How frightened we are of the unknown! We like to remain enclosed in our
daily habits, routines, quarrels and anxieties. We like to think the same
old way, take the same road, see the same faces and have the same worries
(Krishnamurti)
Faults
Your mind is agitated and you have a bad nights sleep. Because of your
bad nights sleep, your mind becomes agitated.
This seems to be a loop. Catch-22.
To break the loop you must introduce a new factor, a change.
For example, you may lie down for 30 minutes before bed, or eat less in an
evening or allow more fresh air into the bedroom, or you may wear less clothing
for bed.
Without a conscious, deliberate change, the loop may well continue indefinitely.
You plateau.
Some changes occur by themselves.
Sometimes a new element needs to be introduced.
Your tai chi progress is like this.
Training a fault will perpetuate the fault. Improvements need to be added and
practiced.
Not all change is
involuntary.
Unlearning
Zen helps our students to drop their baggage and realise that they
don't know.
Shedding past experiences, opinions and preconceptions is a vital first step.
Students find this to be very difficult.
It entails change.
Tools such as zen
koan are an invaluable aid.
They challenge our pre-conditioned ways of regarding the
world
and invite us to see the
essence, the true nature of things.
Until you have unlearned what you think you know, progress is difficult and
slow.
People to cling to their notions for security, never realising that freedom and
mobility come from letting-go, rather than holding-on.
Intuition rather than knowledge
Taoist/zen precepts, insights and principles are not easy for the modern,
rational mind to cope with.
People want to get a 'grasp of it' or 'get their head around it'.
It is hard to accept that we cannot truly understand very much about existence.
It is fundamentally too vast and too complex to be comprehended.
This is why
unlearning is so vital. Not only do we want to
lose clutter and memories, we also need to lose our way of looking at things.
Not all things can be held, fixed and comprehended. Some things are too big to
be understood.
And perhaps we do not even need to understand in order to make progress...
Perhaps all we need to do is
feel
it.
Tai chi cannot be learned in a step-by-step way.
Linear progress
We offer a very detailed
syllabus, with many topics, modules, and a clear path of progress.
Yet, we also realise that progress is sporadic.
Students are individuals. They all learn differently.
There are sometimes great leaps of insight and ability.
At other times, people fall back into old habits and are required to review the
basics once more.
Everyone is different.
There is no linear progress.
Tai chi is not logical. It is not like a
conventional martial art. You cannot
understand tai chi in terms of something else.
Most of the exercises and drills are about unlearning, about
realising that what you think is so is not
necessarily so.
We teach new insights. We also take things away.
Connections and associations
When a student begins to put the pieces together, one insight can spark
off many more.
Instead of seeing the new insight in isolation, the student realises how it
pertains to many other aspects of the training.
Neigong is Iike this. If you can manifest a quality all the time, it
underscores everything you do.
Jing
is the same as well.
When you look at the
form you notice similarities and differences
between postures.
You see variations on a theme.
The
insights cause a chain reaction, sparking an ever-widening growth of
awareness and curiosity.
Instead of knowing more, you
see more.
You realise that there is more to see, to explore, to uncover. Your vision does
not narrow, it widens.
Everything is seen in a new light.
Huge spurts of comprehension and insight occur constantly.
You find yourself making connections and associations between previously
unrelated parts of the curriculum and your abilities increase unexpectedly.
Innovation
Creativity is a natural offshoot of this way of exploring tai chi.
You have new ideas all the time and continue to see things differently.
Nothing is static. Everything is changing.
Page created 27 March 1998