Tai Chi principles for everyday life
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Tai chi chuan is an art of magick similar in many ways to western hermetics. A difference is it focuses a lot on the body, although in a subtle way. It can enhance greatly classic western rituals by this particularity, as dance or external martial arts can to some (way)lesser extent.
Though what i'm gonna introduce here is basic correspondances with the yi king, in a way anyone can use them in everyday life(according to one's own current possibilities).
From feeling the energy one can understand it and then get illumination from this understanding. The tai chi chuan is based on this idea, and applies it in congruence with the taoist principles , especially the yi king. Thus, a basic(although advanced in its mastery) teaching is the so called 13 postures.
Those are thus: 8 trigrams + 5 elements. Those correspond to 8 types of mouvements in regard to ones own body, and the 5 elements correspond to directions of moving(in regard to the earth). Those can be precised by the yin and yang interplay.We can of course add the western correspondences and the cardinal ones(micro and macro)and so on.
Here is a key:
http://taichibali.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Pakau-5Elements.jpg
We hopefully dont interact in everyday life using fighting techniques with our environement, yet the principles of any movement can be classified in such way.
The idea is to become aware of these forces which are at play 24/24... Each time we move, in any way, all these come into play. I stretch my arm to grab a glass. According to direction, intent, orientation.... there are specific proprieties at play.
We can also add the chakras, the meridians, the mind, the will...
Each type of activity, state of mind, environement, will and interaction between those will open a otpimal window for a specifric angle of work. We can also add the factor of interaction with other persons in everyday life.
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I'll present an alternative but occasionally complementary point of view.
Taijiquan (Pinyin transliteration) is a Chinese "internal" martial art, practiced nowadays mainly for health, with several extant styles: the main ones, in terms of popularity are Chen, Yang, Wu, Wu (Hao) and Sun. There are also numerous derivatives of these. All styles ultimately derive from the Chen style, the martial art of the Chen family, or clan, which hails from a farming village called Chenjiagou, in Henan province. The Chen style is originally derived from martial arts the Chen clan brought with them to Henan when they were resettled there from Shanxi province in the 13th century, and developed through the centuries as a practical, weapons-based martial art with barehand training foundations, used by the Chen clan in general, to defend themselves and their village, and by scions of the clan who left the village to earn their living as caravan bodyguards, a tradition that made the Chens' skills widely known in Henan province. Its current form is the result of several reforms, simplifications and refinements made by noted family members down the centuries, most notably in the 18th/19the century, the emphasis on the barehand form as a form of health training came to prominence, as the art's practical usefulness in warfare diminished with the increasing use of firearms in China - a fate suffered by most Chinese martial arts at the time. There is probably also some influence from the Shaolin temple, which is situated not that great a distance from Chenjiagou.
The name Taijiquan was first given to the Yang style some time in the 1800s, prior to that time the Yang style and its Chen parent had various names. The Yang style, the first offshoot of the Chen style, was taught by the first known outsider to learn the Chens' art, Yang Luchan, who himself practiced and fought in the Chen style, and was allowed by his teacher to teach a simplified form of Chen to the military and gentry of Beijing, where he had become famous as an "unbeatable" competitor in Lei Tai, open platform challenge competitions. The other main styles are derived from Yang.
There are numerous theories of the origins of Taijiquan, but the above general outline is the only one supported by documentary historical evidence. The popular idea that Taijiquan, or a precursor, the Thirteen Postures, was originally invented by Zhang Sanfeng, a Daoist alchemist purported to have lived some time before or during the 13th century, and that this art was somehow (theories vary) transmitted to Chen village, or down alternative lines to other Taiji variants, is fanciful, and likely the result of confusion on the part of early Yang and Wu practitioners regarding a certain 17th century political propaganda tract, disguised as the epitaph of a martial artist, which mentions Zhang Sanfeng in connection with the invention of "internal" martial arts.
Thus far the history.
As to what it is: as an "internal" martial art, it shares principles with several other Chinese martial arts, of varying age and provenance. These principles *can *be connected to both Daoist and Buddhist philosophy in various ways, which has been done several times, by different authors (including some noted practitioners of all the main styles). However, the connections made seem to be largely either after the fact, or vague enough to fit anything. Primarily, the internal martial arts principles pertain to body skills, a somewhat unusual way of holding, moving, and performing martial actions, with the body.
It is an unusual body skill that has to be practiced a lot, since it is very different from the "normal" way of holding and moving the body we grow up to haphazardly learn; it is in effect a re-learning of how to hold and move the body. This is the main reason why it has to be practiced slowly, at least at first, and with constant supervision and correction by a teacher.
There are two basic principles at work in "internal" martial arts: qi and jin. "Qi" has no direct English translation, but "pressure" is probably about the closest to a general translation. "Jin" is a particular, trained method of directing force. In terms of Western physiology, qi pertains to the body's fascia, or connective tissue, and also to breath and pressure in the body, while jin pertains more to skeletal alignment and clever leverage.
In essence, "internal" movement is the movement of the body by manipulation of qi, or internal body pressure, along "lines" derived from the lay of the body's fascia. This is at first very weak, but gets stronger, and eventually becomes the foundation of a whole-body movement, unifying muscular force with clever leverage derived from skeletal alignment. Since the lower abdominal region is a nexus of both the upper body's weight as it rests on the pelvis, and of many "lines" in the lay of the fascia, radiating and spiralling from the abdomen up and down the torso to the arms, and from the abdomen up and down the legs, "internal" movement is said to be "from the dantien".
