Christmas, 2010
Awareness Not Softness Creates Tai Chi
In Tai Chi softness, unlike we have been told, need not concern us when we do our forms. Instead, awareness brings us in harmony with heaven and earth and the ultimate. We must not try to perceive hardness and softness but rather substantial and insubstantial.
If most of what you can perceive in your postures is substantial, then you are too hard. If most of what you can perceive in your postures is insubstantial, then you are too soft.
Although the Chinese term song is often translated as relax and equated with softness, this understanding is liable to lead many Western practitioners astray.
Song should by no means be equated with total softness or complete relaxation. It is a mysterious quality that demands support by our fascia, tendons and cartilages without the interference of force or tension from our muscles.
In other words, our soft tissues must be substantial while our muscles are insubstantial.
Tai Chi practice is to train to be intensely aware of this substantial and insubstantial quality throughout the body – and eventually the Mind. One leads to the other.
But what is awareness and how do we acquire and maintain it? One might ask the same question with regard to qi or chi (ki in Japanese) in Tai Chi or Akido practice.
Some equate awareness with consciousness. While they are certainly related, is but an aspect of consciousness yet so is non-awareness. All of us are conscious throughout our daily lives, but so few are truly aware.
Awareness is clarity – the clarity of still water in a bowl or a placid lake. It is the ability to sense or feel non-being within being, stillness within movement, the formless within the form.
It is the skill of perceiving the benefit of forms and at the same time the usefulness of the formless, the empty, the void. Only the latter can give rise to the former.
From the Further Teachings of Lao-tzu translated by Thomas Cleary:
Lao Tzu said:
In the general course of human life, attention should be minute, while aspiration should be great, knowledge should be round, while action should be straight, abilities should be many, while concerns should be few.
Minuteness of attention means considering problems before they arise, guarding against calamity by being careful about small and subtle things, not daring to indulge in your desires.
By following Lao-tzu’s guide, we need to make our awareness minute like looking through a microscope. It is the skill of focusing on the small and subtle aspects of our tai chi and qi gong, both in our form and our push hands. Guarding against calamity so you are not put in a vulnerable position by your opponent.
How then does one attain this minute awareness?
We are not unlike that bowl of water or that placid lake which obtained their clarity though quiet stillness, empty calm.
This is the ultimate goal of both meditation and taichi. Meditation, as most of us know it, is arriving at empty calm through stillness. Taichi, on the other hand, is arriving at empty calm through movement. But not just any movement – the movement of substantial and insubstantial, yin and yang.
Although external changes of action and non-action occur, internally we remain ever aware, empty and calm without our emotions, fears or concerns being aroused by those changes lest we lose track of the small and subtle which will lead to calamity.
But is it possible to be so empty and calm?
Yes, Lao-Tzu tells us if our aspirations are great enough.
So, that leaves us only one question. Is our aspiration to perform tai chi so great that we wish to advance to the highest level possible? Is our aspiration great enough to observe all the myriad parts of our physical structure and to unite them into one whole unit?
Does our roundness of knowledge through awareness of minute detail have no beginning or end? Does it flow in all directions throughout our being, springing inexhaustibly from the source of our emptiness and calmness.
Eventually our lives will become a reflection of our tai chi. No matter what changes occur on the outside, we will remain calm and empty on the inside.
Only then can we acquire that straightness of action to stand unshakably in control of our structure in the face of a relentless opponent and not indulge our desire to win which may lead us to commit an incorrect action.
This then is our practice, not softness, not song but awareness. However, like that bowl of still clear water, one shake will instantly muddle it. The vital spirit is indeed difficult to clarify but so easy to obscure.
