Softness

The great conundrum of Tai Chi. Of life in fact. If softness were just a light touch then life would be so much simpler. One could just practice sensitivity. However, softness isn’t just a light touch. It is an entering, insinuating, seeping life energy that transforms as it goes/gives. It is an expression of a consuming interest and passion for the basic need of any living being – the need for connexion. It is an expression of your compassion.
Most creatures show softness at least some of the time, the most obvious time being when they are with their young. An enlightened being shows softness all the time, even when they’re being hard. For a truly soft being, hardness is just an intensity of energy that in no way means the withdrawal of their compassion – it just means they mean business. The best examples I can think of are cats. They’re certainly far better at it than humans. For a non-enlightened being hardness is the withdrawal of their compassion – selfishness. You don’t need to touch (or be touched by) a hard person to know that they are hard. When a selfish person tries to become soft without addressing the problem of their selfishness then they become sly - they use their intelligence to give the impression of softness, which is in fact just another expression of their hardness – their lack of compassion. This is a great strain and will lead nowhere. Most students of Tai Chi get it wrong at least to start with: they misunderstand what softness is. It took me 17 years to twig. At that point my teacher said to me, "Ah, now you’re ready to begin." Most students I know haven’t begun. They’re still aimlessly wandering around in the wilderness refusing to see what’s been staring them in the face ever since they were born. I suspect that the big insight people need to have before they can see what is truly there, is that the way they are is purely their own doing and their own responsibility. No matter how harsh your upbringing and your conditioning, it has been your response to that that has produced what you are now, not the circumstances themselves. Another person having exactly the same experiences would have turned out very differently. When you realise this, that the only thing reasonably to blame for your present state is yourself, then (after you’ve got over the shock) you are empowered because you realise that with a change of focus and emphasis, brought about through correct teaching, it can all be put right, by you (assuming you're willing to do the work). You have to believe this otherwise it’s all hopeless.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881

Solo practice

The foundation of the work is your own solo practice. My teacher always used to say that if you’ve done enough solo practice then when standing in front of another person you should be able to forget it all and concentrate fully on them; any techniques should naturally express themselves when necessary. A student who doesn’t practice is crippled by laziness. In the old days my teacher used to sometimes watch me in despair and shake his head. From that would come the vestige of a smile and the phrase, "What will save you is your willingness and ability to work hard." The student’s practice is like a tiny light: a beacon of hope that one day they may in fact learn and understand something of importance. Without it, no matter how well-intentioned and eager for partnerwork that student is, there will be an air of failure and decay about them: each time you see them they’ll be slightly older and their vitality slightly less. For a teacher that’s pretty depressing. Some people get it naturally right - there’s an element of the work that they practice in their daily life, without knowing it, and consequently there’s an aspect of their energy that continues to improve. Such people are rare but wonderful to behold. My teacher would call them natural masters. They have something important to teach. Whether they can teach it, other than by example, is doubtful – they’d have to spend years analysing and investigating precisely what it is they know in the hopes that they’d find and develop a means to instruction. If you come across one and they’re compassionate or stupid enough to agree to spend time in your company then lap it up: immerse yourself in their energy and vitality and try to suss what they’ve done to deserve it.

One of the tenets of Tai Chi is that although you can never guarantee to be stronger than an opponent, you can always choose to be weaker. The idea of partnerwork is not that you get a chance to practice techniques and compete but that you get the opportunity to practice listening, humility and compassion. Every person that stands in front of you is going to have something wonderful to offer – there will be some aspect of their energy or experience that is totally fascinating and worth emulating. If you have the heart you can locate and focus on this. Then not only will you learn but you’ll also be encouraging the best part of that person, which is probably the greatest favour you can do them. But to manage this you’ll need to have done your solo practice otherwise you just wont be quiet enough to hear what they have – you’ll end up projecting yourself on them instead. Can you imagine anything worse?

