Journeyman Taiji Quan Teacher
An autobiographical sketch of how I learned mindful whole body movement arts.
What is lineage?
Lineage in the arena of martial arts is similar to a family tree; but it is the ancestry of the martial arts styles mastered and then taught, normally with a supporting “wall of glory” — trophies and certificates. I only have two “real” trophies, one from a solo Taiji Quan¹ competition, and the other for a solo Taiji sword form. I don’t have any official certificates, but what I do have is a pretty good intellectual and visceral understanding of mindful whole body movement arts that I’ve worked or played at since childhood. What follows is a narrative of the physical education in my life that touches on the principles and ideas related to mind<=>body work and play.
What I bring to my practice and to my teaching comes from fields not often thought of today as martial arts. Two of them, horsemanship and fencing, were considered essential elements of a warrior’s art in the West before skill with guns became the basic skill a modern martial artist needs. I’ll start this narrative with a brief discussion of my current practice. At 74 and having had a chunk of my lungs removed by surgery and some unhappy side effects from the covid vaccine, my current practice is 20 minutes of mindful whole body movement work done at a slow enough pace that my lungs can supply the oxygen I need. Most of the 20 minutes are simple movements done in slow motion that include some stretches and bending and twisting. One section of about 5 minutes is an actual Taiji Quan form that I assembled from Taiji Quan work I’ve learned from the Masters I studied under during the past 40 years. The other sections are more like Qi Gong (energy work) sets that have very few explicitly martial moves but do cover a wide range of motion and balance work.
In the years since that first 32 week course in 1981, I’ve been able to study for extended periods under a couple of Taiji Quan masters from China and attended workshops and short classes given by another half dozen or so masters, Western as well as Chinese. However, my learning of mindful whole body movement arts started shortly after my parents moved to Indonesia where we lived for my middle school years.
Judo, boy scouts, bicycling (Falling, low crawl, balance)
From age 9 to 13 I lived with my parents in Jakarta, Indonesia, where I distinctly recall learning how to fall, how to low crawl and a lot about balance while we were there. A great many of the details are lost to me, things like the name of the judo school, or much of anything else about Judo other than how to fall, how to dive and roll; those skills saved me from serious injury or death several times later on. The boy scouting that I did was straight out of the original Lord Baden-Powell manual which was explicitly for training boys to be (unarmed) scouts in a war zone; a bit different from the emphasis of the American Boy Scouts. I also rode my bicycle a lot: no hands steering; riding jungle trails and crossing creeks on coconut trunk bridges; doing 360 degree spins on gravel. Lots of good aerobic exercise.²
My first mind/body flow training: water skiing
I think first on the list of mind/body coordination teachers would be the water ski boat driver in 1960 and 61 off the coast of Pattaya in Thailand³. He taught me how to ski barefoot and how to ski tandem with him, get off my ski and climb up on his shoulders. Those were my first clear memories of what it’s like to be “in the zone” with mind and body working together joyfully. Once you experience the thrill of an athletic accomplishment that requires that level of skill, you want to experience it again. There is a formal psychological term for this: “flow.”
There was required Physical Training at the International School of Bangkok, but no big sports program. I did play on the soccer and rugby teams, 2nd and 3rd string though. As the smallest guy on the rugby team, I played hooker in the scrums. The mindfulness challenge of the position is that one is suspended off the ground and totally entangled with both teammates and opponents, yet the job is to hook the ball back to our waiting runner. There aren’t too many team sports where my small size was an advantage, but about the time I should have gotten into track and field, I had found my next training situation.
Mrs. Lee Rhodes of the Royal Bangkok Riding and Polo Club
My younger brother wanted to take horse riding lessons and my mother decided I had to escort him to and from the lessons because he was too young to take a taxi by himself. After a few weeks of my sitting in the stands, usually reading, the teacher, not all that gently, told me to put down the book and get in there and get on a horse. I reluctantly started what turned out to be nearly three years of a training program in Dressage, jumping, horse care, and even gymnastics on horseback (though quite mild compared to the YouTube videos I’ve found about vaulting or voltige).
The essential mind/body aspect of this training was actually mind/head/heart/body training. Having the mind educated about riding while the head is memorizing the body routines useful for staying on the horse are sufficient to be a horse rider, but the heart is essential to forming a bond with a 1200 pound partner. A partner who can only be talked to on the ground with body language and heart language. A partner who understands signals transmitted through the saddle by using your core muscles isolated from hands and legs.⁴
Speaking of hands and legs, when I was taking riding lessons at the Bangkok Riding and Polo club’s covered ring, on the side away from the clubhouse was a Muay Thai school. This was the real kickboxing, not the aerobic thing done in Western gyms. I would watch how these guys, my size and smaller, who would run at a heavy boxing bag and, from a good six or more feet away from it, leap into the air, and when they got to the bag there would be a flurry of blows on the bag with fists, elbows, shoulder, knees, and feet at the kind of speed seen in this video. Like my chosen sport, fencing, speed is critical to this style of fighting. Unlike fencing, however, the chances of getting seriously hurt are about 99% more likely. As with horse riding, leaping into the air and working arms and legs at full speed also requires a very solid and strong core to support all that action.
Once I realized how important control of the core muscles were in my Taiji Quan journey, I was able to bring forward muscle memories and visceral understandings I’d learned while learning the essential Dressage technique of rubbing the saddle⁵. The olympic sport of Dressage is intended to show an officer’s ability to control his horse in the middle of a very noisy battlefield. This skill of communicating with a 1200 pound horse by using your core muscles is not all that useful on today’s battlefields, however.
United States Marine Corps
And, so, to the battlefield I went. My next significant mindful whole body work was courtesy of the United States Marine Corps. When I enlisted in the USMC, the Vietnam war was just getting started; I got off the bus at MCRD San Diego on January 17, 1966. This was modern warrior training and only included a relatively small amount of training in hand-to-hand combat; most of our training was geared toward the modern battlefield, though at that time the battlefield was not full of electronics. It was full of weapons of deadly destruction that “honorable” martial artists shun; however, the fact is that the art of war has not involved duels between champions for hundreds of years.
