Today it’s a whole year since I put out my notice on a digital bulletin board about giving free, daily taiji lessons in our local park. After a full year of taijiquan in the park, we have a great group of people together and a steady trickle of new people. People hear of the group and send me a text message to ask if they can play, or sometimes they just drop by the park at the right time and join in. This saves me the difficult job of explaining to people why they should do taiji. After all, what’s if for?
What’s it for?
Well, the original Taoist idea was to prolong life, and restore youthful elasticity. If aging is a process of becoming dry and brittle, they reckoned, then reversing that process consists of rehydrating tissue and regaining elasticity.
Is that really possible? Can we get the stretchiness of our tissues back? Yes. That’s what a lot of the taiji and qigong exercises are about. Do them in the right way, and we feel the elasticity of our body increase. We focus more on the connective tissue than the muscles. These exercises repair, grow and rehydrate that tissue. There’s a lot of science about the best way to exercise. People think in terms of getting the right BMI, reducing fat – particularly belly fat, working the vascular system and so on. These are excellent principles on which to build an exercise program. Taiji goes about it another way, however. In fact, for each activity, there is an ideal body type. We try to transform the body in order to make it possible to do taiji. At the same time we do taiji to transform the body for longevity and vitality.
Fascia and interstitium
In 2018 pathologist Dr. Neil Theise published a paper in Scientific Reports describing “a previously unknown feature of human anatomy”. He writes about the network of connective tissue all over the body, the fascia. Previously this was thought of in terms of linking muscle to bone and as a shock absorber for the organs. Before modern imaging technology, this tissue was always dried and pressed flat before viewing under a microscope. Now we can see that what Dr. Theise calls the ‘interstitium’ is actually a three-dimensional, fluid-filled lattice. He describes it as a “widespread, macroscopic, fluid-filled space within and between tissues.” It seems odd that we’ve missed an important organ of the body, and have only discovered it now. This springy organ throughout the body is what taiji tries to repair and augment. Once we’ve grown it sufficiently, we can do some really interesting stuff with it.
Psychology and mental health
The changes we seek to bring about in the body are led by the mind. Each exercise is directed by the awareness. In the Taijiquan classics they say “Yi (awareness) leads the Qi“.
After we’ve done these exercises a while concentration improves, and a calmness begins to extend into everything we do, not just into our practice. We become less reactive to little annoyances. It’s as if the transformation we are directing in the connective tissue also helps to make us psychologically more “thick-skinned”. Things slide off us more easily.
My teacher and I were returning to Berlin from a week’s training in the woods near Poznań, Poland. In the compartment with us was a woman and her young son, around twelve years old. They wanted to hear about our course. My teacher, Howard Choy, was telling them about taiji, and why it can be good for people. The compartment door slid open, and a young Polish train conductor asked for our tickets. Howard hadn’t printed his tickets, but had them on his phone. The conductor said he didn’t have a reader, and that we had to show paper tickets. Howard said he hadn’t been able to print one, but that his digital ticket should be enough. The conductor got a little forceful then, and said he’d need to hold on to Howard’s passport. Howard just gave him a friendly smile, and said, “No, I’m not giving you my passport.” The young man was nonplussed, his face darkened a little, he turned and left the compartment. We assumed he was going for help. He didn’t return. When we passed into Germany a Deutsche Bahn conductor scanned the tickets, and there was no further mention of the incident. The mother and child had watched this with mouths hanging open. They were convinced that Howard had supernatural powers. In a way, he has. His interaction had no spin: there was no fear and no threat attached to it, so it didn’t escalate things to the level of conflict. Howard played it down, but the mother and child were deeply impressed. I told him he was a Jedi, and this was his “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” moment. He looked blank. He’d never seen the movie.
Martial arts
Let’s not forget the martial arts side of taijiquan. Taiji works with consciously directed relaxation, rather than muscular strength. Which means that even when we are quite old, we can continue to practice. There’s quite a clever fighting applications exercise called tui shou: pushing hands. Without any punching or kicking, you try to unbalance your partner. The first person to have to move his feet loses. It’s amazing to see some of the old guys in Chinese parks, the really good ones. Plenty of the younger men try to push with them. They get “pushed out”. I had the privilege of being thrown about by two very good practitioners in a park in Kowloon. It’s a great learning experience, and fun. Being pushed out means we lose our feeling of rootedness and suddenly stumble back. Sometimes it’s quite dramatic. The really good guys hardly do anything, and you just go flying.
Adam Mizner is an Australian taiji teacher with a school in Thailand. He can do this about as well as anyone on the planet, including all the Chinese guys. Once in a workshop he invited us to push him. Not in the formal pushing-hands way, where you touch arms to begin, but just anywhere on his body. This should have given us an enormous advantage. I got my hands on him – my right on his breastbone, my left on his right shoulder. It was weird. His skin seemed to grow, to puff out slightly like rising bread dough. I couldn’t reach his core, there was in fact nothing there to push against. My hands just slid apart. He said, “It wasn’t always like this, but recently people can’t get past my skin.” So he, too, has developed a thicker skin.
He emphasizes that it’s not about tricking your opponent to make them overcommit, or anything about getting just the right angle, or bracing with your back leg. He’s made the transformation necessary to upgrade his connective tissue. That’s what you feel expanding when you touch him. He just stands and relaxes, then allows a wave of relaxation to come up from the ground, through the fascia and into whatever part of your body he perceives as blocked or tight. And you go flying. How does he get that wave going? That’s a story for another day.