adjusting to your environment (2)

Another week, another business trip – ah, the perils of having found employment once again.

This time – on the train back up to Tokyo – ended up working through the opening of the second Sha family tai ji quan form in the space between two cars of the train.

This is not any train, but the Shinkansen, or “bullet train” which zips along pretty quickly indeed and which connects all major Japanese cities.

The prior week I had a full schedule everyday (up in Hakone, another Shinkansen ride away from Tokyo), then gong fu with my daughter on Friday night, special Liu Jingru Laoshi review session all day Saturday, special Sha Laoshi review on Sunday – and directly onto the train from the workout, my roller suitcase full of sweaty clothes and clean suits, and my head still buzzing with three days’ intensive martial arts training.

That week had been spent entirely within the confines of the training facilities, apart from the solace to be found on the rooftop (read about that in a prior post). The change from that setting to three days of Chinese martial arts was immense and much-needed, though I might have used a brief transition.

Again without transition, I plunged back into the work world, spending the next week (i.e. last week) on a mountain outside of Osaka, having boarded the train immediately after Sunday’s practice session. Upon arrival at last week’s facility, I was pleased to discover that we were completely free to wander outside in the forest. So off I went, early every morning and late most nights. I had parallel lives going – work during the day and workouts before and after.

I was stuck between two worlds in another way. It was easy to get lost in the forest as I ventured further and the trail narrowed and I started to worry about getting back on time – and then glanced up to find a giant power line overhead. A small clearing in the forest with both wildlife – the frog I almost stepped on, the birdsong overhead – and reminders of civilization, with the sudden appearance of a set of concrete stairs leading down to….nothing.

In that clearing and other, smaller ones, I worked through the tai ji and tai ji jian (sword) forms of the Sha family, trying to lock in the recent corrections I have absorbed. For a brief period, I could put aside matters related to work and do nothing but move slowly in the mountain air.

I have been transcribing my stack of practice journals into a more orderly and digital form, typing everything onto a computer for my own use now and for possible development into a text in the future (very maybe on that one…). The going is extremely slow but I hope to finish (most of ) an early version by the end of this year.

But in such a wonderful setting, it was not the time to hunch over a laptop and make notes about the wrist curling inward in the direction of the little finger….no, far better to get out and do it, learn with the body and all that. Remember, there are precious few spots of nature left in Tokyo, so I got fairly excited about the woods on the mountain with birds and frogs and – gasp – even signs warning those who stray from the path to be on the watch for snakes.

Back to the Shinkansen and civilization. The week’s work done, I was on the way back to Tokyo and watching the scenery whiz past while hunched over my laptop and making notes on the second tai ji form of the Sha family.

This was actually the first form of theirs which I worked on, started by fortuitous chance but left largely on my own to review during the long gaps between sudden bursts of new motions. I have always been a little shaky on the first sequence of moves, which involves a series of horizontal circles and strikes with the palms.

I had ironed out the sequence of motions back in the woods but couldn’t type out a description of the motions without doing them. And with staring eyes all around my motions were constrained in my seat. So I did the only reasonable thing and moved to the space between the train cars and drilled that section even further between trips back to my seat to tap out more notes.

I got it figured out somewhere between Nagoya and Shizuoka in that small, swaying space and it will be forever etched in my memory. We can’t always choose the best times and places to practice. Sometimes they choose us, and when it goes well, it is an experience to hold onto. Leaning back into another bagua-like palm circle, seeing another unremarkable town flash past out the corner of my eye, returning with a double-handed push to the front – I was far removed from the peace of the mountains, but had created my own brief period of tranquility in a very different space.

reader questions

"What are the differences between the styles of tai ji? Is there not one basic set of forms? Are the different styles so apart that one would be hindered by reading texts/watching DVDs from another school's style?

My concern here is that for home practice, would I necessarily need to study materials from the same style as my class?"

OK, at the risk of sounding pompous and spouting off too much, I will take on the above – but only after first inviting readers to provide their own, better answers in the comments section. We need all the help we can get.

And also after complaining once again about my friend who spends all of 30 seconds typing these questions which require hours and hours of overtime from me and my beleaguered staff. Just kidding – keep the good questions coming, but don’t expect timely answers.

Taking your questions in order…

(1) Here goes an extremely loose history of tai ji. There seems to be general agreement that the Chen Style may be the oldest of the Big Five. Chen style is noticeable for being a bit more lively or active in appearance, especially its fajing expressions of power.

