Yang Style a la Lee Shiu-pak as presented by Sam Slutsky (Columbus branch)
If anyone wonders why I've placed my page of Tai Chi notes in the Weirdness section, they've clearly never encountered any of my TC family. I should note for vistors that this page will probably change, possibly quite drastically, following any family workshop.
The majority of people who get motivated to actually sit and write something about Tai Chi seem to come in two flavors: the mystical and the empirical. Ne'er the twain shall meet, or at least they'll be really uncomfortable when they do. In all parts of my life I try to strike a reasonable balance between empiricism and mysticism. In many cases this balance boils down to the two words: who knows? Some things I know of my own experience, a lot I can only speculate baselessly upon, along with everyone else in the world. Some few I am willing to take other people's word for rather than go to the work of acquirring the experience to know or speculate-with-base myself (astrophysics, for instance).
Alternate states of consciousness, the existence and direction of something that extends both inside and outside the boundaries of one's skin, these are things that I know of my own experience. I practiced them before I ever started Tai Chi, though I will use the vocabulary of Tai Chi to express them here. These are things I count on the empirical rather than the mystical side, and I ask my visitors to take my word for it.
I find "chi" a useful short-hand term to describe something that is both physical and not, at least not in the usual sense: breath, life, power, a unified concept that does not really differentiate between physical and spiritual-- chi. I do not make categorical claims for what can be done with this thing; I can really only tell for sure what I do with it.
If this raises the hackles of either die-hard empiricists or committed mystics...tough noogies.
I would recommend that any new-comer start with breathing. It's a useful way to increase one's body awareness. Either sitting or standing, a lot of us tend to have bad posture. This was not rectified by the centuries of arbiters of "correct" posture who thought more of how one's clothes drape than how one's lungs work. One's ribs should open to the sides and one's spine compress slightly on the inhale. The ribs fold down again and the spine lengthens on the exhale. The head should not bob, nor the shoulders lift and drop. Both of those things crunch the ribs. One should feel the muscles down the sides of the stomach and along the spine working.
Besides the basic point of good respiration, this should accustom one to listening to one's own body. Try to keep listening at all times. It helps with more than just Tai Chi.
If you get a bit light-headed to start off, don't worry too much. You're giving your body more oxygen than it's probably used to getting. This will get better with time, especially if you can remember to breathe well at the computer desk and so forth.
This is one of the things that invariably infuriates any newcomer. People toss around these short-hand terms as if they were self-evident, which they are self-evidently not. So here's my best shot at explaining the long-hand version.
Release: This is what happens at the very end of any movement. One releases the energy one has gathered. It's tempting to keep the energy in one's body, in one's muscles, and try to shape it into a strike that way, but the basis of a strike in Tai Chi is to, instead, let that energy go. The body is only the core of the movement as a whole.
Shift: This is the center of every movement, the transition from one weighted/un-weighted arrangement of the body to a different one. It is also shorthand for a fairly complex alteration of one's own weight, balance and energy inward and then outward. The shift starts at the feet; the unweighted knee bends; one moves 'back' into oneself, and all vectors are neutralized; the used-to-be-weighted knee straightens; the previously-unweighted side becomes the weighted side.
Gather: The first part of any move involves drawing in one's own energy and hopefully one's opponent. One's movement while gathering should be inward. The first knee-bend in the shift moves one inward to the center of one's stance. Gathering is a much higher percentage of any movement than sending or expressing.
Send: This is a bit like releasing without actually letting the energy leave yet. Sending usually refers to a movement of the arm across or around the plane of the body, and often is a move which sets the opponent off balance or moves them without actually striking.
Expressing: This is a term I tend to use a lot. Calling it the striking hand or foot tends to encourage one to try and drive through a strike with muscular strength. Expressing captures more of the practice of moving one's energy outward without pushing beyond one's own stance and balance.
