"Like a razor's edge, the Path - narrow, and difficult to tread"
Katha Upanishad
Xingyiquan is the most AMAZING EFFING ART to play once you get the ARC streaming. It's just soooo incredible. Most interesting thing you can do as a human being imho. But there's a gigantic paradox guarding the entrance ramp to this oddball art. And that paradox is the almost-deliberate miscasting of the practice, it's almost designed to misdirect onlookers and students, like a magician who won't let you ever see how it's done.
And the name of the trick that dare not speak its name is: tension. Or rather, the removal thereof. You can't even make it to the starting line with this incredible practice until you can empty your upper body of all tension so that only shape and mind remain. Yeah, a big secret right? It's only just the fricking NAME of the effing art itself: XING (形 :SHAPE) + YI (意 :MIND). Cleverly camouflaged eh?
But in defense of the ancients I have to say they knew they didn't really need to be all that artful in concealing this profound secret cause they knew we'd all be looking at the practice with eyes wide shut, as we look at everything. So they laid it out plain and they laugh in heaven when they see us f*cking it up by plodding around with stuff shoulders and white knuckle fists doing bad karate and calling it Xingyi. The art doesn't begin til you get the ARC streaming. But then whoa - it's something to experience.
But this ridiculous entrance ramp paradox remains. We want it to be a tooth-and-claw fightin' art, so we run in exactly the opposite wrong direction, trying to look and feel badass while missing it all along. The horrid paradox of this art is that you can't even begin it til you can relax, yet the initial sense the art (and most teacher tbh) give the student is tension, power, roughhousing and speed. The ridiculous irony is that the ONLY method I know of for generating the deep understanding of relaxation that you need to even begin to appreciate Xingyi can only be developed though one training known to me anyway, and that isn't even Xingyi at all. It's Zheng/Lo approach to 37 simplified Tai Chi .What a ridiculous joke! But if you haven't gone through that training (and frankly in many cases even if you have) you have less than an snowfall's chance in hell of creating the essential state of [mind plus form minus tension] that you need to even crash the starting gate of Xingyi.
Another dumbass cosmic prank of the type much beloved of the gods!