Sep 27 The Diagonal Room

“Ok, let’s see how you are doing with the broadsword form.” asked Sifu during a lesson from my humble training room.

I was a couple of weeks into the form and had just started to piece together the sequences. It’s a wonderful form to practice with a lovely continuous flow through which you hack, chop, stab and slash your way through an entire battlefield of opponents. Sifu says wielding the broadsword is a chance for us to bring out our inner ‘pirate’ to play.

As I swash buckled my way through the form Sifu was tucked away in the corner of the room just in case I slightly misjudged a cut with the sword. I had been using a blunt metal training dao (broadsword) but had just taken delivery of my first ‘proper’ dao which came as standard with a razor sharp edge, so naturally Sifu positioned himself out of harms way.

Due to the space restrictions in my training room I have to shuffle around a bit to stop myself from hacking the walls to pieces and this hadn’t gone unnoticed…

“It really uses up the space in here doesn’t it?” remarked Sifu.

“Totally. The room’s just not quite long enough and ever so slightly too short. If the room was diagonal I’d be able to fit the form in perfectly!” I said which brought a sly grin to Sifu’s face.

“Do the form again!” he instructed whilst walking over.

I stood facing the wall and was just about to begin…

“Wait!” he said as he turned me so I was facing the corner of the room, “Viola! One diagonal room!”

Doh!

Its funny, every single morning I go into my training and have different spots to start the various forms off from that helps maximise my limited space, but I’m always pointing in the same direction. As stupid and ridiculous as it may seem the notion of changing the direction I face when beginning practice has never crossed my mind. In the very process of practising an art that demands total mindfulness I had ‘mindlessly’ become stuck in a habit – how ‘un-Taiji’ is that?

Quite a few years ago my father took a group of his black belts down to perform a demonstration at a martial arts show. In part of the demonstration four black belts stood with one facing north, one south, one east and one west. They were all performing the same kata (a Japanese term for form) so in theory they should have all ended facing exactly the same way they started – unfortunately, and rather comically, the black belts all ended up facing in hysterically random directions. Whilst practising for the show they were all used to facing the same way and became totally disorientated when beginning in slightly different directions.

The power of ‘habit’ is awesome and quite often is a force that we are oblivious to. Most of the time we walk round with auto-pilot switched on and totally unconscious of how we are actually moving from A to B. Taiji when broken down is really incredibly simple but becomes immensely difficult whilst we still cling to our old ‘habitual’ ways. Its really not until you come to study something like Taiji that you start to build an awareness of how you move your body. Very few us receive formal tuition in body mechanics as children and just muddle our way through as we go and as such our body movements are self taught barring the mimicking of those a round us. By the time we reach adulthood most of our bodily functions and movement patterns are so unconscious that we don’t give them a second thought and our lives become more and more hardwired and ‘habitual’.

Many people as they advance in years seem to acquire more and more ‘habits’ to such an extent that eventually their entire existence becomes ‘habitual’ as everyday they perform the same rituals and follow the same routines. For a lot of us actually breaking these routines causes immense ‘stress’ as we have evolved into creatures of habit to the point that anything spontaneous is actually seen as a traumatic experience. How many times have you noticed that when asked to do something different, like catching a show, going to a new restaurant or something else outside of the norm automatically triggers that internal ‘sigh’? Whether we actually like our habits or not we usually end up defending them ferociously when something challenges them we turn into the ultimate excuse making machines.

One thing that amuses me about teaching Taiji is how the ‘challenge of the habitual’ becomes like a little merry-go-round with the same theme cropping up again and again as we move through the cycle of fighting the new layers in the teaching. When students come to their first Taiji lesson they are usually overwhelmed by how uncoordinated and clumsy they feel. As we said movement on the whole becomes habitual and once that habit has been formed and nurtured over the course of our entire lives breaking it becomes hellish, and because of this many people give up after their couple of lessons. For those that do stay for a month or so the initial sequences they have learnt become more comfortable and familiar but they then despair again when presented with a new sequence. Given another month and the once new patterns again become familiar but now the really ‘new’ movements become tortuous – and this goes on, and on, and on…

Sifu’s have a habit of springing ‘new stuff’ on students when they least want it. It seems that just as we start to become comfortable with one part another is slipped into just to upset the apple cart. Taiji for me is the only pursuit I’ve found thus far that has kept me feeling like a total beginner.