There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart.
Chandogya Upanishad

This from Masaaki Hatsumi's guidelines for the running of his dojo in Japan.

All those joining the Bujinkan must get an annual membership card. This card not only preserves the honor of the Bujinkan members, it indicates you are part of a larger whole - one whose members come together with warrior hearts to better themselves through training and friendship. It evinces the glory of warrior virtue, and embodies both loyalty and brotherly love.

The tradition of the Bujinkan recognizes nature and the universality of all human life, and is aware of that which flows naturally between the two parts:

The secret principle of Taijutsu is to know the foundations of peace.
To study is the path to the immovable heart.

We must put the heart of the warrior first, working together for self-improvement and for the betterment of the Bujinkan.

A full life

A full life is one that realises your potential (destiny) not one that passes arbitrarily from experience to experience, or as JK would say, from sensation to sensation. A full life has nothing to do with the range or variety of experience it contains, and everything to do with the intensity and passion with which each moment is lived. A full life is just as available to those in confinement, whether it be wheelchair, prison or a coma. Who can enumerate all the realms in which we are alive anyway? A full life gets truly stuck in.

Nitsan sent me this painting by a student of his called Boris Kravits. I find it very perceptive. Ward-off (rounded shoulders, hollow chest) gives the feeling of a shell or scab of energy on the upper back. This shell is an avenue to higher aspects of connectedness. The tail digs down into the ground and your ancestry. The feet splay, the head cranes, the eyes flare and the face and heart smile. Even the patterning on the shell, its rim, the seeming hole in the centre and the fact that it looks like a shield, all resonate.

Unconditionality

This is the fundamental quality we all need to develop. It is the basic thrust that gives your life meaning, beyond yourself. It simply means putting giving above and beyond anything else, especially receiving. It is this that Hugo and Pip and Roberto possess, and it is this that gives them the magical quality of having joined with each and every situation in such a way that they have prior knowledge. This is the real meaning of forget self and become one with the Tao. It is the opposite of the measured and careful approach. People who have it have learnt at some point in their life that the only way forward is to give unconditionally from the heart to each and every moment as it unfolds. (The feast is forwards.) They have then put that principle into practice long enough for it to have become internal - for it to have seeped into their soul. It has then become part of them - they do it all the time with their energy regardless of how they feel. These are the magical beings, super human if you like, truly soft. I learnt quite early in life that if I studied hard then the subject of study became really interesting and engrossing and infectious at which point study no longer became a bind - when I gave whole-heartedly to the study then it gave back enormously and I achieved academic accolades in abundance. However, I didn't have the humanity to realise that I had discovered a principle that could and should be applied to everything in life, not just bookish study. It did though bring me to Tai Chi and my teacher who introduced me to the concept of principle ("If something works then do it all the time") and in particular to the principle of unconditionality: shaking your energy loose and casting it carelessly and willingly into whatever it is that you're doing. This is what you (should) do each time you practice your Tai Chi, and the more regular and frequent your practice the better you become at it. At this point the student begins to glow with the energy of Tai Chi - the bloom of health - and they feel empowered. This is a crucial point. If they have it in them then the teacher will help them direct this energy into deeper and more difficult aspects of the work, to do with eradicating self and establishing raw and tender connectivity as the constant of life instead. If not then these students go on their way, often using their new found energy and insights to positively change their lives in astonishing ways. Those that stick at the Tai Chi are in for a difficult time. The next 10 years or so will feel like laboriously and painfully digging a deep hole in which to eventually bury themselves. However, they are in fact sinking a well down to the source of it all, which when tapped floods their life with light and meaning. This is the point at which they have become forever unconditional: they have become the source, and their energy is no longer limited in any way. If this energy is used to feed the source rather than dissipate into worldy affairs then these students become truly divine. If this isn't enlightenment then I don't know what is.

On Samoa Peninsula

Horizon
– left edge
a gray sliver
where the jetty
juts.