A great many Americans hear the word “Vietnam” and immediately think of the mess our politicians made of our involvement in Southeast Asia. As one of my officers over there said, early in that war, we thought the war was winnable. But our politicians wouldn’t let us cross into the North. In the end, I felt I did my duty to my birth country as well as to the country I had grown up in, Thailand. I am glad, as most Thai people are glad, that the US did fight the war in Vietnam because it did let Thailand escape what ended up happening in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.⁶ Suffice it to say that in terms of Taiji Quan lineage, the training at bootcamp, advanced infantry, and then combat did teach me modern as well as practical warrior skills. Important ones like being able to take a nap just about anywhere, anytime. And even more important, paying attention to what’s going on around me. Such as noticing a booby trap before stepping on it.⁷
I survived my combat tour with the Second Battalion, Fourth Marines and do not regret that I never had to use any of the hand-to-hand combat skills I was taught and that I had a good share of luck during the various times bullets and artillery rounds were headed in my direction. What I certainly did learn in terms of mindfulness was how to pay attention to my surroundings. So, for example, when standing in an open area when mortars began to come in, a quick glance around, a couple running steps, and the kind of dive I learned in judo got me into a safe place until the attack was over.
I had no desire to go back for another tour and was quite happy to leave active duty and return to college⁸. I had spent my freshman year in college before the Marines and when I got back after Vietnam, a whole lot of things had changed. I was in for many interesting events, teachers, and learning opportunities during the turbulent years from 1968 to 1974 while I was mostly attending the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). In terms of physical education and mindfulness, my fencing coach was very important in the arena of mind/body/warrior training.
My college fencing coach, Zoltan Von Somogyi
My college fencing coach, Zoltan Von Somogyi was born in Hungary in 1914 and died in 1980. I studied under him my freshman year, 1964–65, in soccer and fencing; and after returning from Vietnam continued fencing on the varsity team until I left the west coast in 1974. Fencing is a hard external style martial art that is also very safe, despite the fact that you have to make contact with the blade to score in competition. One of the hallmarks of a good fencer is precise positioning of the sword in a parry and another one is timing that positioning perfectly to deflect an incoming attack. What I carry forward into my Tai Chi teaching is the fact that to get position and timing perfect, lots and lots and lots of drilling is required. Some of this drilling can be mindless repetition of the same move, developing muscle memory. But the precision and timing parts require mindful attention to detail — at high speed.
Another thing I learned from Coach Zoltan was what he learned by being in a Russian POW and labor camp for many years — that you had to be an athlete to survive the first two years. I’ve never considered myself a jock, but I do consider a good amount of exercise as important for my health; a kind of savings account for when I need the extra health.
I went on from college to a commission as an Army officer in the Corps of Engineers, though I’ve never quite understood how combat experience as infantry followed by a bachelor’s degree in philosophy was a good fit for civil or combat engineering. However, I got what I had hoped I would get, a tour in Europe; and even more importantly, a job in which profit was not a goal. Growing up in Asia had given me a taste of enjoying other cultures, and I did enjoy my four years stationed in Germany with visits to England, Italy, France, and Switzerland.
The Fencing Club in Esslingen
When I arrived at a base near Stuttgart, Germany, in 1975, I managed to find a fencing club not far from where I lived. Only a few at the club spoke English, but several spoke French. As one of the younger adults, I got the chore of drilling the kids. Most fencing schools and clubs spend a lot of time drilling. For a two hour session, the first 20 minutes, after the stretching and laps, was drilling — lots of drilling. Lunge, advance, retreat, advance-lunge, retreat, retreat, jump lunge, and on and on. Shouting loud and clear the few words of German that I knew. Good for your lungs when working 20 or 30 fencers at once. This is then followed by another chunk of time working on two person drills where one person practices attacks and the other person practices parries and parry riposte.
Fencing is a martial art that is a highly developed body of learning related to a very specific situation — a duel between two people with one of three kinds of sword. A great many of the same principles that govern movement in fencing are found in Taiji Quan; the major difference is the speed. Some of the mindfulness concepts I got from fencing are the ideas that an attack is a forward motion, that the lower your center of gravity, the easier to move in any direction, that a miss of a half inch is as good as a mile, and that there is no such thing as a feint. If you launch a fake attack, it’s obvious to anyone who knows how to fight. You have to make it a real attack and be prepared for either landing a hit or making an instantaneous recovery.
To achieve a parry riposte sequence at lightning speed with accuracy requires many hours of practicing the move against an attack, which provides your opponent the opportunity to practice their own lightning fast and accurate straight attacks. It is entirely normal to have lopsided muscle development along with incredible speed and power — most fencers have one thigh a good inch bigger in diameter than the other thigh. Unlike Taiji sword, though, there are left-handed fencers and swords and it is excellent practice to switch, at least in practice. (Numbers only approximate — 60% of the world class fencers are left handed even though only 20% of fencers are. When a right hander faces a left hander, all the parries and attacks are different.)
Fencing is not a popular sport in the United States, probably because it is much too fast to follow unless you are a fencer yourself. And the safety gear, the mask in particular, makes it impossible to see the face⁹. However, when you can’t see the face in a duel, you do have to learn the skill of reading the whole body, including the tiny moves that most people do that telegraphs an attack or a certain kind of defense. These tiny moves, or “tells” as they are called in martial arts, are often things that have nothing to do with facial expression. I faced one fencer who always gave away an attack by shifting her leading foot’s toe a half inch to the left. Mindful whole body work with a partner or opponent works best when you spend enough time watching how they move; and, more importantly, being aware of how you move.
The sport is governed by one international organization, Fédération Internationale d’Escrime, and every fencing school or club will be following their rule book; or trying to cope with the many rule changes over the years. When I was competing, for example, sabre bouts had to have 4 judges plus the director; today, however, the judges aren’t needed to watch for the full contact of the blade on the valid target areas, instead the hits are registered electronically. FIE has detailed rules governing not only how hard the blade has to hit the target areas, but also the metallurgy of the blade and the impact resistance of the uniform worn. Local clubs often go by older versions of the rules because an FIE compliant setup can be very expensive.
I continued to fence for a few years after I returned stateside and was stationed at Ft. Belvoir, near Washington, DC. Although I enjoyed it a lot, I didn’t feel I could afford the time and money to travel and compete several times a month — the only way one advances in fencing is by performance in tournaments. I sometimes regret that my mother hadn’t told me back then that she would have supported me if I’d wanted to do that, but then I would never have switched to Taiji Quan.