The Yang Style probably developed next and may be the biggest influence on the modern forms such as 24 and 48. The Wu (吴, or wu with a rising second tone) style was developed by Wu Quan Yu (or Ch’uan yu) and his son Wu Jian Quan (or Chien-ch’uan), who had earlier made extensive study of the Yang Style. The Wu (吴) style is known for its tendency to have the upper torso leaning forward in many stances (though old photos revealed that major Yangs also developed this tendency as they got older).

Then we have the Wu (武, or wu with a falling – rising third tone) Style, sometimes called Wu (Hao) (武郝) Style, actually third in order of development of the Big Five. This is the style about which I know the least, though one book tells me that one of its characteristics is that the hands are never extended past the feet.

One of the patriarchs of the Wu (Hao) style went on to teach Sun LuTang, who developed the Sun Style. You can recognize it by its abundance of motions in which the upright palms spread apart and come together, as well as by its follow-foot stepping style (think of kendo’s footwork here, or maybe xing yi quan).

Brief digression – the Sha style, which I write about in this blog, was developed by Sha Guo Zheng, a leading student of Sun Lu Tang.

2. One basic set of forms? No, but the tai ji principles apply to all styles of taiji. They are just expressed in different ways by each style. I could answer this another way – there are the modern forms such as tai ji 24, tai ji 42, tai ji 48, tai ji sword 32, and so on. These were developed from the 1950s onward by national sports committees in China by drawing influences from the Big Five. They can be practiced by anyone regardless of style and are seen frequently in competitions.

3. Are the different styles so far apart that one would be hindered by reading texts/ watching DVDs from another school’s style? Ohhhh, good question, bad can of worms. Purists might say yes. I would give a strong and definite “maybe”. The danger is, of course, that exposure to too many influences will result in a useless mish-mash.

If I recall, you have started one of the Wu styles recently, with no prior experience in the Chinese internal martial arts but experience in kendo and TKD.
In the beginning, I would recommend spending 90% of your reading/ viewing time on materials related directly to your teacher and your style. The other 10% or so could be general reading/ viewing on tai ji, but I would not recommend much comparison to other styles until after a couple years with your teacher. Yes, you should have some general knowledge about how your Wu style might be different from the others, but I would absolutely not start trying to learn the motions of any other styles until having spent considerable time with your teacher. (Having said that, learning something like the general 24 form – with the same teacher – might be a good idea).
Think about your kendo experience. Kendo is a relatively open world; people can easily visit different dojos and practice together. Too much of that and you become a gypsy with no recognizable style, but some amount of interchange is quite ordinary. Now think of koryu kenjutsu (or any koryu bujutsu, for that matter). Apart from The Immortals, you need to dedicate yourself to a single ryuha or school for an extended number of years. Sure, you might begin to learn how to recognize characteristic motions or feelings of other ryuha, but you will be studying one school, with one teacher, for a long time. Some people do both koryu kenjutsu and modern kendo, but they are few in number and often criticized from both sides.
Things are not so strictly separated in the taiji world. You can do one of the Big Five styles AND the modern forms at the same time (many people do, and they are respected by those around them IF they separate the unique movements and flavors of each). If your Wu Style teacher is good, stay with them for a long time and let the influence come deeply into your body and spirit.
Back to watching DVDs and all. Sure, spend a little free time on the non-Wu stuff, just to investigate. But I would keep 90% of the focus, time, and energy, on the Wu Style for now. I wouldn’t buy any non-Wu DVDs – it is too easy to find good samples of all the major forms on Youtube and such.

4. My concern here is that for home practice, would I necessarily need to study materials from the same style as my class? Basically, yes, for at least a year or more. Reading up on general taiji or other styles is great, but your body has to develop a foundation in one thing right now. My advice would be to try to remember as many key motions, descriptions, and feelings as you can from each class and to start writing your own book. Do you keep notes after each class? I highly recommend it.

One final point – I am winding down a week of day-long intensives with Ma Chang Xun, his son Ma Jun, and senior student Xu Xiang Dong, all famous 吴 Wu Style teachers from Beijing, who are here with us in Tokyo for a while. The son told us that he doesn’t know any other tai ji styles, doesn’t even practice the 24 or 48 forms. It is far too late for me to follow that path, but I would suggest confining yourself to one (good) teacher and one style for as long as possible.

I hope I have started to answer your questions, and I further hope some readers will chime in with other/ different/ better answers, because these are good questions.

a sudden and wonderful spring day

…followed by the cold and bitter winds of lingering winter. But what a day it was – perfectly timed to coincide with all-day outdoor practice in the park. And I am at last getting a grasp on this Chen style taiji form.