The other day only a couple of weeks after finishing off the broad sword form Sifu told me that I’d now be learning the Long Boxing Form which is the advanced ‘martial’ form of yang style taijiquan – and on queue I became the Taiji ‘newbie’ again!

“You’re flicking your hands around mindlessly. Remember you need to have a ‘martial’ mindset continuously throughout the form!” Sifu commented as we covered the first section of the form.

“Better, but in the Long Boxing we only focus on the ‘martial’ applications. Every movement of every inch of your body should be ‘martial’ and flow powerfully and continuously!”

Thinking ‘martially’ and being mindful of the applications work Sifu had covered with me I let rip into a dynamic and powerful performance.

“Stop ‘gurning’!” Sifu burst out laughing. “Go to the mirror, close your eyes, do the form and don’t open them until I tell you!”

Walking over to the mirror Sifu was still giggling. I set off through the opening sequence ‘raise hands’ with my eyes closed and thinking ‘martially’ as instructed.

“Right, stop there and open your eyes!” Sifu instructed.

Looking at my foolish reflection I actually gave an embarrassed grin,

“Ok, I do actually look quite funny.” I acknowledge as my whole body looked strained like one of those ‘power lifters’ you see in every gym.

Again I was doing things mindlessly and lazily out of habit. It’s not that I was being purposefully lazy but over the years my body has become very accustomed to moving in a certain manner and its not until Sifu began showing me the art of Taiji that I became aware of how ‘inefficient’ both my martial arts and overall movements were. However the most alarming discoveries into my shortcomings were to found in my mental abilities. I’d always considered myself to have a fairly focussed mind but I found that in reality I was unable to hold my focus for more than a few seconds at a time. Moving through the form I’d find that rather than focussing continuously on the movements I was performing my mind would start chatting. The chatter was always about Taiji, the task at hand, but it wasn’t focussed – I’d be thinking of a section a couple of moves a head or a mistake I’d just made. This ‘frittering’ of my thoughts was entirely habitual and actually something I used everyday, as I’d overanalyse every aspect of my life. Instead of being able to hold my focus in one place my mind scatters over a huge number of different subjects and has evolved the ability to do this extremely quickly. Which is ironically the same manner in which I perform my martial arts where I’ll work frantically to be ‘everywhere’ and as a result never actually be ‘anywhere’.

What Taiji and my lessons from Sifu has given me is means to challenge these life long habits. The philosopher Alan Watts eloquently described us as ‘apertures through which the universe sees itself’, saying that on its own the universe cannot actually look upon itself. Likewise we are unable to see ourselves without the aid of an external source – we can see ourselves by looking out into a mirror but cannot look upon ourselves directly. Because we have this ‘blind spot’ that stops us from seeing our true selves we need to find a ‘mirror’ through which to view our reflection and Taiji provides us with a wonderfully clear image. And the beauty of the Taiji mirror is that the more we polish it the greater the clarity it reflects.

Like with everything though the danger of ‘habit’ always creeps back into equation and as wonderful a ‘mirror’ as Taiji is the reflection it provides is only as good the position we place it in. Through habit we can make our Taiji mindless by practising it in the same fashion over and over and then the reflection we see of ourselves only tells us which we already know and limits its potential. With me I accepted the constraints of a small room when all I needed slightly change the angle I started from to be able to move freely throughout the entire form. Something so simple that was blinded by habit and failing to look at the bigger picture – the lesson was so annoyingly ‘Taiji’ whereby it was ‘me’ that was making my life more difficult than it needed to be.

It is in our nature to become creatures of habit but it is only through diversity and challenge that we evolve. If our body isn’t forced to look at the world through fresh eyes life becomes bland and habitual. Days roll into years and years into decades and in the end cease to experience the wonder of the new and exciting.

At the end of my lesson Sifu had eventually stopped laughing at my ‘gurning’ and become bored with teasing me on my poor ‘feng shui’ so I commented,

“I always feel that I’m just starting to ‘get’ Taiji with ever actually ‘getting’ it!”

He smiled and just said, “Me too! It’s that chase that keeps us alive!”

Gavin King

Gavin King is a Shiatsu practitioner, writer and Martial Arts instructor from Essex in the United Kingdom. He runs a full time Martial Arts centre in Hockley, Essex teaching Tai Chi and Kung Fu. You can contact him via Facebook or Twitter!

More Posts - Website

Follow Me: