Taiji Day 307: Protect Health

This morning I woke with a tickle at the left back-side of my throat, and a vague sense of a lump hanging at the inner end of my left sinus.  It’s an odd sensation, because I didn’t know that my nerve endings there were precise enough to distinguish left from right, deep inside my neck.  Nonetheless, there it is — an odd sensation signaling a potential infection of some kind, on the left-hand side of my body, starting in the lower back sinuses, perhaps an onrushing bout with the flu or a norovirus intent on making me phlegmy and uncomfortable for days.

Western standard operating procedure in this case is to panic, stay home from work, rest up with lots of tea and toast, and so on — or simply to ignore the sensation in the hopes that it will go away. I’m not sure I’m doing either of those things, actually.  First of all, I’m going to work: I’ve done my tai chi for the day, because while I’m aware of this symptom, it’s just one symptom. There’s no fever, no plugged sinuses, no stomach bug, no horrible digestive issues, or any symptom suggesting that this is anything more than the usual mild winter cold.

I used to be phlegmatic.  I used to have a sinus infection all the time.  I used to be a mouth-breathing dope with a perpetually runny nose.  Was tai chi the only thing that cured that? I don’t think so, but even now as I sit and write this — the sickest I’ve been in a year, really — I’m breathing with my mouth shut.  It’s an easy breath, not labored, and not so heavy as to suggest that I’m rasping out my last breaths.  I’m feeling in the prime of my health.

And…. as I write this, what I thought would happen has happened.  I did my tai chi, and felt this obstruction or preliminary-to-infection loosen.  I sat down to write, and I kept breathing normally — through my nose, unforced, deliberate, controlled — and this lump of mucus or whatever has popped free, and is actually liquefying on its way down the esophagus to my stomach, where a range of acids will effectively and permanently dissolve it.

And that tickling sensation I had at the start of this little writing exercise is gone.

I don’t know that I’m always going to be healthy. Maybe tai chi isn’t part of the reason why I’m healthy, although it feels like it is.  Maybe this thing will come back, and attack me in my guts; or maybe it will climb out of the “pit of despair” back up my throat into my sinuses and lungs.  If it does, good for it — it’s evolved in interesting ways.  So have I.  A few years ago, the least sickness would have felled me for a few days or at least kept me home.  Now I lure the diseases in with a soft, pudgy-looking body, and then I drown them in a pool of acid.

Taiji Day 220: Distinguish Energies

Today, as I shifted from doing Five Golden Coins to Eight Pieces of Silk, I realized that the two forms have radically different energy signatures, despite the fact that Eight Pieces has variants of four moves from Five Golden Coins. There’s half a dozen reasons why it should have a similar energy signature: they’re both qi gong routines; they come out of the same working tradition; they’re similar physically; they both have parallel breathing patterns; they’re both done at about the same speed; they both have physical health in mind, particularly internal organ healthiness; they’re both about improving one’s balance in the vertical (as opposed to moving, dynamic balance, which I think of as being more related to the tai chi form that I do last — and which so clearly has its own energy to it, that I’m excluding it from this particular discussion).

I’ve done the five postures of five coins longer than I’ve done Eight Pieces, so maybe it’s just the sense of familiarity that comes from long practice.  But I get more of a workout from Five Coins than Eight Pieces.  My heart rate goes up, my breathing pattern changes, and my ability to project forceful motion even while moving slowly is much improved with Five Coins.  Meanwhile, the Eight Pieces movements — even when they’re the same movements! — are much more tentative, and require much more forethought than the Five Coins.  It’s like, the Five Coins are pre-programmed; I hit a button on the remote, and the station comes on.  The Eight Pieces involve some fumbling:  there’s a coherent pattern, but it’s not automatic. And the result is a smooth but not forceful energy.  I never come out of Eight Pieces sweating harder than I went in.

I did the tai chi form in 11 min 37 sec this morning.  So I’m hitting that “something extra” window pretty easily, without much forethought besides starting the timer.  That said, the tai chi form has a much different energy signature than either of the two qi gong forms that open my practice — and it’s changing all the time.  That’s the part I have a hard time getting over.  One day it will be powerful and forceful. The next it will be weak and mostly internal.  One day I can project power; another I must receive it.  With the same moves! Day in and Day out, always different.

