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Faults
Your mind is agitated and you have a bad nights sleep. Because of
your bad nights sleep, your mind becomes agitated.
This seems to be a loop. Catch-22.
To break the loop you must introduce a new factor, a change.
For example, you may lie down for 30 minutes before bed, or eat less in an
evening or allow more fresh air into the bedroom, or you may wear less
clothing for bed.
Change
Without a conscious, deliberate change, the loop may well continue
indefinitely. You plateau.
Some changes occur by themselves.
Sometimes a new element needs to be introduced.
Improve
Your tai chi progress is like this.
Training a fault will perpetuate the fault. Improvements need to be added
and practiced.
Not all change is involuntary.
Unlearning
Zen helps our students to drop their
baggage and realise that they
don't know.
Shedding past experiences, opinions and preconceptions is a vital first
step.
Beginners find this to be very difficult.
It entails change.
Zen
Tools such as Zen koan are an invaluable aid.
They challenge our pre-conditioned ways of regarding the world and invite us
to see the essence, the true nature of things.
Until you have unlearned what you think you know, progress is difficult
and slow.
People to cling to their notions for security, never realising that freedom
and mobility come from letting-go, rather than holding-on.
How frightened we are of the
unknown! We like to remain enclosed in our daily habits, routines, quarrels
and anxieties. We like to think the same old way, take the same road, see
the same faces and have the same worries
(Krishnamurti)
Intuition rather than knowledge
Taoist/Zen precepts, insights and principles are not easy for the
modern, rational mind to cope with.
People want to get a 'grasp of it' or 'get their head around it'.
It is hard to accept that we cannot truly
understand very much about
existence. It is fundamentally too vast and too complex to be comprehended.
Loss
This is why unlearning is so vital. Not only do we want to lose clutter and
memories, we also need to lose our way of looking at things.
Not all things can be held, fixed and comprehended. Some things are too big
to be understood.
And perhaps we do not even need to understand in order to make progress...
Perhaps all we need to do is feel it.
Tai chi cannot be learned in a step-by-step way.
Linear progress
We offer a very detailed syllabus, with many topics, modules, and a clear
path of progress.
Yet, we also realise that progress is sporadic.
Students are individuals. They all learn differently.
There are sometimes great leaps of insight and ability.
At other times, people fall back into old habits and are required to review
the basics once more.
Everyone is different.
Unconventional
There is no linear progress.
Tai chi is not logical. It is not like a
conventional martial art. You
cannot understand tai chi in terms of something else.
Most of the exercises and drills are about unlearning, about realising that
what you think is so is not necessarily so.
We teach new insights. We also take things away.
Connections and associations
When a student begins to put the pieces together, one
insight can
spark off many more.
Instead of seeing the new insight in isolation, the student realises how it
pertains to many other aspects of the training.
Neigong is Iike this. If you can manifest a quality all the time, it
underscores everything you do.
Jing is the same as well.
When you look at the form you notice similarities and differences between
movements.
You see variations on a theme.
Insights
The insights cause a chain reaction, sparking an ever-widening growth of
awareness and curiosity.
Instead of knowing more, you see more.
You realise that there is more to see, to explore, to uncover. Your vision
does not narrow, it widens.
Everything is seen in a new light.
Huge spurts of comprehension and insight occur constantly.
You find yourself making connections and associations between previously
unrelated parts of the curriculum and your abilities increase unexpectedly.
Innovation
Creativity is a natural offshoot of this way of exploring tai chi.
You have new ideas all the time and continue to see things differently.
Nothing is static. Everything is changing.
Zen in the Martial Arts
by Joe Hyams...
The chapter called Lengthen Your Line is very important. The
author is failing to make headway when fighting against more skilled
opponents in class. His solution is to be an 'arse'.
The instructor (Ed Parker) asks to speak with him after the lesson.
Short line
Ed draws a short line on a piece of paper and asks Joe how to make the line
shorter. The author provides a few suggestions. Ed draws a longer line
alongside the first line. Now, the first line looks shorter.
Improve your own line
Ed Parker explains "It is always better to
improve and strengthen your own line or knowledge than to try and cut your
opponent's line".
Realisation
Joe realised that in many different areas of his life he was investing a lot
of effort attacking other people and trying to make life difficult for them
rather than seeking to improve his own skill.
What about you?
If we take the principle from this story and expand it... Consider that your
current skill level can be represented by a 2 inch long line.
During a lesson Sifu gives you the opportunity to extend that line another
inch or two. But do you?
Are you making the best of the opportunities?
The student who goes home and thinks about the lesson, practices the skills
and then applies them will come to the next lesson with a 3 inch line.
By contrast, others will still have a 2 inch line.
Which type of student are you?
Page created
18 April 1995
Last updated
16 June 2023
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