During lockdown I taught myself a 140-move tai chi form. It’s actually the long form of a short form I have been doing for over 30 years, but with the help of half-remembered lessons, books and sifu YouTube I finally got it down –
I wouldn’t say “pat” because it’s a work in progress. Anyone who has practised a martial art will know that you can watch the same technique by 9 different teachers and you will see 9 different versions of the same technique. In the same way, you can watch a form performed by different tai chi players and it will look a little different each time.
However, what has interested me more is that in the past, my experience of practising tai chi in church halls and gyms. Now fortunately, the style I practise is sometimes called “Monk’s Tai Chi” because theoretically it can be performed in an area of one square yard, so I have been able to learn it easily in the comfort of my own home. It’s not ideal, though, making sure you don’t “Brush Ornament Off the Mantelpiece” instead of “Brush Knee and Sidestep”, so I took my practice outside, and this is where things got interesting.
Indoors and on a level floor, foot placements are very easy. As soon as you practise on grass, or an uneven patio, things become more difficult – smooth transitions of weight from one leg to the other are compromised by your heel binding on damp grass or a step becomes a stumble as you catch your toe on a raised paving slab. We become frustrated that we can’t reproduce what we have been taught or practised; and yet there is nothing to say the foot work shouldn’t be adjusted to deal with circumstances in the same way a punch should be altered depending on uke’s height.
It is an interesting phenomenon that in the West, we feel we have to replicate exactly what our instructor has shown us because it comes from an ancient culture which we have to preserve because it must have a meaning, even if we don’t understand it. It reminds me of the story of a couple who went to see a Japanese noh play. Midway through the performance a man walked across the stage and took away a robe that was draped over a piece of the scenery. At the end they asked what was the significance of that act. Oh, they were told, someone forgot to take the robe off-set so a stage hand just went on and got it!
In fairness, I have to say that I have been to a lot of courses and seminars around the world where the instructing sensei and sifu insisted on a foot being placed just so, or a hip being turned precisely this way or that. Now up to a point, I can see the importance of being taught correct form, but when it becomes the only thing, then the art begins to ossify.
The only man I know of who addresses this issue and says “it’s OK to be clumsy” is Terry Dobson, the first American to train in Japan with Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido. He even voiced the sacrilege that even Ueshiba had bad days when his technique wasn’t so great, or he didn’t know what to say. He conducted practises where students practised techniques rapidly over and over until they started getting ragged, and Dobson told them, “Now you’re beginning to look real.” I think that what Dobson is talking about here is learning to accept what is and deal with that.
The other interesting thing you notice when you have all of the outside to practise is that the things that have anchored your practice disappear. In a church hall, you know that whenever you “Gather Celestial Energy” you will be facing the windows, and “Fair Lady Weaving” means you’re looking at the fire escape. But every time you carry the form out in a different place, all those little reminders have vanished and it’s very easy to lose your place.
Now apart from dealing with physical problems, there are also mental ones. There are simply the days when it is too cold, or it’s raining or even snowing. These are fairly easy to deal with – you just tough it out, just like going to practise at that church hall or gym on the days when you’re too tired, when work is spinning around in your head or when you just don’t feel like it – you just go.
The more difficult ones to handle are the distractions. It’s easy to concentrate on spiritual things on a mountaintop or in a monastery, surrounded by like-minded people – it’s much harder when shopping for groceries in Tesco’s! Bruce Springsteen managed to make a whole song about how “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” For example, after shortly I took my practice outdoors, I noticed that at almost the same time every day, two green parakeets flew overhead. Obviously, the first time was quite a surprise, but apparently the descendants of the pair that first escaped in London and started breeding there have slowly been migrating north.
After the initial surprise, I looked for them every day and got distracted if they did, or didn’t come. And then there was the grey squirrel which would sit on the fence and watch me, and the wren which made a surprisingly loud alarm call every time it saw me, and my cat, who would sometimes come and rub round my feet when I was trying to stand on one leg for “The Dog Awakens.” All of these things were capable of making me lose count of which move I was on, and then it was a case of checking with the book I had brought with me, or starting again from the beginning.
It reminded me of what the spiritual leader Ram Dass once said, ‘If you think you’re enlightened, spend a week with your family.’ In the same way, a martial artist could say, “If you think you know your form, try practising it in your back garden.” But enlightenment, of course, isn’t so much about changing external things as learning to change our internal response to those things, in much the same way that the ancient Greek Stoics and modern CBT therapists say that the only thing truly under our control is our response to events.
And perhaps herein lies the problem of studying the martial arts – we’re always in pursuit of unattainable perfection. It may account for the high fall of rate amongst beginners (who realise they won’t be perfect after six weeks), and why many stop after achieving their first dan (they mistakenly think they’ve achieved perfection). In fact, in any martial art, there is nothing to attain, simply something you do. And each time you do it you learn something – about yourself, or your foot placement or shifting of your body weight, or about parakeets, cats and squirrels.