First Taiji Quan class, 1981 near Washington, DC
I started Taiji Quan by learning what was called the Yang Family Short Form. I don’t recall the teacher’s name; probably for the best since I learned later that many of the details he taught were simply wrong. But for the most part, the basic sequence (the choreography) I learned then is very close to what I do now and what I can see in videos of Cheng Man-Ching performing what he called the 37 posture form.
I never met Cheng Man-Ching, nor have I met any of his first generation students, though I did enjoy hearing and seeing some of them on zoom sessions dedicated to Cheng Man-Ching’s teachings. I claim no direct lineage to Cheng Man-Ching, but his 37 posture form is the one I’ve done the most times over the years.
I remember only one conversation with that first teacher about his attending a school in New York, but beyond that I recall very little other than the sequence that I still do today ¹⁰. Unlike fencing, no special equipment is needed nor is there a need to have an opponent to drill with. This is the primary form I’ve been using when teaching Tai Chi. For the first five or six years after learning it, I practiced every day. Well, almost every day. Call it an average of 5 and half days a week. Those 7 minute formal sessions very definitely contributed to lowering the level of stress my desk job produced. On top of that, the minimal but mindful exercise kept my muscle tone in good enough condition to be able to pass the mandatory physical fitness tests the Army required every six months without my having to give up lunch to use the gym or the track. And, as an additional benefit, the place available to me was a wooded area just off the parking lot; the trees and nature always seem to contribute.
Fox walking, Tom Brown Jr.
As a child, I had devoured Kipling’s Jungle Books, Burroughs’ Tarzan books and had been inspired by the stories in the original Lord Baden Powell Scouting for Boys that talked about how trackers could read tracks like a book. I don’t recall how I found out about Tom Brown Jr., but he is one of those people who can read tracks like a book. I was thrilled to discover he was actually teaching classes and I attended a week long basic course in wilderness observation and survival from Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School in the early 1980’s. I am very pleased to see that his school is still going strong and still teaching the basic mind/body/heart whole body work of fox walking and the other wilderness survival skills the humans can do with stone age implements. Some of the key skills are less physical and external and more internal — things like learning how to use peripheral vision, how to fox walk and the basics of tracking. A properly done fox walk involves the same empty step expected in most Taiji Quan steps.
I was able to attend a second week long course a couple years later where he was exploring other aspects of teaching the art of tracking, stalking, and wilderness movement. This class was held in the large cypress swamp area of New Jersey; we did primitive camping and he took us through a week of challenging days and nights of learning how to use the whole body and all senses to move through what amounts to a jungle. During one segment, for example, we followed a rabbit path that required an hour long belly crawl. A belly crawl in a swamp does help develop awareness of the natural world: learning how to process the sensations the body is sending to the mind and taking the appropriate action, or non-action.
In the mornings, after breakfast and before the wilderness work, I would do my daily Taiji Quan form in a small clearing nearby. One of the other students recognized it as Tai Chi asked about it and I told him that it was the Yang Style Short form. He immediately said that to do “real” Tai Chi, I should do the form he learned, the full 108 move long form that takes 40 minutes. I asked him to show me, but he said he’d forgotten it, too hard to remember and too hard to find 40 minutes every day to practice. This is the reason I’m glad I learned the short form, because it only took 32 weeks to learn and I still know it, 40 years later. I have since developed a curriculum to teach this form in only 20 weeks — but it is based on the assumption that the student will in fact do the homework.
Second Tai Chi Teacher, Dorota Zak
I was transferred to Ft. Sheridan, north of Chicago, in 1986 and it took a while to find an alternative newspaper that listed Tai Chi classes. The closest ones were in Evanston at a Zen Buddhist temple. It was a class in a Chen style form and the teacher, a young Polish woman named Dorota, was quite strict about us learning a special warm up set she called “The Basics.” They were a physical challenge that could be easily increased in intensity when needing to build leg strength. I later saw Master Kenny Green teaching essentially the same set with slightly different moves and a bit less emphasis on muscle development.
She taught mainly through no nonsense drilling; do it again, over and over. Spending a whole hour long session working on just one movement does tend to develop essential muscle memories. Before we could start learning the form, we had to demonstrate a smooth flowing run through all six of the basics. To make sure we got it, she spent the first six weeks teaching us just those six moves, one move at a time. She expected us to practice on our own every day, which I did on my walk to the train station on those days when I could take the train to work. I was fortunate enough to be only a couple blocks from a nature trail which provided a nice pre-dawn mile walk to the train station. I could pause in the predawn light (in my dress greens), and run through the six, one time freezing in place while a momma skunk and her three babies marched by me, tails at attention.
The Chen style she taught was much more aggressive than the Yang style form I first learned; this form included several much more explosive moves than the Yang style I had been doing. I had been doing Single Whip as a slow coordinated turn and extension; she taught it more like coiling and then explosively uncoiling the spring and quite literally whipping the one arm into the extension.
For a while I tried practicing both the CMC 37 and this new Chen form, and that worked; but the new one took enough practice that I set aside my Yang style for a year or so. I later lost the form I learned from Dorota, though I did retain the basic warm ups she taught and used them later on to warm up high school fencing students. What led to my losing this Chen form was meeting another master who also taught Qi Gong, sword, fan, and staff forms as well as a lengthy and challenging bare hand form. What led me to it was the sound of swords clashing, a sound I hadn’t expected in downtown Evanston. I tracked it down to the basement of the first Baptist church where a Tai Chi Sword class was in session. Not a class that was listed in any of the sources I’d been looking at.
Master Peter Moi
I haven’t been able to find out where Peter is today. Online research has found several people with that name, but no Daoist priests who were also Taiji Quan masters of bare hand, sword, fan, and long staff and whose wife was a practicing acupuncturist. I hadn’t intended to lose contact so completely; in fact I had planned to mail Peter some videos of me for him to critique.
Peter Moi did give certificates, but to earn one you not only had to do several Taiji Quan forms and Qi Gong sets, but you also had to know the 108 acupuncture points and each point’s healing and hurting potentials along with a huge amount of detail — several years of college level mental work while continuing to practice doing the Taiji Quan forms. I elected to continue with the physical work of learning the forms but my day job needed my mental attention.