Stable: At the simplest, the hand and foot that aren't moving are stable. The stable elements are what support and source the ones that express. I find that, of the two hands and two feet, generally three are stable. Most often that is two feet and one hand, but when kicking (bar Double Lotus) one foot and two hands are stable to support the expressing foot.
Yin/yang foot/hand: Loosely, the weight-bearing foot and expressing hand are yang while the un-weighted foot and the stable hand are yin. Hands often correspond to the circles--yang at outer circle and yin at inner. Remember that this is fluid and conditional, and that applying a mechanical or even geometric rule to determining which is which will likely screw things up. This is one of those areas where brute memorization has to serve until one starts to get a feel for what's stable and what's expressing.
Inner/outer circle: This refers to two different distances from one's center. I suppose one of the easiest ways to explain this is in terms of block versus strike. A strike moves as far out as the outer circle. Turning this around, the outer circle is the point at which one cannot go any further without over-extending. This is the point at which one lets the strike go. A block only goes out as far as the inner circle. This is the point at which a bent arm is butressed by the geometry of the whole body. This is about half the distance of the outer circle.
Listening point: Also known as three fingers point. It is, coincidentally enough, the width of three fingers below the base of one's palm. This is the point at which one wants to make contact so as to listen to the opponent's movement. Among other things, it's the pressure point that influences nausea.
Breath point: Point just inside the shoulder joint-- that is, the top of the upper arm bone inside the shoulder socket. So, perhaps four inches in from the outer edge of the shoulder.
Heart: Not one's physiological heart, but the center of the chest under the beginning of the breast bone. This is the middle of the three centers.
Lower center: Even with the base of the spine, analagous to the second chakra. For women, about where the womb is. The tan tien, for those who are familiar with Chinese vocabulary.
45/90: This usually refers to the feet, and if tossed off with no other explanaition usually means to check that one's feet are in the proper alignment. The weight-bearing foot should be 90 degrees to the plane of one's body, while the un-weighted foot is turned 45 degrees from that plane (in the other direction, of course). In other words, the weighted foot is pointing stright forward, wherever forward is at the moment, and the un-weighted foot is pointing just a bit off to the side. It can also refer to hand position, though 45/45 is the more common angle for the arm.
If and when I get around to sequence notes they will be quite sketchy. One's perspective on what happens in each movement changes pretty quickly, and rather extremely depending on what one focuses on at any given moment.
Remember that there are three centers, all of which work with and around each other, which must not freeze or fuse into each other. That results in not breathing. Bad news. Ex: the heart center extends the arms/hands, don't try to source hands through the lower center; that's legs/feet.
--Remember that one of those centers is at the top of the head and connect that one to the others lest everything break off at the neck and lose most of the elasticity for outward expression. Keep the head up and balanced.
Stay inside one's own stance.
Always bend and straighten the knees in the same plane as the toe points; anything else is very bad news for the joints and breaks the energy to boot.
A lot of these get tossed around, especially diagrammatically.
The Bow. This is actually one of the easier ones, in my experience, though also one of the less literal. I do find it helps to remember the compression and lengthening of the spine that goes with good breathing and envision my spine as the bow itself. When used as a diagram, this one is generally drawn with the bottom of the bow at one's feet and the top at one's head, the arrow being propelled out through the heart center. At any rate, one gathers one's energy and then releases it on expression, like an arrow from a bow. While this does have some physiological basis, I find it most useful in helping me remember to actually release the energy of a strike, rather than try to hold on to it. That is what gives a strike it's power.
First off, the other branches of my own family:
Atlantic Canada pages, keeping track of the branches up there. Probably the most extensive and informative of this set.
The Rising Sun School in Toronto, established by Paul McCaughey. This is probably the most reflective of the extant family webpages.
The Atlanta Tai Chi Society, headed by Herb Goldberg.
More general resources:
The amazing Peter Lim Tian Tek, three cheers for his scholarship, who brings us these hugely informative pages on Yang style and the history of Tai Chi.
Last modified: 08/23/08
First Posted: 06/14/2003
© 1998-2009 Emily Ravenwood