Dear Friends, Neighbors, and Family —
This week I want to talk about Tai Chi and what it can teach us about our relationships with others. Last week and the week before, I outlined my experiences with Qi Gung, which taught me how to bring my mind and body together again, and to feel at home with my blood, bones, and nerves as I really hadn’t in a long time. Arthritis had done quite a number on me. There were times when I was pretty upset with my body for doing what it did to me, as if it were something foreign and not a part of me. As I learned to pay attention without making unnecessary judgments, and as I became better able to let go of things I had no control over, I could almost forgive myself for being sick. Dan and Qi Gung entered my life at just the right time.
In a related aside, a few days ago a friend sent me some material on forgiveness and acceptance, especially as it relates to our ability to alleviate suffering, even our own. It contained some observations by Dr. Edith Eger, a PTSD therapist who was mentored by Viktor Frankl, the eminent Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and philosopher. Both Frankl and Eger were holocaust survivors who spent time in the Auschwitz concentration camp during WWII. Eger tells us one of the key epiphanies she got from Frankl was, “Each moment is a choice. No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can choose how we respond…” She also explains that she could choose to accept herself as she was, in all her human imperfection. And she could choose to be responsible for her own happiness. We don’t have to be holocaust survivors to make good use of these ideas. I highly recommend Frankl’s book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which came directly out of his experience in the camps.
Now I’m going to wander into another tangent, but bear with me. It’s related to Qi Gung and Tai Chi, promise. I want to point out that the summer I turned 13, I grew two sizes and needed all new clothes by August. A big change, and fast! At that point, whatever physical talents I had fled and never came back. Well…that’s not quite true. I could still run; I was hard to beat in a sprint. And I could do a fabulous job of anything that involved my hands, as long as I didn’t have to talk at the same time. But that was about it. I was often lost in daydreams and didn’t always watch where I was going. Because of this lethal combination of daydreaming and of no longer being sure where my arms and legs were at any given moment, I nearly always had at least one bruise or scrape. I had trouble getting out of bed on the days when I had physical education classes because I dreaded them so much. Any activity that required much coordination was a huge embarrassment. My name, Nancy, means graceful. Imagine what the other kids did with that!
As an adult, pre-arthritis, I took a few tennis lessons, but spent most of my time running after the ball. I did a little roller skating and a little rock climbing, but never got very comfortable with either. Qi Gung was difficult for me. Sure, arthritis was one reason, but another was just my long, awkward relationship with my own body. Learning the Qi Gung movements, which are precise and required me to know exactly where my arms and legs were, among other things, was a real challenge. Two things helped me keep going. First, early on I noticed that I felt better after Qi Gung practice. Within a few minutes, I would experience a wash of warm energy that is hard to describe. If my hands or feet were cold, they would begin to warm up, and that often meant less pain. If I had been doing a standard athletic workout, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find myself warming up. But Qi Gung movements are so slow and gentle, it’s hard to imagine that they raise the heart rate much. It was a mystery.
Dan explained that I was feeling the Chi as it moved more freely through my awakening tissues. Even though I had already benefited from acupuncture, which is all about moving Chi around, I wasn’t sure I believed in the existence of Chi yet, or in the Tao, for that matter, or in Lao Tzu’s theory of life and the universe. It didn’t fit easily into the Christian belief system I’d grown up with. I was willing to admit that I felt something strange, something I couldn’t recall feeling ever before. But Chi? Maybe it was just my blood I was feeling…or something.
But matters progressed. As I became less embarrassed and more able to relax during practice, I developed a greater awareness of both myself and the world around me. Hmmm, I thought. Maybe Chi really did exist, and maybe I was feeling it. I wasn’t sure. Dan was very patient, never critical. He would show me a movement over and over if he had to, guiding me with gentle touches, smiling broadly when I improved. Otherwise, I would probably have given up on the whole enterprise before it could do me much good.
Dan had described Qi Gung as the management of one’s own energy. But to believe that, you have to believe in Chi, which I didn’t quite yet. I began to feel restless about Qi Gung, and unsure about continuing with classes. Dan must have seen it, because he chose that moment to introduce me to the idea of Tai Chi. I had previously thought of Tai Chi, if I thought of it at all, as exercises old Chinese people do together in parks at the crack of dawn. It was far more than that, Dan said. Tai Chi was the management of one’s energy in relation to the energy of other people. Tai Chi was a form of communication that went far beyond language. It would teach me basic principles about how to get along in the world. That certainly got my interest.
So I set out to learn the Tai Chi Chuan Wu Style 99 form. According to Chinese tradition, Tai Chi is the offspring of Qi Gung, and initially it was meant as a more elaborate form of exercise — probably for people like me, who were getting bored with Qi Gung in spite of the fact that you could spend a lifetime learning it. Who knows. Tai Chi is based on movements that are useful for keeping one’s self safely in balance during interactions with others. It’s easy to see how that might grow into a martial art. And indeed, Tai Chi Chuan can be practiced as a martial art, albeit a gentle and defensive one. There are many styles. Wu is just one of them. And there are many “forms” of various lengths. I like to think of Tai Chi forms as highly choreographed dances. And indeed, Tai Chi is sometimes called “the slow dance.”
The “99 form” is named that because there are supposedly 99 movements in it. I say “supposedly” because the dance is so fluid and water-like that it’s hard to tell where one movement ends and another begins. Done at the proper speed, it lasts 20-25 minutes. If nothing else, it’s a formidable feat of memorization. It took me about five years and more than a few tears of frustration just to learn a jerky, crude version of it. Some of my finger joints were fused by then, and I couldn’t bend my wrists, ankles, or knees normally. I despaired of ever making it look beautiful. With his usual patience, Dan would stop to talk about how I was learning to sense and mirror the movements of the Tao itself — flowing and ever-changing.
I’m talking about all this because after a while, Tai Chi becomes a physical language. It becomes your way of being in the world. I doubt I’ll ever be graceful, but I’m certainly more graceful now than I was before I took up this practice. More important, I now understand how shortsighted and ineffective resistance is. As the children of Western Civilization, we grow up believing that if you want something, you have to fight for it. Which means not letting anyone push you around. That might work for a while if you’re the biggest kid on the block — which, at 4’8” and 103#, I am definitely not. But even if you have the mass to overpower an opponent, it doesn’t work for long. It takes too much energy, and sooner or later, you lose. Points in case: U.S. vs. Viet Nam. U.S. vs. Afghanistan. Rome vs. the Vandals.
Next time you see protestors on opposing sides facing each other down with shouted insults or actively hurting each other; next time you read an article or watch a video about the violent conflict in the Middle East; ask yourself how it ends. The answer is it doesn’t. It can’t. The violence simply continues until one side or both realize they will never get exactly what they want. In the best of all possible worlds, both sides will dance together forever, sometimes giving and sometimes receiving. Like this:
Looks like fun, doesn’t it? It is fun, and it’s an illustration of how life can be lived if we are skillful and perceptive enough, and if we treat our fellow humans as respected partners rather than enemies. Next issue, more about the principles of Tai Chi in everyday life, the infinite game, and how all this leads to meditation. Here’s a good-bye poem I wrote long ago, about dancing and other things.
DANCE OF OUR PROMISE KEPT
Lovely, the long dance,
Bright, dark, slow, fast,
Spun like sugar,
Or a web,
Leaves on a whirlwind,
Or the branch,
Our breaths against our skins.
Shall we dance together?
We shall dance together,
In the cold rain,
In the sun,
Weep, rend, stamp, crouch,
Sing, bend, clap, touch.
Lovely, the long dance
Of our promise kept.