Heartwork

If the first stage of Tai Chi is personal relaxation then the second stage has to be coming to grips with the art as interaction and communication. Generally this involves learning the martial applications of the postures so that an imaginary opponent can be visualized as one performs the solo Forms of Tai Chi. There are different ways in which this can be practised: you can imagine the opponent as a physical or energetic or spirited entity. With each you effectively yield to that aspect of the opponent with the same aspect in yourself: if you “see” the opponent as a physical being then you yield to that physicality with your physicality (arms and legs and waist turns). If you “feel” them as energy then you yield with your energy – throw it towards or around them, meld and draw them into your spirals. If you regard them as a spirited entity then you must rouse your spirit to bite into them – piercing to their core and revealing yours in the process. Each approach is important and the Chinese recommend a graduated path, i.e. start to work physically then progress to energy and finally reach the realm of spirit, and they claim that working in this way the next stage naturally develops from the preceding one: so working physically correctly (relaxed, body as one unit, etc.) will develop ch’i which in turn, over time, will accumulate in the body and gradually transform into spirit. This may be the case but it’s a very external approach to spirit. By external we mean acquisitive: it is all to do with self – personal gain – and at no point really puts the other first. An internal approach is all to do with purity of intention – just how pure – how selfless – can you make each act. And if each act, each breath and each moment stops being burdened with the cloying self then is life not one long thread of vibrating connexion? This is the realm of “empty spirit” or what Dr Chi called “nothing.” My teacher calls it the perfection of Tai Chi. It is attainable by all of us at any time – it doesn’t require decades of practice, it just requires us to lose ourselves in the breathtaking magnificence of the moment. This is a far more useful skill than regarding each entity as a threat and having the ability to counter that threat if required. It is the compassionate edge.