While studying under Peter, I generally spent one or two weekday evenings and several hours on Saturday afternoons. There was a lot of material to learn, including lectures based on the Tai Chi Classics. At one point I was practicing his main bare hands form, 2 straight sword forms, a sabre form and a complex 4 direction Qigong set. I have some videos I made back then that show me doing some of the forms. It’s almost embarrassing to watch how clumsy I was back then; but working with Peter and his students was probably one of the most fruitful whole body mindful movement learning I’d done up to that point. One aspect of Taiji Quan forms in general is that the mindful part not only includes memorizing a complex sequence of movements, but also more and more details about each of the movements — sometimes needing to have one hand going one way, the other hand going a different direction while at the same time making sure the weight was moving from one leg to the other in coordination not only with the hand and arm movements, but also with the head and eye movements.
At one point Peter was talking about the eyes and what you should be doing with them. My first teacher had said to keep the eyes kinda half-closed, as if half asleep. Peter said very definitely that the eyes should be shining bright and open and projecting spirit — something I have since read and heard from other masters also.
In conversation with him one time I learned that when he’d first come to Canada, he’d taught the CMC 37, the same form I had initially learned. At that time, the 80’s and early 90’s, when you said Tai Chi, you probably meant Cheng Man-Ching’s 37 form. It was certainly shorter and easier to learn than the advanced forms I learned from him.
A very basic problem with mindful whole body movement work is that the more you learn, the more you realize there is to learn. When I recently built a spreadsheet to list out the 37 moves in relation to the actual moves as I teach them, I found myself at more than 50 separate moves. If you poke around the Internet, you will find other breakdowns of the CMC 37 that also detail quite a few more moves. Taiji Quan forms are identified by the number of moves, but most of the time transition or windup movements are not counted, and quite often a single named posture, such as Grasp Sparrow’s Tail, is actually several moves plus the transitions between each move.
I have found for myself that I seem to have a limit at around a thousand or two separate details — my mind doesn’t seem to be able to be on top of more than 3 or 4 Taiji Quan forms without starting to lose track of the details or unintentionally moving from one to another. When I wish to dig deeper into any one form’s details, I need to release some of the other forms from active memory. However, I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that it is usually not all that hard to bring the details back if I had spent enough dedicated time practicing them. My time learning under Peter stretched that to the limit with not only a complex bare hand form, but also three straight sword forms, a broadsword form, a complex Qi Gong set, parts of a long staff form, and meditation or internal energy cultivation techniques.
Couple of workshop teachers: Master Kwan Saihung and Master Lu
During the same years I was studying under Peter Moi, I also had the opportunity to attend some workshops and lessons by visiting masters.
Master Kwan Saihung is the subject of a set of books called The Wandering Daoist. I went to a workshop of his in 1990 or so. He was 73 at the time and to me looked to be in his late 40’s, maybe. What we did was a lot of very strenuous exercises, including things like the dragon stepping used in Bagua, as well as a sitting meditation that was very similar to one I had learned from Peter Moi. At one of the workshops, upon request by a much younger and bigger “kung fu” guy, Kwan demonstrated the martial application of that wonderfully gentle sounding move called “wave hands like clouds.” Kwan asked if the kung fu guy was ok with being thrown onto the wood gym floor, and he said OK. So the kung fu guy charged and with very minimal movement on Kwan’s part, he sailed a good five or six feet to land flat on his back on the floor. That was when I realized that Taiji Quan is indeed a martial art. I was able to find that he is still doing very occasional workshops as of 2019, http://wanderingtaoistarts.com/index.html¹¹
The other memorable classes I took in this period were from Master Lu. I think that was his name¹², and I believe the style of Tai Chi was the Wu family style. It starts by raising the hands, one in front of the other, and placing one foot out in an empty step, heel down, toe up. He demonstrated that he could not only deflect any attack, but he could also throw people off their feet with very little effort. My most memorable interaction with him was the time he was trying to get through to me something about my posture. I had never learned Chinese, and the American who was sponsoring the classes wasn’t all that fluent in Chinese either. Finally, Master Lu took my hand and patted up against his back; gesturing for me to feel his back, up and down. I did, then I did both hands and then I realized his back muscles, the ones on either side of the backbone, felt like straight iron rods. So I have worked on that part of my posture ever since and it has paid dividends.
Learning how to teach whole body movement
When I retired from the Army, I had hoped to use my retirement pay to support my family while I tried farming with writing as a secondary career, I had become accustomed to regular Taiji Quan practice. But without a teacher and weekly challenges, I realized I needed to do more than just practice what I’d learned so far, I needed to teach. And teaching is very definitely a good way to extend and expand learning, particularly with a mindful body movement activity like Taiji Quan. I taught classes off and on for several years while living in a very rural area and then a few more years after moving to a small city, Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri. This phase of teaching and refining my practice forced me to think through and document for myself both how I did the moves and how I explained how to do the moves. Whole body movement was also part of the work I did around the farm — but quite often this kind of work was essentially mindless rather than mindful. While it is certainly possible to dig a ditch or carry things from one place to another mindfully, it was a lot easier to just do the work and let the mind focus on something else. There is plenty of value in working the whole body without being mindful of what you are doing as long as the relevant muscle memory was developed mindfully.
The first and still the biggest challenge in teaching Taiji Quan is getting students to practice at home between classes. The movements are not especially difficult, but many of the moves do require mind-body coordination that includes muscle memory. For example, stepping or walking requires learning how to place the foot without weight on it before transferring the weight. It takes hours of practice for this to become relatively easy because modern people do not think about how they walk. I soon learned that when holding classes in Tai Chi, people expect to learn what they need to learn in class and don’t bother practicing at home during the days between classes. So the basic teaching challenge turned out to be how to teach tiny somethings they could in fact learn while they were in class.
This approach, teaching only the tiny little things that they can learn without doing practice at home, meant that I had very few students who actually learned what I had to teach because most moves in any Taiji Quan sequence are complex. So I had to develop a lot of patience and to go over the same exact lessons again and again. I wanted to set up a structured lesson plan to go through the entire form, but most of the organizations who would sponsor a Tai Chi class wanted a maximum of 4 sessions. The idea of a 20 or 30 session program was simply beyond the pale.
