Ward-Off

The Other Body I talked about below (03/09/05) is very important. John has likened it to a guardian angel. It is an aspect of your energy that resides behind you, looking over you protectively and engagingly, connecting and guarding. Ward-Off is simply a posture that stimulates and activates this guardian. In a true Ward-Off the arm should stem roundly and firmly from the back heart, the inside shoulder (around the clavicle) should be soft and empty, the mid-palm should face your sternal notch and the hand should be torqued, i.e. should feel as though it is twisting palm upwards to counter its natural inclination to turn palm downwards. Your head should crouch slightly between your shoulders with the feeling that the hump of the upper-back rises very slightly. This should make the hairs on the back of your neck bristle and bring a tingle to the crown of the head: sure signs that the energy behind is activated. As you retrieve Ward-Off at the beginning of every posture of the Form, the rounding and stretching shoulders should bring some of this behind-energy around and into the action. The crouching, tingling head brings some of the energy over the top and the sinking and hooking coccyx brings some under and up. You have thereby pincered the opponent on the horizontal and vertical planes. With practice this Ward-Off engagement becomes so familiar that a little of it is with you at all times, and its full intensity can be activated at the drop of a hat. When you get to this stage then your practice, your life of Tai Chi, engages with the real enemy which my teacher has always said is time. Not just ageing (though it is essential to tackle that if you wish to finish your work) but the linear, plodding, inexorable grip that time has us in, or rather, which we have conditioned time to be. Your daily practice gradually builds up an energy which relaxes into time as you relax into the energy and temporal events begin to bleed into each other just as much as spatial ones do. A Tai Chi life is one yielding to time.