten Essences thoroughly.  This will become the toolkit that helps you to evaluate your own Tai Chi or if you are a Tai Chi coach, the Tai Chi performances of your students.
The first thing that you will need to do is to be able to recite the Ten Essences in their sequence.  Without being able to remember the Essences in sequence, you will struggle to work with them quickly and efficiently.

  • Lift the head – raise the spirit
  • Sink the shoulders – lower the elbows
  • Loosen the chest – round the back
  • Loosen the waist
  • Separate the substantial and the insubstantial
  • Coordinate the upper and lower body
  • Continuity in movement
  • Unite the internal intent of the mind and the external frame of the body
  • Use mind and not force
  • Seek stillness in motion and motion within stillness.

Mere recitation is obviously a long way from learning but it is a good first step.  I see the Ten Essences of Tai Chi as a kind of poem that means different things to you depending upon your level of knowledge when you read it and other factors such as your aspirations and dreams at that point in your life.
For example, the Tenth essence could be seen as imparting profound knowledge in a similar way to a Zen koan – or self contradictory nonsense.  Hopefully, the latter will not be the case for any Tai Chi students out there!
Let’s take a look at the essences individually now.


Essence Number 1 – Lift the Head to Raise the Spirit

 

This is possibly the easiest of the ten essences to get a handle on in the early days.  Sometimes though, the apparently simple things in life have more to offer us if we are willing to dig deeper.
An easy way to think about this essence is to imagine that you are going into a job interview.  You are trying to present yourself as a person who is confident and able to do the job in question.  How do you look to the interviewer?  Do you walk in, look them in the eye, smile at him or her and greet them?  Or do you shuffle into the room, gaze at your shoes, mutter something under your breath and look terrified?
Obviously, we try to do the former and not the latter – even if we really feel like doing the latter.  This already brings us to a very interesting concept.  We know that other people notice our body language when we are confident or nervous – but what about our inner selves?
If we can lift our heads and straighten our backs then we look more confident.  If we look more confident then we start to feel more confident and the cycle becomes self perpetuating.  Think about some famous people who are well known for their confidence.  Even when times were hard for them, you did not see great sportsmen like Jesse Owens or Mohammed Ali staring at the floor when they were doing their stuff.  They looked the world in the eye and took what it had to throw at them!
On the other side of the coin, look at children when they are nervous.  Usually, children are less adept at controlling how they feel and when put under pressure will do anything other than look a person in the eye.
If you practice any of the disciplines that are said to develop the body/mind/spirit whether they are Tai Chi, Yoga or other forms of meditation – they ALL have this message encoded into their teachings somewhere.
The implication here is that this kind of inner confidence can be trained and that methods such as martial arts and meditation can help with that training.
If you lift up your head, the first thing that physically happens is that you become more balanced.  Think about how much your head weighs.  Typically an average human head weight is about the same as five bags of sugar.  Your centre of gravity is in the Tan Tien point, just below your belly button.  The distance from the middle of your head to your centre of gravity is roughly the same as the length of your arm.
Next time you go shopping, try this one.  Grab a few bags of sugar and hold them out in front of you at arm’s length.  It takes quite a lot of effort!
So, the person who walks around with their eyes on the floor for most of the time is inadvertently putting pretty much the same sort of mechanical stress on their bodies – just by not paying attention to their body posture.
Now, another exercise, if you are reading this the chance is that you have your eyes gazing downwards to look at the printed words.  Keep your head in that position for a moment or two.  Perhaps even let it drop a little further.  What I suggest that you do here though is really observe yourself.  How does the “stooped” position make you feel?  How are the muscles?  What about your inner self?  Do you feel balanced?
Now, put the book down and lift up your head to a nice neutral balanced position.  How did that make you feel?  More balanced?  Less muscular stress?
When you let your head drop forwards, it creates a physical stress in your body that is similar to that that you felt when you did the sugar experiment in the supermarket, but you gain nothing from it.  It does not even burn calories for you! 
Your bodymind does not really differentiate between physical or mechanical stress of this sort and nervous stress.  So if your neck is not balancing your head freely then the effort taken by the rest of your body to just maintain that position is depleting your energies and putting you under stress that is possible to avoid!
It sounds easy!  Just lift your head up and reduce the muscular stress in your body and thereby reduce the nervous stress.  If only it were that easy, we would all be Yogis and Tai Chi masters.
The first thing that most people have to contend with is habits that are already programmed into our bodies.  This is especially true if you spend a lot of time using computers, telephones or driving.  These are notorious for training our bodies into bad posture.  Along with environmental factors such as these, there can also be congenital factors such as muscular skeletal problems.
What can happen is that the core muscles that should be used to lightly balance your head on the top of your neck become atrophied and the more external muscles become overworked and tight, leading to bad posture and all of the well documented problems that are associated with bad posture.
How do we solve the problem?  A good way to start is with Tai Chi because it teaches you awareness of your posture.  The Tai chi training will also help you with softening the external muscles and training the internal core muscles to support your body better.  A few nice massages will help as well!
Once the physical side of things starts to improve, your body will straighten and your head lifts – perhaps imperceptibly but this will change your energetic structure.  Issues that previously would have made you nervous or stressed will probably still have an effect on you but the difference will be that these events have less impact on your body and mind.  You are starting to regain your internal balance!