Notebook
propped up
by a stiff tuft
of beach grass.


You awake
within the poem.


Joseph Massey

T T Liang

It is well known that when a Chinese teacher praises you they are generally being somewhat dismissive and sarcastic and when they are firm and scolding it is because they really care for you. T T Liang was the perfect example. JK told me of one occasion when a proud student picked up some posture quickly, "Ah, you genius!", said Liang enthusiastically. He then turned aside and muttered, "Learn quick, forget quick."

A Rant

Kevin Grey quizzed me further about chi kung yesterday (he's studying it as part of a course in TCM). This is my reply, for what it's worth. Like he said in his response to me: "Can't say I fully understand everything you say, but the challenging stuff is part of the attraction." I'm pleased to find a fellow soul who values challenge above understanding.


As you've picked up I have little sympathy for Chi Kung. I also have little sympathy for Tai Chi, the way it is generally taught and presented anyway. You only need to plug Tai Chi into Google Images and see all the shite out there to realise it doesn't amount to much. I sincerely and strongly believe they miss the point. The point is to forget self and become one with the Tao: to become a person better able to connect with other energies. To become a better person. Our researches have revealed, firstly, that connecting energy comes from the heart - or rather, is heart. It is not chi. Chi can connect but only by invading (making an effort), not by becoming - it isn't naturally connected or connecting. (This is why we value softness so highly.) Secondly the only rule is to always go forwards. The feast is forwards as JK so beautifully put it. All those Chinese terms like adhering, sticking, joining, are there to confuse the issue. The fact is that there is you and there is the other and you either get it right or you don't. Getting it right does not depend on technique, it depends on heart. A complete beginner can do it immediately if they are encouraged to do so. Years of Tai Chi or Chi Kung or any other training often simply gets in the way. Worse than a beginner. This is what I mean by spirit cutting thru everything: when the spirit is up you can achieve miracles.

The Chinese and Western approaches are very similar: thru concerted effort and study to develop and accumulate in the hope that it will all lead to a place of enlightenment and natural connexion. Unfortunately this rarely happens. John says he's met so many martial artists who have spent their life accumulating strength and energy only to eventually realise that it is all in fact a hindrance to real progress which is always spiritual. Think of Dr Chi who gave up Tai Chi as a bad job and devoted his day and energy to Jesus. Jesus had saved his life, had given him life, once the Tai Chi had brought him to the brink of death. He later revived it all but only to earn a living.

Stuff like Chi Kung or Tai Chi, which involve daily repetition of the same thing, is inevitably going to create a shell around you. The name of our game is an almost unbearable rawness that comes from daily entering an unfolding and enheartening process that John calls the natural process. At present John is dragging Charles permanently into this world of rawness, where his only true response is to weep, it is that unbearable. But like he says afterwards, never has he felt so alive and so connected.

I don't suppose any of this helps. My advice would be to do what you do, develop a deep suspicion of intellectual structures (which is what the 5 element theory is), all created to protect from reality rather join with it, and trust your own good energy and instincts.

Chen Wei-ming

After studying the picture of the 109 year old yesterday, John suggested that he may have been a student of Chen Wei-ming who was the same age as, and a student of, Yang Cheng-fu (born 1882), and lived well into his 80's. Years ago I really enjoyed Chen Wei-ming's Questions and Answers book, although the only thing I can remember now are his five requirements for the successful study of Tai Chi: faith, respect, perseverance, patience and humility. Apparently he was a terrific fighter with athletic long and deep postures; and a devoted buddhist.

Believe it or not, this old codger was 109 when this photo was taken in 2001. Great posture as well - real authentic Yang Style. Note that the wrists don't extend beyond the front toes, neither does the front knee, the back leg is slightly bent, the front foot is slightly turned in, the angle of the spine extends in a straight line from the thigh, the waist is working to the right, and both wrists are bent. Given his age he could easily have studied with Yang Chien-hou.

