Sep 27 The Tai Chi River

“You don’t do Tai Chi, it does you!” is a phrase Sifu uses a lot, particularly when I’m stomping around the room frustrated that I can’t ‘do’ it. He often relates practicing Tai Chi as being ‘swept along by a river’ where the current just takes you on your way. Before you practice the form there is a moment of stillness as you mentally prepare to train – a period of self reflection where you allow the mental ‘mud to settle’ as Sifu puts it; which stops the mind ‘fizzing’ and allows the concerns of the outside world to slip away

It’s a wonderfully tranquil sensation when you fully let yourself be taken by the moment, and is one of the truly rare times where you have a ‘zen’ like experience of being completely in the ‘here and now’. Thus far I’ve only had a few glimpses of this state of Tai Chi and have sabotaged each one of them by catching myself having a ‘moment’. Recognising it requires your mind to pause and snapshot it, by which time you realise that you’ve stopped dead and the river has flowed on without you.

‘flow’ was in my lesson the other day where Sifu was nagging me as usual about my ‘stop start’ performance as I stumbled through a section of the Yang Cheng Fu Long form. Sifu performed it next to me acting as a ‘metronome’ to pace myself by. We started off together and I was flowing along nicely until I hit a point that Sifu had just corrected, so I concentrated on that little bit and then found I’d slipped behind and then had to rush onto the next bit, got flustered and then my pace started to fluctuate, my body wobbled to the end of the sequence where Sifu had already arrived. He said, “Isn’t it funny that for most of the form you were going faster than me, but I finished first?”

What had happened was that I was trying to do the form and was racing between each of the points concentrating furiously on keeping to the pace of Sifu – which ironically caused me to keep stopping to check my pace. You really only have to consider my internal dialog to see why I was messing up my timing, “Ok he’s finished that move. Whoops I missed a beat there. Damn, too fast, slow down a bit. Don’t forget to transfer the weight ‘muscle to muscle’….doh, too fast – Sifu’s not got here yet, slow down, arrgh, he’s already there……”

With my mind to-ing and fro-ing like that, is it any wonder that my body was finishing in a different time zone to Sifu? This is where Tai Chi training transcends the physical and becomes a deeply powerful mental training tool. The seemingly slow pace of the form Sifu always jokes, is actually too fast. If we ‘try’ and force ourselves upon the river we’ll sink like a rock. What we actually need to do is ‘lighten’ our heads and just let mind and body ‘experience’ the flow of the river. This is where the practice enters the realms of a meditative discipline.

The Tai Chi river is a wonderfully romantic notion with idyllic leanings towards inner peace and tranquility, but it is also the state of mind that underpins the Tai Chi combative mindset. Having the ability to be totally ‘in the moment’ and spontaneous without the mental ‘hang-ups’ of the ego is essential to act with true clarity and speed. The analogy of the river and how Tai Chi works when unhindered by the mind answered a question I’d had for many years. Virtually all Martial Artists are familiar with the Japanese concept of ‘Mushin’ or no mindedness. This is the level of performance where the practitioner flows into action without conscious thought. In my training prior to Tai Chi it’s a state of mind that I really only achieved when the chips were down and I really needed to dig deep to succeed, heavy sparring, intensive pad workouts and live weapons work really got me into the ‘zone’. It was during these sessions that I didn’t actually remember consciously what I did and it was exactly like something had just swept me away, a natural force that just ‘happened’ seem to govern my performance, as if I was just a casual observer.

This phenomenon also followed me into doorwork. On the Door no matter how many times I stood in front of someone, no matter what their size, or the number of people round me as backup I could not stop myself from being intimidated. As a Doorman I physically had to make myself stand in front of people and found every confrontation highly intimidating. Yet if the confrontation stage was removed and I went straight into a physical engagement I felt nothing until the situation was over. For example, at one club I had a favourite vantage point on the DJ stand and if there was a ‘shout’ I’d dive off the stage, cover half the club and be helping drag someone out before I even had a conscious thought. It seemed, as it did with my Tai Chi form, when my conscious mind stayed out of the picture my performance was fluid and natural, yet the moment I started to contemplate and force the situation my brain would stall and my thinking become fettered.

