Early 2019 I joined a local Tai Chi school in Hamburg. After 4 years of weekly practice in an unusual sport, the time has come for a pivot. The time has come for reflections.
How it started
Let me answer the same question my teacher / master asked me when I went for that first open day lecture at his Tai Chi school: Why have you come? It had started a few months before. I had seen an old man doing his Tai Chi routine at the alster. I felt touched by what I saw. He was clearly doing something more. His movements graceful, but powerful and relaxed at the same time.
I had come over to ask him what he did. He said he was doing Tai Chi in the Yang Style. I had no idea what it meant, but there I decided, I should do some research and find out. Only a few months later I moved to a new place. Just by accident it happened to be very close by a renowned Tai Chi school, so naturally I signed up. I later learned other students specifically moved to Hamburg, just to learn here. For me it was an accident.
And so it started. The training was quite different from usual instructions in the western sphere. Each training starts with some relaxing / stretching exercises called softenings. The teacher announces the name of the exercise and starts doing it, the students repeat. Generally chitchat can happen here, but this part can also be silent. The approach is learning by doing, learning by observing.
What then follows is what’s called “the form”. A coreography of movements including the whole body, one movement leading into the next. The form consist of four parts, and with all its basic movement patterns it takes quite some time to learn, maybe one year. After going through the form together, which takes maybe 20-30 minutes, the time for individual training would come. Here the teacher would teach which movements to perform next, or which general areas to focus on. Then the student is on his own again. The key part of the whole thing: Practice and repetition.
Asking Questions
As no general information is given, things are merely shown by the teacher or corrected during the individual training section, the pace of learning depends on the student. Asking the right questions one by one, may reveal certain details to the questioner and the group. But here as well, the answers are not universal. The teacher would answer questions differently depending on who is there, and depending on the progression of the student.
In this way the learned knowledge is also very incremental. Maybe 1 or 2 questions per student per week. Having gotten a non satisfactory answer which seems to be hiding more than it reveals, you may go again at a different time.
With this thirst for more, which had been pretty much there since I saw the old man in the park, naturally I turned also for other sources. I learned quickly to hide this from my teacher. Maybe this is line with the chinese tradition, where it is frowned upon to have “multiple masters”. Mentioning third party info or strolls into other fields like QiGong were met with suspicion and mostly disconfirmed or corrected.
But the search went on. Tai Chi is not very prevelant in the west, and indeed I faced a lot of judgement when mentioning it to peers or family. Tai Chi knowledge itself also tends to be esoteric, and is given from master to student in a tight-nit relationship. At the same time it is a dying Martial Art, which is why more books are being published around the topic. Another great source I found were reels on Instagram. Tai Chi Martial artists would publish videos here for inspiration. While it hasn’t taught me much, it has given me motivation to keep on learning, as well as even more thirst to reach to their level.
Fallacies of Tai Chi Training
My master has said it himself numerous times: He did not start his school to become a teacher. He started his school to be able to do Tai Chi full time while sustaining money. This for me has become a point of concern. Apart from the fact that often it really does feel like he either doesnt care or doesnt know how to teach: Tai Chi doesnt have organised belts like other schools. Asking one question every week might be good for conversation and making a bond. But on bad days, without any sense of progression and achievement, without a systematic way of learning, it is not hard to feel and see, that you have reached exactly nowhere.
The master is really fine with mistakes. While there is a sense of pressure around correct execution, if you do something wrong, he will just leave you be. Apart from the occasional knee pain from incorrect execution, I did a set of movements grossely wrong for more than three years. Finally he corrected me. At that point I noticed, that one time even a fellow student pointed this out to me, but I had forgotten it. This was the tipping point for me. The idea that repetition will somehow deepen the practice is fine, but to allow it to be fundamentally wrong, that upset me. As my master noticed my disappointment, he hinted I should avoid crying if possible. Something I was not any way near to. I had been simply upset and disappointed. Maybe an emotion that other students dont reveal as directly to him.
This event had me looking back at my time with him. Learning through repetition, learning through obversation. Part of Tai Chi is to develop a deep sense of strength in the stomach. This strength can be seen in the movement, but it can also be felt by the practitioner. For the beginner, this is of course either not felt at all, or only in the infant stages. According to my master, he practiced Tai Chi for years, until he had his first real experience of life force, or “Chi”. In Yoga it is called prana, and it depends on a certain openness and fitness of the student for this experience. To experience it the related energy centers have to be open and functional to a certain extend.