The successful melding of mind and body in a complex whole body movement, even something as slow as Tai Chi, requires daily practice — the body is basically lazy and the mind always has more interesting things to think about than ten minutes of body work outside of class. I’m sure other people have better words to explain why daily practice is so important. I can certainly go off on an explanation with a slew of words in one of the quasi-mystical traditions, but intellectual understanding is simply not the same as physical or visceral understanding. Professional dancers and athletes understand this concept and the successful ones fully embrace that they need ten thousand hours of dedicated practice. And that means some kind work every day; maybe not a full workout, but some level of mind<=>body work.
I continued my own daily practice out in the fields near our “farm” and was pleasantly surprised when visiting the area several years after moving away to have one of the neighbors telling me how he had enjoyed watching me practice from his house a half mile away. However, Tai Chi is not something that you can make a living¹³ teaching in small towns or rural areas, not like Karate or Dance or computer programming. Yoga has better potential if only because homework is not as important when the primary goal is a position rather than a complex sequence of moves. I was able to hold classes at some Karate or similar schools because some of those teachers had had teachers who praised Taiji Quan as advanced mind/body work. One of them once asked me if I could break a board using Tai Chi. I’d never even thought about doing something like that, and to my surprise, moving slowly until the final inch or so, I was able to break the boards typically used for testing in external martial arts schools.
Performance and competition
Whole body movement work, especially whole body work in which the mental component is critical, requires either public performances or competition to bring you to the next level. In most sports and dance this is obvious, since that’s how you have learned about the dance or sport, by watching it. For whole body movement work such as Taiji Quan, however, this is not so obvious. Like Yoga or meditation, there is not a whole lot to see. However, I do think it is necessary, if only because you need to be able to focus well enough to put the audience in the proper place in your attention to the here and now.
When I moved to Jefferson City in the late 90’s to take a full time job, I was able to find a few more students interested in learning Tai Chi, but did have difficulty finding a place or a sponsor. There were plenty of people who thought Tai Chi was good for health and I did find some who welcomed having a teacher — but most of them thought of Tai Chi as some kind of new age thing that didn’t really require any effort to learn. What they wanted was something more like slow motion whole body movement sessions with no homework that were easy to do. I was asked to give a few talks about Taiji Quan, but mostly my classes were small to start with and got smaller as students began to realize it actually required work to learn this mind/body skill.
During my normal teaching, I sometimes mentioned and demonstrated fencing moves because the world’s fastest sport has some very basic similarities to the slowest sport. One of my students had recently formed a fencing club and I was asked to coach them. This soon became regular weekly lessons at the Y. I found it useful to include some basic Tai Chi warm up sequences for my mostly middle and high school students. And, unlike my Tai Chi students who were mostly adults, the kids did understand the concept of homework and some would in fact practice the lunges and other fencing moves. Any teacher of a whole body movement discipline can quickly see whether or not the homework has been done. Unlike purely mental work, it is impossible to lie about your muscle memory. Several of them developed the basic fencing skills good enough that I was able to take them to beginner level tournaments in St.Louis and come back with medals or trophies. I would drill them the same way I had been drilled and how I had drilled those kids in Germany so they not only looked like they knew what they were doing, but they were often able to score with very simple straight attacks. One of my fondest memories was of the time we had a “booth” at a local one-day renn faire and one of my 12 year old kids, short for his age, accepted the challenge from a “booth” doing medieval sword bouts. My guy got into his ready position, watched and would suddenly lunge and score — every time! No wild waving of the wooden swords, just “professional” level fencing lunges and a trained eye for timing. The renn faire actors were a bit upset with how easily he could get through their defenses. The modern sport of fencing is often derided as being a sport and worthless in a real fight. However, the origins of the foil, the basic beginner weapon for fencers,was to train people who would be using real swords — training them in how to time an attack, how to parry, and the other basic skills that make working with real swords much more effective.
However, this phase of my education in whole body movement arts coincided with a full time desk job doing computer programming and database work, so I looked for organizations, such as parks and rec or the Y, to sponsor classes. The most recent time I considered starting up a new class, I gave the program director a 1 minute example of what I taught (The first 2 moves of the 37 posture form) and he said, “No, that’s too hard. Tai Chi needs to be simple, like what they do in parks in China.” I didn’t bother saying that this was in fact what they do in those parks. I have since discovered that there is a growing movement and organization that does do what they call Tai Chi Fit or Tai Chi Flow, which is what that program director was looking for — leading a group in slow motion exercises using the same format as a fitness class: follow the leader, no corrections, no touching, no discussion regarding martial applications, nothing other than big wide movements that people can imitate. There is certainly value in that approach, particularly for people who otherwise are not getting any exercise. It does require the leader to keep a sharp eye on the followers and to continually use voice to coax and bring folks along, but never push them too hard. This is not how I learned, nor how I teach; but I do recognize the value of getting people up on their feet and moving. If that is your cup of tea, a slow motion fitness session, search on “Tai Chi Fit” or “Tai Chi Flow.”
People stick with trying to learn one of the complex Taiji Quan forms for a number of reasons; mostly related to health. I’ve had a number of successes in teaching a form or parts of a form to students who not only practiced at home, but were able to take what I’d taught and use it on their own. I have worked with folks in walkers who seem to have benefited from learning some very basic Taiji Quan moves, for example. I have learned from successes and well as failures.
One of the successes was a 59 year old male wearing a coat and tie and dress shoes whose doctor had said maybe Tai Chi would help his insomnia and his blood pressure issues. So I focused on teaching him the same form I initially learned and, unlike most of my students, he did practice at home. He always came to class in coat and tie and would take off the coat and loosen the tie, but that was it. After four months, 16 sessions, he said he had learned what he needed, that his blood pressure was where it was supposed to be and the 10 minutes of practice in the evening let him sleep better. His performance of the form was awkward, but he clearly got into a state of flow and focus: he was doing mindful whole body movement work.