It was this gap in performance that led me to start looking into the ‘reality’ based training programs of heavy and hard intensive contact sessions. My reasoning, like many others, was that it was in intense survival situations that ‘mushin’ really kicked in and therefore in order to learn to access this level of performance I’d need to train in that manner. What I found however was that pretty quickly my body became accustomed to the pace and soon even the hard training became the norm and I was no longer having to slip into a real state of just being. We started looking into more and more elaborate ways to dip into the ‘river’ playing with pads and fancy head gear which eventually drew us further and further away from reality and consequently the flow that I’d experienced in ‘real’ survival situations.

During this time I’d say that my performance on the Door actually dropped because increasingly I was finding that I had to use negative emotional states like anger to help boost me up to the level of arousal I needed to perform. And despite all my training I still couldn’t directly access ‘mushin’ I had to achieve it by winding myself up, it reminds me of the comedian Brian Connelly’s character ‘Dangerous Brian’ only I had to become ‘Dangerous Gav’ in order to perform. This was having a direct affect on my character causing me to become a very intense (which could also be read as ‘tense’) person and this was a trait I was increasingly recognizing in the majority of people who shared similar training methods.

It wasn’t until I met Sifu that I experienced a training program that specifically addressed this state of ‘no mind’ and trained the ability access it at will with total mental clarity. The Tai Chi training despite its superficial slow pace and peacefulness is an incredibly intensive regime and it isn’t until you really begin to experience the horrific Tai Chi process of ‘eating bitter’ that you begin to bridge the gap between the mind and body. With my heavy and ‘faster’ training I could always hide in the speed and intensity where in Tai Chi there is nowhere for me to cower. Despite all the intensity and speed in my training whenever I moved round with Sifu he’d always ‘arrive’ first just like in the form.

I’m sure at this point there are still those amongst you for whom the concept of the ‘river’ and ‘No Mindedness’ is still fanciful and too much in the realms of esoteric thinking, but it is state that I’m sure virtually everyone who has partaken in any form of sparring has experienced. In sparring we have all landed shots (and most of us have received a few) that just seem to come from nowhere. You will be moving around and then you’ll slip a punch in that lands effortlessly and these are usually the ones that snap your partners head back and leave you begging for forgiveness. Whenever I land a ‘lucky’ shot it always feels like I’ve experienced time differently and I become an observer of the event rather than the perpetrator. I then spend the rest of the session trying to recreate the ‘moment’ and usually end up eating leather. It is accessing this higher state at will that eluded me for so long and which needed to use heightened states emotional arousal to achieve. Through Tai Chi I began to see the tools I needed to train myself to get into the ‘zone’ without having to trick my body into it.

Now obviously I’m not saying that simply performing the Form alone is going to improve your combative abilities, but it is one of the methods used to train the mind and body to operate as a holistic unit. One aspect of Tai Chi training that took me by surprise was the manner in which it actually changes your thought processes and has a profound effect on the way you think. Most people think in a straight line of events, we process information in a linear and logical manner. We have an internal commentary and process information on a secular basis paying very close attention to single details before moving onto the next thing. Our mind ‘snapshots’ the universe and actually has a filtering system that draws our attention to things of particular interest at the expense of ignoring those things that are not. This enables us pigeon hole the world and label it. After a period of time of practicing Tai Chi you actually find that you stop thinking in terms of pictures and words and start perceiving the world as a whole. By performing Tai Chi in the manner of the casual observer you begin to perceive the larger universe in increasingly more intricate clarity rather than focusing directly on single aspects. The separation between thought and action blurs and it actually becomes extremely hard to make a clean distinction between them and it is here that the practice starts to grip hold of you on an extremely profound level.

Many of the Martial Arts practiced today I believe cause their practitioners to tune into specifics and end up dealing with separate events; a punch, a kick, a grab from behind. These are put under the microscope, isolated and studied as separate happenings. This leaves the perspective of the ‘fight’ as a long list of potential possibilities each with their own individual solutions to be trained and mastered. Tai Chi requires you to actually tune out and to look at the universe as a whole and consequently our view of the ‘fight’ becomes ‘holistic’ and we look deeply at the commonalities between all actions, but this requires a total overhaul of our perspectives which is a process that starts by humbly dipping your toe into the ‘river’ and knowing how to let ourselves be taken by it.

Ultimately I believe it is the ‘river’ that we are all trying to experience as Martial Artists, that ability to just ‘do’ it. Yet most of us jump in with so much baggage that we stink straight to the bottom and get bogged down. Tai Chi, I believe, is the art of offloading the excess weight so that we are free to float gently and appropriately to wherever the ‘River’ is meant to flow!

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!

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