Just Do It !

A standard way of asking a question in Chinese is “Xing bu xing” or “hao bu hao” – “OK or not OK?”, “Good or not good?”. I doubt if the bard knew this when he penned the immortal lines “To be or not to be”. A question is the occasion where we ask ourselves what to do, and this can be quite time-consuming since we often have many alternatives, which all have different outcomes.
A lot of my Tai Chi brothers and sisters find that the doing the nei gong training, especially on a regular basis (ie. every day) is hard going. In the morning? At lunchtime? In the evening? Before class? If you’re not careful it gets to midnight and you still haven’t done it. Godfrey once told me of a time at Jasnières where he was exactly in that situation, and he’d had a few glasses of wine to boot. He fell asleep in the tortoise posture, and awoke, still in the posture, but with his head resting on the ground. Godfrey is a very special, very advanced elder brother, one of Dan’s best students in the man’s own words. Most of us don’t have that degree of will power, let alone stamina. So decide when to do it, and then do it. Don’t worry if you’re feeling tired, or something else comes up. Switch off your cell phone, go to your ‘special place’. Just do it.
A fairly well-known internal martial artist, trained in Taiwan and London, living in Paris, recently told me that one reason he no longer teaches Tai Chi is that he was attracting a lot of intellectuals who were more interested in Chinese culture than in martial art training. This is a well-known problem for us Tai Chi teachers, and something of a pedagogic challenge. Carl wrote on the forum that he no longer advertises his classes as Tai Chi Chuan, but as Neijia quan Kung Fu (nicely mixing the pinyin and wade-giles as we do so often). I have tried to separate Form and Function in my classes, but that doesn’t really work either. The very concept of Tai Chi, even in martial clothing, seems to attract people who want to work out how it works, rather than just doing the work and letting it work. Some of my Tai Chi brothers and sisters are formidable intellectuals and can tell you all the names of all the techniques (and all the names of all the people who can do them) but have no basic gong fu. As a teacher in the Wu lineage, I have recently started asking myself if the square form is really that useful for the intellectual students, since the very fact of decomposing the movements can lead to those questions – my right hand is turned towards or away from my face, or my chest? Xing bu xing? Read the books, watch other students, ask your teacher, whatever … but for goodness’ sake, just do it.
In NLP there are basically three “perceptual systems”: Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic. There are also Olfactory and Gustatory. These are common to all animals. Something that interests me greatly is what they call Auditory Internal Digital – essentially when you’re talking to yourself, and this seems quite specific to humans. “Digital language” means language that is neutral in sensory terms, so in AID you’re asking yourself those questions (see above). Hao bu hao? In the fifteen-odd years that I’ve been teaching Tai Chi I’ve seen this in a majority of my students (maybe it’s my fault). People who are immobile, separated from their body, asking themselves what they are supposed to be doing, rather than just doing it. As I said to Guillaume yesterday, don’t talk – do Tai Chi!
Modern life can be a complex affair and can lead to lots of energetic muddles in our heads. Sport in general is a great way to unload our mental burdens and “get physical”. This is just as true for Tai Chi training as it is for weight-lifting or football. One of the things that makes Tai Chi so special however is that it is relatively complicated, with lots of movements in lots of different exercises. However, it is your body, not your mind that will master this complexity. Tai Chi training involves listening to your body, not your internal dialog (“the babbling monkey”). You will make mistakes, forget bits of the sequence and that’s OK – you will be corrected if you follow your teacher. The key is to work with your body to imbibe it with the key principles (such as alignment, yielding or jin), and then let the body express those principles in the prescribed movements. Don’t think about it, just do it.