One of the failures was a guy who had had a motorcycle accident while on active duty in the military and had several iron pins in his lower back. He wanted to learn how to walk without pain. After only about 4 sessions I was able to teach him how to walk with ultra mind/body focus and no pain. But it was too slow and too hard, he explained later. The drugs the VA gave him took care of the pain just fine.
Master Kenny Green
The next stage in my lineage was finally finding the group who did Taiji Quan forms on Saturday mornings in Columbia, Missouri, 20 miles north of Jeff. I had heard there was a group that was doing Tai Chi on Saturday mornings, but no one could tell me where they met. I finally saw a group doing Tai Chi in a green space between buildings at Stephen’s College one day when driving by on Broadway into town.
Kenny had learned the same form I had a few years earlier than I did. He was also an accomplished martial artist with plenty of competition and teaching experience in the Asian external or hard martial arts. I began participating in the weekly gatherings which were often more of a social gathering than formal classes. Kenny almost always had a teaching point or two to talk about, frequently directly related to martial applications of one of the moves in the forms he led. There were several people in the group who, like me, had learned one or more Tai Chi forms from other masters and from time to time Kenny also recruited us or visiting masters who knew him to lead a session or part of a session. The group also went on trips to St. Louis and Kansas City to participate in Tai Chi events or to visit some of Kenny’s teachers, such as Tuey Staples in St. Louis and Fred at his school in Kansas City.
I continued to teach Tai Chi as well as fencing classes in Jefferson City during this period and in fact stepped up my daily practice to the point that when Kenny told us about some competitions, I decided to enter. That’s where I eventually got the trophies for my own “wall of glory.”
One of Kenny’s challenges was to perform a complete form as slowly as possible. However, when I decided to enter the competition, I discovered that the form I had been doing in 7 minutes would need to be done in 2 and a half minutes. It was easy to stretch the 7 minute form to 10 minutes, but speeding it up took a lot more focus and practice. Very difficult to make sure each and every move is actually performed correctly; very easy to skip details. I practiced at the 2 and half minute rate for several months to get it good enough. However, today don’t ask me to do it that fast without at least a three-month warning
Kenny is who I learned several of the Qigong (Chi Kung) sets from that I use in my Energy Orientation classes. I Chi King, the Teacup or Saki glass exercise, and the moving five elements are the main three that he passed on and which I have amplified and modified in my practice.
One of the most important mind/body techniques I learned from Kenny was what I now call the Fascia stretch or the Qi stretch. One day he showed the group what he called a “parlor trick” in which he held out his arm and challenged anyone to bend it at the elbow. When you try to bend it, you discover that the arm is “locked” straight, but without using muscles. It is essentially the mind telling the body to use the other tissues to hold the arm straight while leaving the muscles relaxed. Fascia is one of those tissues, and there are other tissues and internal systems in the body besides muscle and bone. When you work with your mind<=>body communication, you will begin to discover other ways of moving that don’t involve muscles. It is not that hard to do once you establish a decent communication between your mind and your body. Some people find it easier to do than others. And it demonstrates very well one of the key principles of Tai Chi that Peter Moi used to express as “steel on the inside and marshmallow on the outside.” It is also, I think, the same basic technique that sideshow performers who lie on beds of nails or walk on broken glass probably use.
Fire performance
It was also during this period that I first saw fire performances and was fascinated by the idea of taking pictures that would show the fire and the performer. And then got the bug myself and built a fire sword and started performing with a fire troop. My fencing background added some flair to my performance, especially when I recruited partners to “fight” with me. I kept the choreography very simple, but with metal swords and lots of fire, our performances always brought applause. For these “fight” performances, I used a variation of a two-person Tai Chi sword form I had started to learn from Peter Moi along with moves from Sabre fencing.
The biggest challenge and the biggest thrill of working with fire is that it does hurt when you burn yourself — it is essential to be very mindful when doing a lot of whole body movement while holding on to something on fire.
When performing for the public, whether fencing, Tai Chi, or with fire, one has to exaggerate the moves and make wild swings you would never use in competition since they leave you open. In fencing, that means using sabre techniques instead of straight sword and in Taiji Quan, that means bigger or larger frame moves. In actual competition, the subtly required to win means no big reckless moves. In either case, mindfulness is required.
Somewhere in this period is when I won my most prized “medal”, a small clay thing that said first place. It was an informal competition, but formal enough that there were judges and a referee; we used boffo swords and you had to hit your opponent with enough force to convince the judges. I suppose it wasn’t fair since I was a fencer; but I persisted anyway, especially after I heard one of them say “watch out for the old man.” I was exhausted by the end, but I did win every bout; almost always by taking advantage of my opponent’s wild swings; the kind you see in the movies but which any decent fencer can get through easily. And after the director handed me the clay medal, he then handed me the sword that went with it — a gorgeous hand and a half broadsword.
Li Yang: Mistress of Dance and Taiji Quan
Li Yang came to a few of Kenny’s sessions one year and showed us several very interesting Taiji forms. The one I most wanted to learn from her was the Mulan Sword form, named after the most famous woman warrior in Chinese history. The Disney version is in fact based on a real person who was a very skilled sword fighter. I had seen a woman perform the Taiji Sword form named after Mulan at a World Tai Chi day event in Kansas City and Li Yang’s version was even more impressive. I did take some lessons on the Mulan sword form, but it was and still is beyond my ability level to do even halfway decently. However, one of the most important things I learned from Li Yang was the value of public performance. She recruited several of us over the next couple of years to perform in the shows she put on that included Chinese classical dance and music as well as Taiji Quan and Taiji fan forms.
I’m a bit fuzzy about just when and how I learned the Beijing 24 form, but it is a popular and fairly easy form invented by the Chinese Sports Committee in 1956 and there are a great many videos available showing the form. Poking around my YouTube channel I see that I led my Jefferson City class in a public performance in 2008 and was later drafted by Li Yang to lead it for a First Night performance in 2009. Watching these old videos reminds me of how I seemed to be in quite a hurry, going much faster than the music.
Public performance is an essential part of learning an art such as the solo Taiji forms and studying a Taiji form as a dance with detailed choreography is very helpful for getting past the apprentice stage in learning Taiji Quan. Public performance puts a lot of pressure on one, but learning how to deal with that pressure is part and parcel of mindful whole body movement work. An essential aspect of mindfulness is being aware of your surroundings. If that includes an audience or loud music, that should not change how well your mindful whole body work is done.