Learning

Before we left London for the bliss of country living, John taught a 10 week course in Kentish Town. This was the first public teaching he had done for about 4 years. The classes were a great success, in my eyes, mainly because Mark was generous enough to drag his students along, all of whom were eager and excited to study with the great man. It gave us diehards the opportunity to meet and work with Hamid and James, Duncan and Alex, Ross and Anne, and all the others who swept through like a breath of fresh air. The master took us through simple Yang style postures, energy circuits and the beginnings of what we now know as heart energy - entering interaction. What struck me was just how much his energy and teaching had diverted from the Chinese approach, how open and vulnerable he was (not something you associate with a martial arts teacher), how much softer he was, but particularly how completely he was what he was, a strange energy being connected to a line peculiarly Irish, that is to say, of these isles and definitely not Chinese. This really struck home when he mentioned the Tiger's Mouth to me - the back of the fleshy webbing between thumb and index finger - a well-known energy point of Chinese medicine. This is the point we were struggling to connect with the other person's pushing hand as we yielded in single-hand pushing. I suggested that this point, being on the large intestine meridian, would be connected to the bowel whereas the middle of the palm was on the pericardium meridian, hence one pushes from the heart and yields from (or to) the gut. He listened with barely veiled impatience and then said, "Yes, I feel it as a deep pool above which a mist is rising." I was instantly bowled over by how much more vivid, lively and evocative his imagery was than mine and it immediately conjured pictures of Glendalough where St Kevin had lived. That simple statement of his had brought alive a soft seeping connecting energy and atmosphere that invaded every pore of my being, unlike the Chinese imagery of acupunture points and meridians which I now realise is intellectual and of little use to someone wanting to open up and connect to others.

The teaching is a complete package. That is to say, everything about it is important and vital, and it does not require padding out with extraneous 'teachings' from elsewhere, either from other teachers or from books. John has always said that if a student comes to him having already studied TaiChi with another teacher, then that student needs to drop everything they have learnt before they can take on board new instruction. This is what we call respect: the willingness and ability to drop your baggage whilst in the presence of the teacher so that the teaching has a place to reside within you. This is difficult to do and the first requirement is complete honesty with yourself and with the teacher. If there is anything not quite right about the teaching environment then no matter how hard the teacher tries and no matter how willing the student, the teaching just will not be able to express itself in a way that the student can grasp. The teaching resides in the teacher but it is the sincerity and honest need of the student that stimulates it to come out. I'm always amused when disgruntled former students grumble that my teacher never taught them anything, as if that was his fault. I've even been in classes where certain good students have stimulated my teacher to open up and teach and still the poor students cannot hear - somehow it didn't quite reach them. The good student is suspicious. Suspicious that the teaching may reside in any and every aspect of the teacher, even in the obnoxious parts of his character and personality. When you're with your teacher you have to operate from the simple premise that everything is important and everything is to be emulated. I'm also amused when people complain that I've just become a carbon copy of my teacher, spouting his words with little originality. For God's sake, I've immersed myself in his energy and teaching for the last 20 years, sacrificing career and family to do so: what do they expect? My main worry about maintaining this folly of a blog is that I'm either being heretical (too original) or giving too much away.

To be alive is to become your destiny and to burn everyone you come across with a stronger and stronger light.
John Kells

Chi Kung

This is an exchange between Kevin Grey and myself in the comments of the Frederick Leboyer post below.

Are you implying that Chi Kung and drastic water fasts are in any way related?
The poor fellow may well have stopped his Tai Chi practice of forms/push hands etc., but surely Chi Kung was there from the beginning in the warm ups and postures?