And as usual, my sense of accomplishment is balanced by a taste of foreboding. Getting a grasp of this new world, this strange and twisty way of spiraling and corkscrewing, is relatively easy. Working it deeply into my body is not.

This is a group that meets occasionally in the park for half-days or full days of intensive practice, a valuable supplement to my regular training. Each of us is responsible to guide our own development / choose what to practice. Old material is reviewed deeply; new material tends to come in large bursts. Mr. T doesn’t usually teach in large surges during regular classes, so this is a special opportunity to delve into new material.

But then there is the responsibility to maintain it all and to integrate it into my overall curriculum. That may be the hardest part, but it is also rewarding.

I am surrounded by youngsters about half my age and find this to be highly motivating. I also take some quiet delight when they compliment me on becoming even more flexible in my stretching (this 40-something body isn’t done yet!).

We are surrounded by all manner of people. The local karate group who yell “osu” a little too loudly and too often. The young baseball kids, sitting through a 20-minute post-practice lecture by an angry coach. I joked that American parents would step right up and take their kids home in the middle of the droning. “Hm, it might be a bit much for 8- and 10-year-olds” agreed one Japanese friend. It reminded me of the pre-practice 20 minute ramblings of ancient and Most Venerable iaido senseis before any all-Tokyo iaido event.

Here in the park, there are others: various drama groups practicing their routines. Six very geeky photographers (all male) and one rather young and underdressed female. The dog society, who bring their identical little weiner dogs out to yap at the same time and place each weekend.

This park is near a university, and many student groups are out doing their thing, so the distractions are many. But I was most caught by the yo-yo guy, running through endless routines on his own, maybe the only one in the park NOT attached to a group. I felt that he was doing something very similar to what we were – each of us in our own world of motion, practicing alone (within the group), finding pleasure in seeking correct motion, doing it again when things don’t go well.

And all of us out on that fine spring day sandwiched between long days of cold.

holiday in Japan

No, this is not a spin on an old DK’s song some of you may be familiar with, just a quick year-end wrap-up.

Christmas is celebrated as a marketing activity here in Japan – buy some decorations, buy some gifts. And buy some chicken. I used to think it quite unusual that people here have made a tradition of eating Kentucky Fried Chicken for Christmas dinner, even more so that long lines will form in front of every KFC joint on 12/25. Then someone reminded me that there are no turkeys in Japan. And I don’t suppose tofu turkey will catch on any time soon.

Like most people over here, I had to work on Christmas. And, unlike most, I got an urgent message on Christmas morning, asking me to help a client finish a year-end project that night. nnnnnnn. So that was Christmas, as the song (almost) goes.

Dec. 24 was much better for me – ba gua in the morning, xing yi and tai ji in the afternoon, tai ji sword at night. My teacher didn’t say a word to me for an hour during the night practice, then made one body adjustment to me mid-form, and that was the perfect wrap-up to a year of practice. That one adjustment touches on all my forms and was both valuable and embarrassing to receive. I have many extra hours of solo practice at the end of each year, so this has been a key point in my daily review, something to carry into next year.

Dec 31 and Jan 1 are much bigger holidays here, and most people have a stretch of several days with little or no work. It functions, in fact, a bit more like Christmas as known back home – no work, families get together and share meals and lie about.

Visiting shrines is also important. They have worked out a system where Shrine A is quite busy on 12/31 night and throngs wait an hour and more in line to approach. Meanwhile, Shrine B is almost empty. Then, on Jan. 1, Shrine B is packed and Shrine A is, well, much less busy. We chose Shrine B on New Year’s Eve. The other part of our yearly ritual is watching the K-1 fights on New Year’s Eve, many of which were quite disappointing this year. Drawing upon my years of experience outside the ring, I offer snippets of advice to each fighter while sipping my beers.

Martial artists often visit important shrines connected to martial traditions at this time of year, and many dojo have year-end cleanings and first-of-the-year practices. All of which got me thinking of how different that is from Chinese martial arts and their relative lack of emphasis on external appearance/ uniform (except on demo day) and cleanliness inside the training area (zokin gake, anyone?). And certainly no temple or shrine visits, at least for the majority. Should look much more deeply into this topic later…

I have done my share of year-end and year-beginning practices but recently I prefer to stay home with family. And, when they go out, I conduct my own first-of-the-year practice, working on iaido techniques. The cats got used to my living room workouts long ago, (iai is the one art I can’t practice outside our house) though they still run off each time I started moving all the furniture out of the way.

The seated techniques of shoden, chuuden, and okuden are better suited to the confines of a living room than are the standing techniques of okuden, but adjustments can be made. Besides, Jan. 1 is the best day to go back to the basics, to look again at everything you thought you had learned long before, to scrutinize each tiny detail and find new places to work on. And to hear – and feel – again the corrections of a few days before, in the year’s final iaido class.