Public performances of Taiji forms almost always include music and the length of the music establishes the pace you need to use in your performance, so a lot of practice with the music is very helpful. I made some videos of her fan forms to help students get the choreography down. 52 Fan Form Names has had a huge number of views, likes, and comments.
Music and mindfulness or mindlessness
I want to digress from the story to talk about music and dance. Taiji Quan is a martial art, not a dance. When I have professional dancers in my classes, they are almost always missing the point of this kind of whole body movement work — any dancer worth their salt can learn the choreography of, for example, the Beijing 24, in an hour or two. What is often hard to communicate to a dancer is the concept of mindfulness as in being consciously aware of every movement and not simply using muscle memory. Yes, having muscle memory for each of the movements is important, but more important is having your mind consciously working the form and not letting muscle memory carry you through. I never use music for my early morning Taiji work because I want to eliminate as many external distractions and allow my mind to fully focus on doing the form. Music, especially when it is part of the performance, has to be paid attention to when doing a public performance of a Taiji form, However, in Taiji forms, letting music move your body is not mindful, it is mindless — and that is also a valid and good kind of whole body work. Surrendering to the music, especially music designed for that purpose, is a very valuable kind of mindless whole body movement work. The best that I have seen is often called Ecstatic Dance. This kind of work is a very specialized performance for the participants’ benefit and not to show off in front of an audience. There is immense value in turning your body over to movement inspired (instigated? controlled?) by music and letting the mind take a complete break. (Note that this is not normally what happens in social dancing, where sexual undertones prevail. That’s ok, too, but is neither mindful nor mindless, even if it is good exercise.)
In Taiji Quan forms, the music can be helpful as a source of physical energy or emotional or even spiritual energy — but your mind needs to be full of what you are doing, 100% in control. I prefer music that does one of two things — either helps bring out emotional energy to add to the performance, or provides a beat that the performer can work off of. So I prefer music that I am familiar with in terms of emotional content when I am doing a formal performance of a Taiji form; or I like music with an upbeat tempo that I can use at a visceral level. For example, if each bar has 32 or 64 notes in it, my Taiji Quan will proceed as if each bar has only 4 notes. Instead of my foot stepping 32 times in a boogie-woogie bar, I’ll only move it once, from here six inches to there while 32 notes go by. I will internalize the power of music and not let it control my external movement. Almost as if I’m telling my cells to move at the tempo of the music, but like an engine going 5000 RPM in first gear, moving slowly.
Almost all public performances of Taiji Quan include music, and most frequently music that at least sounds Oriental. The fan form Li Yang did has a song with very war-like words; fighting words. In many cases, the music and the form will have checkpoints where a move should coincide with a phrase in the music; but mostly the music’s main purpose is as a timer. It certainly looks best if you finish a form just when the music finishes. I’m embarrassed to admit that several of my public performances leading a group ended before the music did.
One of the things Peter Moi used to say when starting a complete group run-through of form was “At your own pace, begin.” Part of his teaching was that when a group of people are doing Taiji together, each person should be moving at their own pace, being aware of where other people are and not interrupting themselves to catch up or slow down. All of the other masters I studied with prefer to have everyone moving at the same pace, which is certainly much more impressive when hundreds of people are doing a Taiji Quan form together. This kind of group Taiji Quan performance is what Master Arthur Du led in China before he came to the United States.
Master Arthur Du
Arthur’s son Brendan joined Kenny’s Saturday morning sessions when he was a student at Mizzou and showed us how much his father emphasized true empty stepping and a low stance. Arthur eventually came to live in Columbia for a few years and I was able to attend classes frequently while he was teaching here. The first form he taught in Columbia was a special six-week class on the very short 13 move form he’d done with a large group in China. I enjoyed learning this form since the moves were familiar to me and he was able to bring a deeper understanding of them for me as he got us in shape to perform at a public performance in Columbia’s Flat Branch Park. I subsequently used that form in my class in Jeff City for a year or two while I studied the combined 42 posture bare hands and 42 posture sword forms under Arthur. A great many of the details in how I do my forms I owe to Arthur — the mistakes are mine.
One of the phrases that Arthur uses is that a well-done move will taste good. When I execute a perfect brush knee twist step, the flow going on can certainly be described as tasting good. It is very difficult to describe the bodily sensations that are perceived when you get the flow of a single move just right. The best Western description is by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. And on those rare occasions when you get the flow right throughout an entire form, the internal beauty is stunning. From the link, “During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life.”
I really enjoyed the in-depth study of the two 42 forms Arthur taught and his guidance helped me attain a new level of understanding that I hadn’t realized was possible. The more you practice, the more you are able to perceive what you are doing and to appreciate the beauty of whole body movement. And the more you practice, the more you realize how much more there still is to learn. Intellectual understanding is not even close to the combination of mental and visceral understanding when you get a sequence right.
One of the more important aspects of my journey in learning Taiji Quan is that I began to realize that the name of what I was learning might better be Taiji Dao — Grand Ultimate Path (through life). As Arthur pointed out in an interview with Violet Li in 2014¹⁴, the original idea of Taiji Quan was of the supreme ultimate warrior fighting — back in the days before guns made heroic duels obsolete. Today’s ultimate warriors are the various elite commandos who are just as skilled with guns and electronics as they are in unarmed combat. Today’s Taiji Quan masters have put in the same level of training, the thousands of hours of practice, but a great deal of it has more to do with health and fitness rather than going into combat. “He teaches that Tai Chi is also a way of thinking and living. To him, Tai Chi is a philosophy that can change our attitude toward life. With that, he suggested changing Tai Chi Chuan to Tai Chi Dao.”
One of the hallmarks of Taiji forms is the use of “poetic” names for each of the postures or movements. In fact, most of the names also provide images to assist in remembering the details of the move. For example, “part the wild horse’s mane” reminds me of how I would get a horse to move while standing on the ground next to it — how to shift my weight to move a thousand-pound animal by putting my hand on his neck, parting the mane to get there, and then shifting my weight. If I have positioned myself correctly, I can move the horse with just a weight shift from my back foot to the front one.