To "move from the dantien" means that movement is *initiated *from the dantien, rather than from any localized region, and that any movement from that region involves not just one part of the body (e.g. the leg or arm), or parts of the body sequentially, but the whole body at once. For example, in the normal way of moving we learn haphazardly from childhood, if we raise our arm, we feel that the nexus of control to be somewhere in the shoulder region, that is where we feel the intention of the movement to be. With "internal" movement, this "locus of control", the place we feel we're controlling the movement of the arm from, shifts to the dantien region (and also partly the feet in their connection to the ground) - one has "sunk the qi". This is the same for all limbs - the leg also must feel like its movement is initiated by the dantien, not at the hip, thigh, etc.
The connection with meditation is as follows: since this way of moving is different from the norm, in order to learn it, a calm mind and a *very *high degree of physical relaxation are required, because the parameters are subtle and have to be felt in the body. It's rather as if one were groping in the dark for the volume control on an amplifier - one has to "feel around" in one's body as one practices the basic exercises, and a sense for what qi and jin are, as feelings and as "controls", develops gradually.
However, while a calm mind is absolutely required for Taiji practice, it is not viewed in the early stages as an end in itself, but rather as a means. In the early stages at least, learning Taiji is hard mental and physical work, and involves concentration on the basis of a calm mind. Also there is a a lot of pain as the body adjusts to the new way of moving; in particular, the thighs take a lot of punishment, as the new alignments relieve the random tensions we accumulate in our torsos as a result of unconsciously constantly shifting the burden of our body's weight. Mental agitation merely increases the burden of difficulty and prevents one from maintaining the positional requirements through the discomfort; hence the requirement for mental calm.
Once a practitioner is settled and has some skill, however, and once the body has gotten used to the new way of movement, and strengthened itself appropriately, the art can indeed be used as a form of "moving meditation", and is indeed so used, even by high level practitioners of the martial skills. However, it is no more special in this regard than any other kind of physical activity that can induce, at a high level of embodied skill, a state of "flow".
It's also the case that once skill and conditioning develop to a certain level, there's a peculiar delightfulness about the feeling of moving qi and moving with qi. Once the skill develops, there is lightness, airiness, an extremely pleasurable kinaesthetic sense of free and easy turning, like an axle on ball-bearings, and of the whole body opening and closing, like a starfish, and spiralling from the ground out to the extremities, and back from the extremities to the ground. Standard estimates would say that getting "in the saddle" so that one can feel the flow of qi and actually move one's body from the dantien, will take anything from a year to a couple of years of study under a proper teacher, with fairly close supervision (say 2 or 3 lessons a week) and daily practice of an hour or two. Expertise will of course take several years.
In its martial aspect, as it was practiced in the days when it had daily practical use (e.g. as skills used by caravan bodyguards) Taijiquan is (one might almost say paradoxically) really quite extraordinarily brutal, with the direct, explicit aim being to end a fight as quickly as possible, with the maiming or killing of one's opponent. It is a close-in art, involving a lot of striking with "short power" - that is to say, delivery of high levels of force in a very short time ("impulse") to any point of contact, utilizing the whole body's mass and weight. There are also kicking techniques, wrestling techniques and joint-locking/breaking methods, and of course throughout the bulk of its history the main emphasis would have been on weapons, including various kinds of sword, halberd, long and short poles, etc. However, although it is extremely brutal in its full martial form, it is obviously *practiced *in less brutal form, even when practiced from a martial point of view (though still fairly robustly - the student can expect to get knocked about a fair bit, and often hurt, though not normally maimed unless by accident). It is practiced in this fully-developed martial form very rarely, and only by and between higher-level practitioners, and usually just to preserve the traditions, precisely because of the potential danger to unskilled practitioners (and paying students!)
The vast majority of serious students learn it for its health benefits and its meditative qualities, and the ability to defend oneself in the course of the kinds of relatively mild altercations that might happen rarely in day-to-day life in civilized countries (e.g. bar fights, defence against mugging, street fights, etc.) comes as a handy byproduct of the serious practice of "push-hands", paired practice that starts in *extremely *gentle form, and eventually escalates (after a few years) to a level short of the full martial potential of the art, and still contained within the for-health paradigm, but still notably vigorous and occasionally painful.
In terms of principles for everyday life, the main benefits are health, perhaps a degree of longevity (or at least the possibility of old age with health and free movement), a calm mind and demeanour, confidence, and a subtle sense of physical connectedness and sensitivity to other people and to the world around one.
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Thanks Gurugeorge.
More here:
.5 levels of mastery:
1.basic knowledge
2.Qi feeling-good form(teaching level)
3.very good form under pressure(champion level)
4.Qi mastery(within and without)
5.illumination.3 parts of training:
1.meditation
2. qi gong
3. fighting.Within fighting:
1.forms(codified pattern of movements-ritual)
2.tuishou(semi codified with partner)
3. san shou(free fighting).Within qi gong:
1.standing(yang) while moving(yang)
2.standing(yang) still(yin) eyes open(yang) or closed(yin)
3.sitting...
4.lying...
5.healing...
6.pressure points...
7....Within meditation:
- breath with dantien
- breath inverted
- accumulate qi
- make it rise
Within rising:
.1. transform jin(assiatic energy) into qi(yetziratic)
2 qi into shen(briatic)
3.shen into shu(atzilutic)