One more good point to all this in Japan – mail is delivered on both Christmas day and New Years Eve, and I found a long-awaited copy of the newest Kendo World magazine in my box on the night of 12/31. Happy New Year.

F Street

Some 15 years back, I attended tai ji class at F Street Recreation Center in Lincoln, Nebraska on Sundays. Tai ji was new and fresh to me at that time, and each class was an adventure.

Winter classes were the best. I can still hear the soft hiss of steam coming from the radiators there on second floor, the only sound to guide our motions. And I can still see snow falling through the window, slowly piling up outside.

Classes began with gong fu basics as warm-ups, then we might work on the 48-style. We were so happy to move on after what had seemed an eternity with the 24-style. And here I am in Tokyo, still working on that 24-form, two classes on Wednesdays and other classes elsewhen.

It has been cold and rainy all day. This morning, during the push hands segment of class, I glanced out from the second story window of a local community center and could see the circles rippling out from where raindrops hit the large puddles in the playground area out back. There are no radiators (have never seen one in Japan) but otherwise the setting took me back to F Street and its playground area in the rear.

I found myself wishing for snow, for the large wet snowflakes of spring in Nebraska. I wanted to ride my bicycle through snow-filled streets, then bask in the warmth of F Street. Those Sundays were so relaxing – not the least because I was in the heyday of my karate training and every class was intense and physically exhausting. For me, tai ji served as a good balance or counter to the heaviness of the karate dojo, and Sunday afternoons were a time when I could bask in lightness and empty some of my stress.

I have written in other posts about losing contact with Di Ma over the years. A couple weeks back, I found her at last on the internet. I emailed someone who emailed someone who emailed her and was quite pleased when she wrote back. I got another, longer email from her yesterday, which might explain today’s memories of taiji in Nebraska.

We’ll have to meet again in the future and of course I would welcome her instruction and guidance again. And given that her family lives in Minnesota, there is a good chance there will be snow falling outside when we do meet again.

Chen

Finally got a follow-up lesson in Chen Style over the weekend – spent a morning in the park reviewing the old and plunging further into the new than expected. There is no regular class for this one, so there are some long gaps between lessons, long sessions of self-practice. That approach has worked well for me in areas in which I have some grounding, some foundation. But Chen Shi is so different from the other styles of tai ji I have studied.

Once again, I dug out that old video of me working through a Chen form with Di Ma back in Nebraska almost fifteen years back. On a whim, I tried yet again to find a trace of her on the internet, having lost contact over the years. This time, I found something, a healing festival in which she had participated (she had begun to teach much more Qi Gong just about the time I left Lincoln). Still waiting for a reply from the contact addresses I found on the site…

My movements were so stiff and clunky…maybe I will look back on my current self, fifteen years down the road, and say the same thing again. But these cycles can only lead up – the clunkiness of 15 years ago, of 10 years, 5 years back. What I may come to see in the future as the clunkiness of 2008…surely the level of klunk is moving upward?

Spiraling upward, not merely circling on a flat, horizontal plane. That kind of spiraling is supposed to be a key element of Chen Style, though you wouldn’t know it from my current level of klunk. For now, it is all corners, but they will be slowly rounded down and made beautiful. I have the feeling I am going someplace good…

lost tai ji classic rediscovered

I wasn't going to tell anyone about this, but I can no longer contain myself. While sifting through musty old tomes in one of my favorite used bookstores, I came upon an unimagined treasure - a long lost tai ji classic. I can't divulge too much yet, but I was pleased to find a chapter whose contents may rock the gentle tai ji world. In short, this work says it is acceptable, even good, to practice tai ji late at night.
For years I have struggled with the common taiji edicts about practicing early in the morning. But this work tells me not to worry - that is only for morning people. The Tao, after all, is about finding the right practice for each of us. And for those who are late-nighters like myself, we do the best for ourselves and for tai ji itself by living in accord with our true nature. So no more struggling awake at ungoshly hours in the morning for sluggish taiji practice for me. No, better to live in accord with my True Nature, and do my practice late at night under the moon.
What forces have conspired to hide this aspect of tai ji theory I cannot imagine, but the true Tao cannot be suppressed. Like water, it creeps and flows forward, overcoming all obstacles. Verily, the soft shall overcome the hard and the late shall overcome the early.
Of course it is far too soon for me to divulge all the details, but more are on the way. Until then, rejoice and reclaim your true Tao Nature, fellow late-nighters!