I am back in Tokyo area for a while. Interested Tai Chi people, and/or martial artists who want to work kuzushi, and/or usual people interested in internal martial arts, please shout me up if you want to do a local session.
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Tai Chi students often get confused about emptiness, softness, and solidity. What's the interplay between these in practical terms of what you feel when you do kuzushi (unbalancing work, an interactive partner practice based on and derived from traditional Yang style Taijiquan push hands drills)? I'll talk here about what you'll feel when working with me in that mode and how to interpret it. This is in response to a number of recent students questions on the subject.
The conceptual background you need for this whole thing is the usual: water. The various powers and states of Taijiquan are best likened to water and have been so conceptualized many times both in explicit analysis such as the Taijiquan classic writings and also be extension and implication, e.g. in the common quotes from Lao Zi's Dao De Jing.
H2O has three states: solid, liquid, and gas or ice, water, and vapor. (These are analogous to what you'll feel as I work with you in push hands through the Four Elements concept that's covered in detail in my Ten Tenets of Taiji Training doc on my site www.zmq37.com. In that doc I go into greater detail on four rather than three modes of basic Taiji energy application, but the additional states are beyond the scope of this little blog post.)
The basic point is that I can manifest the Taiji energy in our push session as any of the three states: solid, liquid, and air at any time. Now here's the crucial point: I can manifest any of the three as either my own presentation of my own energy or as a reflection of yours. In other words, I can have you experience my energy as any of the three states, or else I can entrain your energy and manifest your own energy to yourself as one of the three. So that's six basic conditions you can be experiencing at any moment working with me on kuzushi. These states can be manifested as a continual linkage from any state to any other, or can be suddenly terminated at one particular discrete state, and in that case that's where the final physical manifestation can be observed.
For example, as you attempt to unbalance me (most experienced martial artists try to use lots of strength in that attempt) you may experience my energetic response as vapor initially, nothing there, then suddenly crystallizing into a kind of solid 'wall' that then may slam you back. This would be an example of you experiencing my energy state. The inverse condition, where I have you experience the change in your own energy state, might be where you attempt to touch me and suddenly you feel like a cement block, as though your body were momentarily tranformed to a chunky, clunky lunk of something that cannot respond in time to my simple unbalancing gesture and over you go. That would be the inverse case mentioned above, where I've got you experiencing a state change in your own energy. In choosing how to manifest my own energy and into what state to entrain yours, I'm usually following your lead (exception is the advanced 'fire' manifestion, which is beyond the scope of this post but thoroughly covered in the 'Ten Tenets' doc).
What I mean by 'following your lead' can be understood with reference to your experience of water. If you gently push your hand through the water you will experience it as softness. But if you slam or slap it you will experience it's solidity. If you body slam it by jumping off the Golden Gate bridge you will (briefly) experience its lethal ultimate hardness. But unless you put yourself in the path of a tsunami, your experience of the water - soothing, smoothing, or smacking depends entirely on your approach to it.
Now, since most of you will be carrying and delivering a huge payload of totally unconscious physical force in your attempted unbalancing of me, I generally focus on reflecting your own state back to you, as water does, rather than preemtively manifesting the state of my own choice. But even though I'm (generally) acting in strictly reflective mode, as 'water', your experience may be of solid, liquid, or vapor, depending on what you bring in.
The basic point remains that you can't make assumptions about how you'll experience the energy of our interaction, e.g. expecting cottony softness all the time just because its Taiji. Taiji is based on relaxation and energy, but with these two as the foundation, a skilled instructor such as myself (no I'm not a Taiji master, but I'm definitely a highly qualified Taiji instructor) can choose to manifest your energy to yourself in any way I want.
My teacher sometimes says: touch the wall. Does it feel hard and solid and strong to you? If so, why? Why does it feel hard and solid and strong to you? After all, before you touched that wall, you didn't really know what it was. It might have been a Hollywood sound set, just a curtain cunningly painted to look exactly like a brick or plaster wall. The sensation of hardness, solidity and strength you get from the wall is coming from yourself. If you had touched it softly enough, you would not have experienced it as hard at all.
When you work this drill under a skilled instructor you are just experiencing yourself, but in an unusual mode, from the outside. I'll be your mirror, get in touch.