To have students try to do this based on observation and repetition, is for me a totally flawed way of teaching. It is like trying to make water boil, just by looking at it. Without electricity the water wont boil. Just by looking at it, without the proper technique, you could be waiting forever. This way of wishful observation leaves also much room for esotericism. Students will try to trick themselves into feeling the way, knowing the way. At the same time the master will only acknowledge progression in this area in extreme situations, where he really feels he needs to do some correction. Most the time he will not acknowledge any student having made progress here, while at the same time giving no clear instructions.
The student is then led to believe, that the real information (or the actual teaching), will happen in one of the topic-based seminars. I can say this is not true. By booking more lessons, by joining several seminars, instructions will be given, but they add on to the general wish-wash of knowledge surrounding Tai Chi. But looking at the masters, looking at myself I know, this colloquial knowledge can only lead to incremental improvements, it won’t lead to a breakthrough. And there you are again, in the Tai Chi lesson, naked, bare, getting your form corrected.
Besides the often fruitless training, my master himself was often quite tired. Only on request he would perform small sequents of the form to the best of his ability. Other times he would do a very reduced variant, “in order not to demotivate students”. But this for me was the real demotivation. Dumbing down your movements, only showing your potential once every other year, so students dont become demotivated by your greatness. For me it is this kind of greatness that motivates me, even if it is still far away to reach it. At the same time it is weird to me, how a practitioner of Tai Chi can be constantly tired. Not only in body, but judging by the facial expression also in spirit.
Fitness in Tai Chi is another problem. From my peers I rarely saw somebody sweating, I myself had to even first learn how to do the form in a way that is physically challenging and had me leaving puddles on the floor. My observation is that it is not enough to do Tai Chi. To be truly fit, going to the gym is very much needed, too. Something that also sets it apart from other sports.
People do Tai Chi for various reasons. Some might go there just to connect with a bunch of hippy dippy people. There is a tea lounge infront of the training area. Others might go there to have a low-effort way of exercise. Just something interesting to do every now and then. Or you might do it based on habit or the bonds you have made over time with people. For the master it is certainly advantagous to have people stay for extended periods of time. Some of his advanced students have been with him for 20-30 years. This sort of time span to me is scary. Not only is the level of passion and thirst obviously very mixed in the class, the teacher is also very much fine with it. He supports and accepts all sorts of students, also those who are just there to drink tea.
The master will when in doubt agree with the student. Looking back at my training, I myself have fallen into the fallacy of whishful thinking, of seeing things that weren’t there. This was of course supported by the fact that teaching was done through observation. Asking my master about this he mostly confirmed my suspicions. Looking back at it years later, I can clearly see that I was wrong. But the master had confirmed me, keeping me in my lovey-dovey state, keeping me in a false sense of understanding. Something that works well short-term for a few years and definitely for the moment, but something that is truly disappointing to me looking back. This fact is also generally known amongst students. Talking to peers they confirmed, he will sometimes nudge and bait students into private lessons or similar, telling them sweet lies.
Tai Chi also is one of those sports that empathises on correct execution of the given style. While the juice, the art of it might be there and come in after a certain period of time, the other aspect is study and repetition of correct physical movement. Because the movement is so complex, because there are multiple layers to it, this kind of teaching can go on forever. This is also due to the fact, that individual instructions may be forgotten over time. The juice, the art of tai chi of course makes it alive. But how willing will you be to follow the movement, the study of it? This is another one of those questions that creeps up on the practitioner over time. You are never prepared for it. But here the initial question of the master has a real sense: Why did you come to learn Tai Chi?
All this not to mention that from a western standpoint, these perceived fallacies are within expected reason. The master never tells the student, that he might be there for years without and progress, with nothing but nonsense. But this knowledge slowly creeps up on the student over the years, and is often endured with either a strong social bond, or absolute and unwavering determination. Instead of giving you information, the master lets the insight creep up on you.
What will be next
What is next is not clear. Just at this moment I put this feeling of discontentment into words. What had crept up on me over years has finally culminated in this post. I see this discontentment not only in myself, but also in others students. Sometimes students dont attend for months at a time. A few of them have shared with me their frustrations, often similar to mine.
What I have done already is reducing my hours. Now I am again at one hour of training per week back from two.
I can also say that I am now less obsessed with the mysticism of Tai Chi as I was a few years back. Not at this cost. Not at the cost of endless waiting. I can have deeper experiences in meditation, where I can focus only on art, not on technique.
I am well-aware that each of my fallacies can be simply taken as a challenge, it can even be turned as a positive. Thats why my journey with Tai Chi has now not come to its end, but it has come to a pivot.