Learning tai chi – not easy, but worthwhile

 

Child doing tai chi
A friend’s daughter starts on the long tai chi road

Learning tai chi – not easy, but worthwhile

Learning can be a frustrating and confusing process.

In my tai chi classes, I watch people struggling with the unfamiliar forms. The Tai Chi for Health sets are easier to learn than the full long sets – the combination of carefully chosen movements and the Stepwise teaching method make a huge difference. But they are still challenging.

The shapes your body makes in doing tai chi and qigong are unfamiliar to most of us, brought up with Western exercises. Remembering the subtle choreography of a set takes time.

Confusingly, what you’ve learned seems to go in and out of focus. At the end of a class, we may congratulate ourselves on really getting to grips with ‘Moving Hands Like Clouds’, only to find at the next class that we have somehow lost any sense of it. It can happen like this with whole classes. Teaching, you find yourself going over the same ground several times, and you ponder how to teach it better.

But in reality this is what learning looks like, and it’s useful to remind ourselves of it. Too often, we think of learning as either/or – we either know something, or we don’t. Schools tend to work like this, and of course it’s the basis of most of our testing. Unfortunately it’s not true.

I have been working on learning the Sun 73 set. It is the full set from which the movements of most of the Tai Chi for Health forms are drawn. Learning it (especially from a DVD) is a salutary experience!

I knew a fair number of the movements from learning the Health sets, but the full set is something else. Many of the forms are complex and take place in a confusing space where it’s hard to tell if you should be stepping sideways or out at a 45 degree angle. As you watch the DVD over your shoulder, you don’t know whether to look at the feet, or the hands and arms, or attend to the turning of the waist. A single form may take you stepping in 4 directions, with complex hand movements for each. (I had endless trouble with ‘Fair Lady Working at the Shuttles’. In the end my partner took a series of stills of the screen, and I arrayed them in iPhoto in order – I was afraid that the slow motion control on the DVD player – and my patience – was going to break down. It took me roughly 3 hours to sort it out, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of it is still wrong.)

I’ve had this sense of things coming in and out of focus over and over again as I learn. A form seems impenetrable: I watch in slow motion, trying to copy, trying to predict the next action. I get frustrated, break off for a sip of tea, go back to it.

After a while, I learned that it works for me to get a general idea of a tricky movement – the directions, the large shapes, the stepping. Then the best thing is probably to forget it for a few hours, maybe overnight. Later, I try again, without the DVD. Usually, it’s disastrous. But the renewed attempt often means that I’m asking the right questions when I look at the DVD again.

And sometimes, there is some miracle in which the body seems to learn by itself, without the interference of a conscious mind. When I come back the next day, the form is there, pretty much whole and properly shaped.

I see this in the participants in my classes. Sometimes, after some intense work on a new form, we all relax, shake off the absorbtion, and settle in to just let the forms happen. And I see them move effortlessly through some complex manoeuvre, surprising themselves. It may not happen again immediately, but some aspect of mind and body has been paying close attention. Things are going in and out of focus – learning is taking place.

As a teacher, it’s always good to be reminded of what it feels like to be learning something tough. As a human being, it’s one of the great pleasures of life – coming to grips with something worth knowing, wrestling with it, and eventually breaking through into a new place, where it is part of us, and we are just a little different.

This post was originally published on November 2, 2012.