No I'm not implying that chi kung was responsible for his death, although I'm certain that if he was still studying with John Kells he'd still be alive. I'm not even sure he was still studying with his chi kung teacher - I suspect not. The last time I saw him was in 1993 - he phoned me out of the blue (I hadn't seen him for at least 3 years) and said he wanted to see me so I invited him around for a meal. When he arrived I was struck by just how much weaker he was than when he was (heavily) into his Tai Chi. I also sussed that he had come to resolve our relationship in his favour and prove to himself the superiority of his chi kung over my Tai Chi. Unfortunately for him I was then at the height of my weight-training, plus I'd been pushing-hands daily with my teacher for at least a year, so my energy was far stronger and better than his and his attempts were futile - I inadvertently kept him on the back foot and he eventually left somewhat disappointed and bemused. At the time I remember thinking it had been a victory of iron over chi kung. Two years previously I had asked my teacher how I could get stronger and had intimated that chi kung may be the answer. He had scoffed and directed me towards the weights (he had a room at the back full of weights machines). He had never had much sympathy or patience for chi. He had always claimed that it is not important, a conclusion he had come to after studying and working on it for years with Chinese and Tibetan teachers of the highest quality: a figment of Chinese culture not really relevant or useful for a Westerner whose natural energy is far more immediate and engaging than chi anyway. The warm-up exercises we always did simply to warm-up and never as chi kung. I'm not even convinced that they are chi kung. And they were always dropped as soon as the student got through the Short Form anyway. Whenever students used to say how much they enjoyed the warm-up exercises John would always stress that they are not really that important and it was far better to concentrate on the Tai Chi which was all about interacting with others (which of course was precisely why many students preferred the warm-ups). The Tai Chi was certainly never taught as chi kung, the emphasis was always on active yielding, softness, and putting the other first - all concepts alien to the development of chi. In the classes my teacher was always at pains to point out that the energy that's important is spirit and not chi. And for John it was spirit and not shen - his concept of spirit is quite different from the Chinese as well. The thing about spirit is that it cuts through everything immediately to the quick. Concepts and theories are frazzled by it, including chi. In fact there is something so immediate about spirit that it is previous. Now John doesn't even mention spirit. For him it is all heart now. The most important qualities of heart energy are softness and lightness. Softness is an entering acceptance, it is the quality that allows the truth of the statement Everything Touches. Lightness is just the humour of the situation: a delightful and playful irreverence that stimulates the world to dance with you.

The man on the left is in control of the situation because he is into his opponent rather than into himself. See how the ground rises up into him rather than him bending his legs to get closer to the ground. Also his bum is in which kicks his heart out all over the other.

Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.
Henry David Thoreau

Frederick Leboyer

The only famous person I've ever taught has been the obstetrician Dr Frederick Leboyer. I was teaching a class in Putney in 1987 and one of the students, a refined and well-educated young man, asked if a friend of his could attend the classes as an observer. I agreed and from then on there was a nice old French man sitting unobtrusively in the corner, watching us intently and every so often furiously scribbling notes. A few weeks in the young man told me who the French gentleman was. Being an ignoramus I had never heard of him, but I insisted he join in with the class rather than just sit and watch, which he was delighted to do (Leboyer spoke no English and the young man was in fact his translator and interpreter). What struck me about him was his good strong energy, soft and of French peasant stock I would say, his absolute enthusiasm for the Tai Chi (he thought the world of me for some reason), and the immensity of his heart which filled the room even when he was sitting out of the way in the corner. When I demonstrated a posture he would sometimes break into applause, and if ever I did an application on Bill Challis, who was my assistant, and uprooted him, Dr Leboyer would be beside himself. He put the rest of the students (average insipid English middle-class) to shame. It was only later, whilst browsing in a bookshop, that I came across Birth Without Violence, which by the way is a beautiful book.

Yes, hell exists. It is not a fairy tale. One indeed burns there. This hell is not at the end of life. It is here. At the beginning. Hell is what the infant must experience before he gets to us.
Frederick Leboyer

I recently learnt that Bill Challis, who left Tai Chi and took up Chi Kung, died after going on a drastic water fast. He leaves a wife and two children.