day 174: the Sunday plan

forms:

• push hands, chen

we had an even lower turnout today compared to yesterday, and i think it was a continuation of the post-tournament hangover. i arrived early and was eventually joined by John Eagles and Phunsak, who were followed by Ching-Chieh and Jay. Sifu came and waited for a few minutes, but after a while decided we should just go ahead and start.

we began with a discussion of the plan for the Sunday classes. since the summer and tournament are over, we're returning to the schedule of class every other Sunday to go along with the regular weekly Saturdays. Sifu said his original plan was to continue with chen tai chi, in particular going into chen push hands and then moving onto pao quan. he also said he wanted to teach miao dao. however, he was willing to take alternative suggestions, since he was already providing private instruction in other areas to other students (apparently, Tommy and Simon are learning long spear).

Phunsak, for his part, has his own list of things he wants to cover. for me, i'm pretty happy with the plan, so i had no objections. i think Jay was more interested in staying with bagua, but i sense Sifu is going to reserve that for private lessons. as for Ching-Chieh, she doesn't seem to have any preferences which way or another.

taking stock of the situation, Sifu decided to just go with his plan. he said we'd spend today just doing an introduction to chen push hands, and continue with this for a few weeks.

push hands

in his introduction, Sifu said chen push hands is somewhat different from yang, in that it stresses more movement in terms of the body and the feet. practitioners don't remain as stationary as they do in yang, working instead on moving about the partner across the ground with the goal of trying to probe and enter the other person's defenses (or, conversely, defending against the other person's attack). as a result, it is much more dynamic and much more active in terms of speed, direction, force, and placement.

i should note, however, that push hands--at least as Sifu has taught it--was never meant to be the static, fixed-feet, single-plane-of-motion exercise it has become so frequently these days. push hands was always supposed to be a much more free-flowing, free-moving, free-form, complex-range-of-motion activity. this is because it was meant to be a stage in the tai chi curriculum preparing a practitioner to use tai chi in full-speed combat, and hence was supposed to help train the practitioner for the chaos of a combat situation. there were different variations of push hands corresponding to different stages in the progression to full-speed fighting, with each variation following one another in a progressive series gradually leading the practitioner to develop the skills needed to use tai chi in combat.

in addition, i should also reiterate Sifu's admonition from prior lessons that the term "push hands" is actually a very misleading title, and very likely an error in translation. in particular, for the initial stages of push hands training, where the goal is to focus on ting jing (i.e., sensing) and hwa jing (i.e., redirecting or receiving), the better translation is "listening hands" or "sensing hands."

Sifu began us with the very basic chen push hands. to be quite honest, this seemed almost identical with the yang push hands he taught in the UCLA class. the only difference i could see was that today he went farther into the "random circle" movements for the hands, arms, and torso that were shown in his tai chi DVD. since i've seen the video, i was pretty familiar with this.

he had us review the basic movements taught in the DVD, with the assumption that we were far enough along in our martial arts practice that we could pick them up pretty quickly. after a few minutes of this, he had us start with basic partner drills. for today, he said we should focus on just sensing the other person's movements and redirecting them away while avoiding direct force-on-force confrontation. he commented that eventually the drills would involve actually trying to apply--and defend against--tai chi attacks in free-form movement, but that for now we should just keep our feet stationary and work on feeling out the motions of another person in close proximity. he suggested we try closing our eyes and just relying on our hands and arms to sense our partner's movements.

we worked in pairs, switching between left and right sides and then shifting the way we faced each other (i.e., instead of both partners having their right sides forward, 1 partner would be leading with their right while the other would lead with their left). we also switched partners, to get used to different people.

one of the things i noticed with this exercise is that you can get a feel for another person's personality and mental state from their body movements. i recall my grandmother telling me that you could learn a lot about a potential love interest by dancing with them, and learn from their physical movements if they had the kind of character and personality that would be a good match for you. i've come to suspect the truth in this over the years, and i could see a lot of similarities with today.

generally, in a free-form situation where people are allowed to follow whatever movements they choose, you can tell by their choices and way of executing those choices just who they are and what they are thinking. here's what i mean:

• movements that are restricted to only a few types of action in a limited range of motion tend to be indicative of someone lacking creativity--either because they are not creative or because they are scared to be so, or because they are distracted in their mind and unable to think freely
• a push hands partner that is responsive to changes in your movements (in direction, force, speed, location, etc.) indicates someone who is open-minded, and willing to experiment with new conditions, particuarly if they do so without resistance
• a person who responds instinctively with an immediate response of physical resistance (even if they then switch to soft receptiveness) suggests someone not as open-minded
• actions that are applied with a level of physical power throughout the range of motion suggests someone fixed in their mode of thinking--although, variation in that power can show some flexibility in thinking (i.e., creativity and open-mindedness), particularly if the magnitude of variation is great (i.e., goes from emptiness to firmness)
  

the trick here is to determine just how creative and just how open-minded a person is, and thereby actually reading something about their personality and character...which leads to the real trick, which is to then figure out what you are supposed to do about it.

i mentioned all of this to Sifu and he replied "of course." so i guess this is something that most practitioners seem to know. still, i found it interesting, since it let me see more of the personalities of the other people in the class. i'm going to have to continue developing this as we go further in push hands.

we finished the day around 12:30, and Sifu reminded us that the next Sunday class would be in 2 weeks.