It’s like, I walk the two blocks from my house down to the river every morning (and I should do that; but this is a metaphor, not truly reality yet).  The two blocks of the town are distinctive: each has its own character and nature. And those are Five Golden Coins and Eight Pieces of Silk.  They’re always the same, even when the weather is different.  Eight Pieces looks and feels this way; Five Coins looks and feels that way.

But then I get to the river of the tai chi form, and it’s always different.

Taiji Day 65: Add something new

This morning, I woke up thinking, “it’s time to do eight pieces of silk.”

Ok, but I don’t know the Eight Pieces of Silk.  This is an internal qi gong form with three more postures than the one I do now, and some of its postures are rather different than the ones I do now. Nonetheless, I woke up from a sound sleep thinking, I should do this. 

So I did what any self-respecting 21st century qi gong practitioner should do.  I looked at YouTube, and found dozens, if not hundreds, of people showing off their interpretation of the Eight Pieces of Silk.  Here’s one of the ones I watched, to get a sense of how many of the exercises one is supposed to do.

I only did three of the exercises this morning, in addition to my regular practice.  It’s going to take some time to learn a full new form.  But here’s the thing.  My knees no longer creak, and my shoulders and arms and legs and flanks are getting stronger (my belly isn’t shrinking, but that’s a different problem. Really).    On the other hand, I’ve reached a plateau.  The Five Golden Coins in two months have opened up a lot of possibilities, but there’s limits to how much they can do.  Likewise the main taiji form: I can, and will, keep practicing it.  But accepting only its postures leads to another kind of rigidity.

Add something new from time to time.  Keep learning.  Keep moving.  Keep stretching the body.  Keep finding new ways to ask it to grow in strength, power, beauty and grace.

Taiji Day 60: did you do it?

Yesterday at breakfast, a colleague asked me, “did you get your Taiji done this morning?” I told her yes. She said, “good for you. The reason to tell people about your work is to get held to the commitment until keeping the commitment comes naturally.”

So it proves. Today is day 60— not quite two months since I began this little endeavor. There wasn’t any particular insight today, except something that I had no conscious control over. It’s kind of funky, so I have no idea how to explain it.

The first day I was in DC on this field trip, I had a conference room in which to practice. The other days, I had to practice in my room’s entryway. The first day there was awkward. It’s a space longer than it is wide. As a result, while I didn’t exactly run into furniture or walls, I was cramped. Yesterday was slightly better but not great practice. I had to be fairly forgiving.

Today’s workout was intense. It was like my body figured out how to do the internal work of Taiji just by going through the motions in the most haphazard way. I didn’t bump any furniture. The form flowed into and around the available space, including the small closet alcove. As I turned into the windmill kick near the end of the form, I brought my hands up to the balance and…

And I was standing inside the alcove, facing outward. My hands were braced against the frame of the alcove door. I had enough space to make the kick, with enough clearance for my head, and for my leg to return to the ground in the right place.

My spatial awareness faculty had sort of “folded” the tai chi form into the available practice space, so that when I arrived at the most difficult maneuver, I was in position to help myself. It happened more than just that one time, too, as I worked through the patterns. My body may not have wanted to get out of bed to do the form, but it was prepared to put my feet down and extend my arms efficiently, so I did the work without hitting anything.

Taiji day 55: close your eyes

The great chi Kung master Obi-Wan Kenobi said it best.

Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.

Today I closed my eyes as I worked through the form in the sunshine. It’s elegant. When your eyes are open, your dynamic sense of balance tells you that your body is stable and in balance. It isn’t. Your feet are working hard to keep your balance, but your head gets none of that data, or only a little bit.

The first time I did the form with my eyes closed, I was stumbling and falling all over the place. My eyes had been deceiving me. But the inner ears are not capable of that kind of deception. They cannot tell you that you are in stable, gravity-dependent balance when you are actually in dynamic, muscle-dependent balance. One cannot be replaced with the other, without noticing.

Taiji day 54: don’t wake the neighbors

I live in an old house. The floorboards creak. My upstairs neighbor is studying a foreign language and culture, and is a night owl. They’re frequently doing traditional dances (it sounds like) until late into the night. I don’t mind their sound, but I try to be conscious that their bedroom is above the room where I do taiji. Today I tried to move silently.

Abject failure. Creaking floorboards underfoot, my weight settling my feet firmly on the floor, heel to to toe, and all that. Silent? Hah! It is to laugh. Quiet, though? Sure. Quiet I can do.

