Openness

An open mind and an open heart are vital for progress. To start with most beginners live in the world of the thinking mind (the normal world) – they are usually reasonably well-educated, reasonably nice, reasonably middle-class and reasonably stiff. They come to their first lesson with some vague idea as to what Tai Chi is but with quite strong ideas as to how the world is and how it behaves, and they have learnt to function reasonably well in it. As my teacher used to say in the first lesson, “You’re all success stories – you’ve got this far – but to go any further you’re going to have to change.” To progress at Tai Chi the students will need to be open to having all their concepts/notions/ideas about anything and everything go through various transformations along the way. This is an exciting process, once one starts, and the Tai Chi class is the ideal environment for change: everyone is well-intentioned and eager to learn and usually there is plenty of support for students finding it difficult for whatever reason. The important change that needs to happen though, the one that was the most difficult for me, is the change in emphasis from head to heart. Until all one’s motivation comes from and to the heart one hasn’t really begun, or rather one is desperately preparing to begin. I always considered myself a good student: I realised in the first lesson that my teacher was the most remarkable person I’d ever met and I was intelligent enough to realise that people like him are very rare and I wouldn’t meet another, not in this lifetime anyway, so I decided to study his art (it’s not Tai Chi but it posed as such originally) to the exclusion of everything else, mainly because that was the approach he recommended. I practised all hours of the day and my life revolved around my daily trips to his Tai Chi school. However, I always had the nagging feeling that I was missing the point: I was going at it the same way I’d gone at everything else in my life – whole-headedly rather than whole-heartedly. The thing about the head is that it thinks the real in – it creates the world the way it would like it to be – it immediately sets up rational barriers between your energy and other energies and there is little energetic communication possible. This was evidenced, in my case, by my inability to respond to energy. I had an open mind in that I loved the excitement of adopting new rational structures and understandings: I would see something I couldn’t understand and immediately and voraciously set about tearing it to shreds to suss it out. However, this was of very limited use when it came to an integrated energetic discipline such as Tai Chi. My teacher’s Tai Chi required me to drop the (open) mind altogether and work from a different place entirely. This is what was difficult. I just couldn’t conceive of a way other than thinking. Eventually the barriers broke, probably from the accumulation of all those hours of hard work, especially the hours one to one with my teacher, and the shift from head to heart started. I always believed it would, as did my teacher, and I guess it’s this belief that saved me.