Tai Chi Chuan promises great martial and healing powers by developing soft skills. Tai Chi teaches relaxation and grounding. As we explore relaxation, we learn to reduce excess stress and release residual tension. We notice that too much tension drains strength, upsets balance, slows our wit, and seems silly.
We own a number of methods, in the internal arts, that examine and develop soft skills.
- We practice Forms.
- We stand in Qigong Pose.
- We join in Push-Hands.
- We play Sticky-Hands.
- We do Da-Lu.
We combine these practices: by applying Qigong’s stillness to slow down our forms, or by pressing and pushing on Qigong or Tai Chi postures, we go deeper. We learn more about excessive tensions, and release them. We discover relaxed, sinking balance. We notice easy, winding motions.
Fear Reactions, Fear Rigidity
As we go deeper, we find new bits of wisdom. We explore a darker, lurking psyche that inhabits our common tensional structure; it limits the flexibility and range of our joints. We notice our fear. Sinking into soft skills exposes this weakness. We discover that our fear of being pushed —literally and metaphorically— creates and exacerbates inappropriate, unnecessary tension and rigidity. Balance failing, mind flailing, our fears come true when we let them. We begin to sense that tension and fear, like codependent lovers, embrace one another, gripping tightly to fabricated strength and to a frail ego. We notice that fear-based tensions cage us.
We want to go deeper. The sage writers of Taiji Classics offer profound visions of softness. Professing that softness moves 1,000 pounds with 4 ounces of pressure, they lull us into ease. We crave more depth. We want the profound strength of no-strength. So we ache for more softness, and at this spot in the psyche, many soft schools diverge from reality, plunging students into a dive for super-human powers.
Soft Brains Easily Deceived
One of my students explains that his former instructor taught “you need to learn to hop backwards when you feel the push, so that you don’t hurt your legs.” Indeed, YouTube abounds with miracle videos of masters with extreme pushing powers that, they say, reveal their inner Qi powers. With students repetitively flying 5, 10, 20 feet, the discerning eye sees the hopping student. The discerning practitioner knows that this is a hoax. The hop must be trained.
We know the benefits. Soft skills relax the mind. Like deep relaxation or a hearty massage, soft skill training brings delight and openness. We expand our awareness and hone our attention. Our world seems to open and deepen as our sensitivities grow and our mind awakes. Ah. But, the risks! As we grow sensitive, we must remain vigilant (not paranoid). We can be deceived by promises, lured into fantasies. We become tempted into dangerous —and potentially fatal— errors. For if we believe that we become better fighters, protectors, or warriors by practicing soft skills alone, we deceive ourselves.
Remembering and Balancing the Soft and Intense
We go deeper into soft skills by treating this kind of training with humility and respect. We practice by exploring intimately our inner balance and by testing our inner extremes. An extreme exploration might have us go limp and heavy when pushed or punched or prodded, to see where our joints swing, where our mind jolts, how our body flows. An extreme tensional experience might have us hold whole-body tension in a Tai Chi posture, and, while being pushed, release none or just a enough to root. The balanced approach hinges on transitions between soft and hard. In pushing hands, we might stop, right at a transition point, adjusting some tensions, releasing some and engaging others, to go deeper.
We go deeper. And deeper.
Remember — soft skill development prepares our core reflex system to stay aware and awake during hard, intense work. But we must train intensely (Taiji Softies — this means train hard). We train intensely to test and to push the reality of our soft skills. What good is all our soft-training if we never test it under pressure? We use some of the same drills and some more drills to go deep into the intensity of speed and power. By going back and forth, from soft work to hard work, we go deeper.
Remove deception and keep it real.