It slows you down, trying to be silent. hmm, this board is about to squeak. Shift the foot this way? No. How about that way? Better. Slowness leads to carefulness and deliberateness. which leads to sore legs and tight flanks at the end of the work.

A long way to go n this lesson. But not a bad start.

Taiji Day 52: use the room

A few days ago, I chose to work the subroutines — to know each set of postures that come back to a repeated leitmotif. Today I worked them doubly: there’s that main sequence of four moves:

• roll back
• press
• push
• [Buddha's Palm] – technically part of single whip
• single whip

That keeps repeating all through the form. Its effect is to turn one around — wherever one is in the room, it aims you for the opposite wall or corner. Yet there’s an additional subtlety: as one comes out of Buddha’s palm into single whip, one can step to the inside or outside. The result is that the next sequence can be aimed to the left or to the right.

So, by adding that extra “single whip inside” or “single whip outside” one can double the length of the form, because now each sequence is repeated twice. The lungs were heaving like bellows at the end of this morning’s session. There was another curious effect, though: I used the whole room. There wasn’t a nook or cranny in the whole office that I didn’t have to step into, and I could have used even more floor space than I had.

Side effect: one of my students reports that he can see my aura, and that it’s quite wide compared with other people. Is this the taiji, or meditation, or both? I don’t exactly feel auras, but he says he wants to learn more. Hmm.

Taiji day 50: work the subroutines

In my taiji form, there are six or eight basic sub-routines. I think of them as the core elements of the practice. Each of these subroutines contains six or eight postures or positions, and the idea is to flow from one routine to the next smoothly. Passing from one routine to the next is like walking through a door. You’re never quite sure what’s going to happen on the other side, but you can’t be sure without opening up and walking through.

One of the subroutines sequences goes like this:

• roll back
• press
• push
• single whip

This pattern of four moves appears seven or eight times in the whole sequence, beginning to end, so it’s a good thing to practice, to make sure you get it right. No other sequence repeats so frequently. You want to practice those more frequently? Guess what? Every one of those other routines begins with a single whip and ends with a roll back. Break the work into subroutines,cod the subroutines, practice the common transitions, and keep doing it. The most common patterns are the most instinctive… but you have to practice them consciously, just like everything else, to find them instructive.

Taiji Day 49: mark your start

Today, before I started my Taiji routine, I made a small diamond of fallen branches on the ground. Then I stepped into it. Mark your start.

I began from that place. John MacPhee (?) in the book a Sense of Where You Are, describes how Bill Bradley took dozens if it hundreds of shots on basket from all over the court. He didn’t know it, but Bradley was developing “field sense” – an awareness of where he was I the court and how far or how hard he had to throw the ball to get it to the basket. From anywhere.

But I have to know where I’m starting from to have that kind of awareness. So, mark your start.

The result today was largely positive. Among the awarenesses I found was that I’m rarely passing forward of my starting point. For a defensive martial art, this is appropriate. But it was also startling. I am never charging into my theoretical opponent’s space; I’m only defending mine. I’m never racing to drive them away forever, only blocking them from invading my space. Whenever I reach the boundary of my space, the form turns on its heels to survey my own territory and sweep it for opponents who may have snuck up behind. There is no pursuit, only self-defense and self-discipline.

There’s a recognition in this form against overextension. Don’t go farther than you can afford to go. Don’t extend your supply lines beyond what you can afford. Live within your means. Don’t challenge opponents — wait for them to come to you. It’s a very different attitude than the Stand Your Ground laws we’ve been hearing about lately; or even the imperialist attitudes of some current and previous governments. Real power comes from mastering your own ground, rather than trying to lay claim to someone else’s. Know where you started from.

Taiji Day 48: move the spine

My day got away from me a few different ways, so I’m writing this entry several hours after I did the working. It’s hard to remember exactly what happened, except that I made the effort to slow down, to pull from core muscles, and work the inner body.

When you do all this, though, you can’t help but work the spine. The ligaments and tendons that join the ribcage to the vertebrae and the neck naturally begin to twist and turn to follow the energies of the body, and then something curious happens…

The spine takes over. It directs the movements and all the other actions start to occur normally. Except it’s very different from normal. Our habit is usually to keep the spine fixed. Yet the truth is it’s very far from fixed. It’s a tool of flexibility as well as stability and strength.