We have gathered some student experiences which may help you in your tai chi training.
Sometimes it helps to see/hear how others train, something familiar may ring true to you, or it might be something totally new and obscure that hits the mark to get you out of your learning plateau.
Enjoy the read! And check back regularly for more contributions.
All body together! How many times did I hear that! “Arm is arm, body is body, leg is leg!” Yes! I know! I am all separate! But how do you achieve this? What is the trick? Is there any secret? This was driving me crazy!
Olivier
And little by little I managed to be more as one. Relax, relax more, until your muscles just hang from your bones. And then do the opposite! Just tense everything very little until you feel a subtle tension which maintains your body parts all together. You will find out then, that initiating a move from your legs or your kua, will generate the move to the other parts of your body!
Now that I am all body together, at least I am getting into it, I understand what an old student told me once: taiji is like those wakouwa push puppets.
I would say first that the key ingredients for achieving any of these are patience, perseverance and repetition. And It’s best not to expect a linear progress. You might have sensations or posture successes that will happen just once and then leave you for a long time. While it might be frustrating, keeping the memory of how it felt is always helpful and hopeful!
Estelle
For closing and locking my kua, having my posture being corrected and remembering how it feels to be in the correct position was helpful – I realised, for example, that when I thought I was too forward bend, I was actually upright. Other things that helped were: Practicing the posture in front of a mirror- imagining that my head is suspended while my buttock is pulled down, like a cable – making sure to push the knees externally as I “sit” down – if I feel pain or weight in my knees, I know I’m doing something wrong.
Rooting is very closely linked to the ability to close and lock your kua. What has helped me: making sure I squeeze my legs and glutes, exhaling and “tightening” my dantian downward, feeling my feet glued to the ground and imagining I’m trying to stick to or move the entire floor with them.
Whole body together is not something I achieve all the time yet, because it requires a lot of elements, including open and relaxed shoulders – the recurring struggle for a lot of us! But I would say that what has been helpful so far was to focus my intention on my waist/dantian as the initiator of each movement, to learn to trust that the rest of the body will follow, to remember that if one part moves, every part moves and imagine that my axis is drawing the movements on the ground. And I’ve also noticed that if I watch people who excel at this, I can feel the posture/movement in my body, another way to learn and integrate, I believe.
In the early days of practicing taiji, I understood ‘closing the kua’ as pushing the lower back out to straighten the spine, tucking my hips under and clenching my lower belly. Which was fine in principle, but inevitably hard to maintain during movement. Over time the details of that process shifted as my understanding deepened, but the outcome wasn’t much different.
Angela
Now, my focus has shifted – instead, I’m paying much more attention to my feet – and my bum. Not that I’ve stopped correcting my posture or holding my core – but by gripping the floor more with my feet, and squeezing the glutes, I have a much stronger and more stable stance (greater rooting) even on one leg. Which means keeping the kua closed during movement becomes easier and more natural. With this the dantian also has more freedom of movement (and can therefore drive movement more easily) because it’s no longer squeezed so desperately. It still requires a ridiculous amount of concentration to maintain throughout the form, but over time the body starts to remember on its own. One day I hope it’ll just be instinctive.