The genesis of the Taiji Quan section of my own Energy Orientation sequence came from a challenge Arthur made to us one day: Do the entire 42 form in a square one meter on each side. I decided to take up the challenge but made it easier by using the 13 form he’d taught when he first came here, and I later expanded the square to about 6 feet on each side. However, once I’d done that, I felt I needed some kicks and asked if I could add them, which was fine by him. Since then I’ve added several more moves, but have kept to the small square area for doing the form.
Energy Orientation Sequence
Although I have a detailed syllabus for a 20-week class on the 37 posture form, I am currently doing a 20 to 30 minute sequence that is mostly Tai Chi-like movements and only 10 minutes of actual Taiji Quan movements. I have found that a session of mindful whole body movement work is best when there is both a warm-up period to prepare for the focused Taiji Quan work and a follow on cool-down period. I have also found that most Qi Gong sets can be done either as a warm-up or as a cool-down, so I sandwich the Taiji Quan with almost identical Qi Gong sets based on the warm-ups Kenny often used in his Saturday morning sessions. I consider this sequence to be my journeyman project in Taiji Quan.
Endnotes
1. “Tai Chi,” is the spelling used prior to the official Chinese transliteration system, pinyan, which uses Taiji. Taiji as a word by itself is simply two superlatives, such as “grand ultimate” or “most best.” It is also a technical term in the Taoist cosmology. It has come to mean a slow and gentle exercise for health. Tai Chi Chuan is the old way of writing Taiji Quan. This phrase translates to grand ultimate boxing and usually refers to a much more rigorous exercise which looks slow and gentle, but in which every move is in fact a martial arts attack or defense.
2. At that time most Indonesians remembered the Dutch colonial rule and now and then I would have to peddle as fast as I could to get away from groups of kids throwing rocks at me, assuming my white skin meant I was one of the hated Dutch still hanging around. Sometimes yelling in their language that I was American would stop the rocks; other times, that just meant more rocks. And speaking of rocks, our scoutmaster would have us practicing low-crawl in a drainage ditch while he and his assistants stood about 30 feet away — pelting any showing elbows or butts with dirt clods that had rocks in them.
3. Back then the main road in Pattaya was crushed coral and the tallest building was 2 stories. A sleepy fishing village where a few Europeans and Americans came on weekends and the sidewalks rolled up at dusk. We stayed at a family cabin-type place a couple of coves over — no electricity or running water, but luxurious nonetheless.
4. Look up Olympic Dressage on YouTube to see how subtle the communication is between rider and mount. Look up Horseback Archery to see how a rider can completely separate the bouncing of the lower body on the horse by using the core muscles as suspension allowing the upper body to be independent. Actions in Taiji Quan are to be done with a consciously completely united body, but many hours of Taiji Quan training in isolating body parts is required before one can fully sense the unity of the action.
5. Why was a ride in the park made an Olympic sport? Back in 1896, the year of the first modern Olympics, officers in the military rode horses on the battlefield. An essential skill for any warrior in those days was the ability to control their horse with their core since there’s a battle going on; voice won’t help at all, and hands are busy with weapons.
6. As President Kennedy described the situation at one point, the domino effect would take all of Southeast Asia if we didn’t intervene in Vietnam. And he was right, and the domino effect was stopped at the Thai border without the Thais having to fire a shot. A very Thai kind of thing to do when you delve into the history of the only country in Asia to have escaped being colonized.
7. We were on a battalion-sized patrol in an area of Vietnam known as the “street without joy.” I was following a fellow Marine along a path and when he took his next step, I noticed something shiny where his foot had been, between the toe and heel print left in the mud. I stopped, crouched, and looked. It was indeed a booby trap; I called the EOD team and they cleaned the area and set it off. However, most of my field time was in situations where we faced regular North Vietnamese troops and artillery barrages — not the Viet Cong.
8. In this story, I am not going into any detail on my other “lineage,” the story of my head<=>mind<=>spirit<=>dreams development.
9. Modern fencers are well aware that audiences expect over-the-top emotional displays and if you watch videos of fencing tournaments, ripping off the mask is done frequently, and often with great displays of emotion. My coach, Zoltan, was of the old school where you do not make ridiculous displays. There was a period, long before I started fencing, when part of the score was “style” points, and such displays were most definitely not part of good style. It was considered unsportsmanlike. I personally tend to agree that these kinds of displays add nothing to the sport.
10. I don’t recall the name of the teacher that led the 32-week class I took in 1981 in Alexandria, Virginia. It cost $320 and had to be paid upfront. The required reading for that class was Cheng Man Ching’s book, Cheng Tzu’s Thirteen Treatises on T’ai Chi Ch’uan. And, as a writer myself, I would have noticed if the teacher or his assistants had said they’d met the author. So I assume this teacher was not one of the direct “descendants.” The form I learned takes about 7 minutes to perform and it can be done in street clothes in relatively small spaces. Those are the main reasons I’ve been able to come close to daily practice since then — no special equipment, no special room (though flat surfaces do make it easier). I also remember signing a piece of paper that threatened all kinds of dire things if I ever told anybody about anything that I learned. Probably not as extreme as that, but incredibly selfish, I thought at the time, and still do. You want to use my stuff in your classes, help yourselves. I appreciate credit when you use my stuff, but the only secrets around here are where I’ve hidden my Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs.
11. He has apparently found a place where he can be comfortably by himself for long stretches of meditation and practice time. The flyer and information I found seems to imply he only comes out a couple times a year to do workshops. He’s 99 at this point, and from the photos, he’s going strong.
12. Somewhere in my papers is the flyer from the classes I attended. I only went to a dozen or so over two winters. These classes were held in locations in either Evanston or one of the northern burbs of Chicago. One of the last times was in the winter and he’d broken a hip falling on the ice and still came to do class. He returned to Taiwan and I’d seen a report of his death somewhere before I left the area in 1992.
13. Large urban areas have enough population that a Tai Chi or a fencing school can flourish. In addition, large cities are more likely to have people who are interested in activities other than BBQ and baseball or American Football.
14. Article by Violet Li in the Examiner.com LIFE / HEALTH & FITNESS / FITNESS & EXERCISE Tai Chi Chuan or Tai Chi Dao June 7, 2014 12:02 AM MST