Some thoughts about the History of Tai Chi

The famous George Orwell quote “He who controls the past, controls the present”, always comes to mind when I look on an internet search engine for “Tai Chi History”.   Many of the web sites that you see will have a family tree on it that starts with Yang Cheng Fu or Chan San Feng and finishes with the teacher for the club whose website you are looking at. 
Something along the lines of “The immortal from the south trained a secret group of students the hidden secrets of Tai Chi and one of those students was the grandfather of my teacher who has now given me exclusive permission to teach my Tai Chi to the public”.  OK, so I am using exaggeration to make a point but you do actually get web sites that make such claims.
It is not just Tai Chi that suffers from this affliction.  Teachers of all disciplines seek to connect their teaching to the original source – not just because it looks good but also as a form of both internal and external validation.
Let’s try and put this very human phenomenon into a Tai Chi context.  In Tai Chi, we are always looking for balance.  This balance is not just a physical balance – remember that Tai Chi is an art form that trains mind, body and spirit.
Think now about another type of balance.  That between the past and the future with the present – the here and now being the pivot point in the middle of the two.  In meditation, one of the aims that we try to achieve is to live in the here and now and experience the moment as it is.  When one becomes truly aware of the moment, then ones consciousness expands and a new kind of awareness develops.  Many religions and mystical systems around the world operate either directly or indirectly on this premise.
So, if we mentally re-visit the Tai Chi web site that is making claims about lineages to the fourteenth century – do you think that the author is concentrating on the here and now or the past?  Alternatively, the Tai Chi master who has forgotten the traditions of Tai Chi and is trying to claim the “one true way”, seems to also be missing out on the essence of the “here and now”.
In Tai Chi, we need to be mindful of the past and also be able to define ourselves in our own terms.  This is what all of the great teachers have done and will do.  To become obsessed with the past is like being the martial artist who is convinced that he will win or lose the next tournament depending upon the result of the last one. 
Each day, each moment should be a new experience.  The past gives us our grounding and the future gives us our impetus to move forwards but it is the only the present that we can truly change.
In this context, our internal relationship with the past and the future is interplay of Yin and Yang.  We can only truly learn to live in the moment when we balance our Yang tendencies to look forward to the future and our Yin tendencies to look towards the past.
The physical aspects of Tai Chi can help you to train your mind to understand the mental aspects of the differentiation of Yin and Yang.  This will naturally adjust your way of thinking to allow what the Zen Buddhists call a “Kensho” experience where one becomes mentally and spiritually aware of the moment in all of its glory and new levels of spiritual enlightenment become possible