So far I have written about strange food, Chinese New Year,
a plumbing catastrophe and my life in general, but I haven’t written anything
about what I spend most of my time doing, which is of course tai chi. This is partly because I wanted to wait until
I had something to say about it, but also because it’s not easy to make hours
of repetitive practice into interesting reading for people who are not as
obsessive as me. But I’m going to try!
I have a favorite book.
It’s called ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ and it’s by Ursula le Guin. I read it countless times as a child, forgot
about it when I was a stroppy teenage goth-type (no room for magic when the
whole world hates you!), then remembered it again when I lived in London. ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ is a quintet of short
novels which tell the story of a wizard called Ged from his childhood until his
old age. It’s a beautiful book and the
only one I habitually re-read, and every time I do so I find something new that
I hadn’t noticed before.
The magic in Earthsea consists of knowing the true name of
things in the Old Speech; a language spoken only by dragons and wizards, and one
which wizards must learn word by word.
So, one winter when Ged is at the school for wizards, he is sent to the
Isolate Tower for a year where he has to sit in a cold, silent room and
memorise endless lists of names written with invisible ink which will fade by
midnight. Sounds like fun doesn’t
it! Ged is an extremely single-minded
boy. He knows that the thing he’s
looking for – power and knowledge – lies like a jewel at the bottom of this ‘dry,
fathomless learning’, so he keeps on studying all through the long, cold year.
What does this have to do with tai chi? Well, I often think about Ged. It seems to me that we’re in a similar situation. I practice tai chi for more than forty hours
a week, and most of that time is spent doing exactly what I did the day before,
and will do again the following day.
Over New Year, I spent what felt like countless hours in front of a
mirror, alone in a freezing hall practicing something called silk-reeling. There are lots of silk-reeling exercises; some
are more complicated than others, but they all involve repeating a movement
again and again while your brain attempts to figure out how to connect what
your knees are doing with what your elbows are doing, why your hands refuse to
do what Grandmaster Chen’s do, while at the same time gripping the floor with
your toes so your feet don’t slip and maintaining as low a posture as you can
resulting in pain in your legs, knees, bum and lower back. It is enough to drive you slightly mad.
About three weeks ago, I started learning Nei Gung
breathing, something I’ve wanted to learn for a very long time. It’s really hard for me to explain this
because my understanding is so limited (I’ve not had the chance to ask lots of
questions as June is still on holiday), but as I currently see it, the breath
is either pulling everything into the centre, or pushing everything away. When you practice a form, ideally this happens
in the right place for every posture.
Because tai chi forms are very complicated that’s difficult to achieve,
so to simplify things you can practice Nei Gung breathing either in a
stationary posture, or in a posture which moves in a circle over and over
again. The first couple of weeks I was
learning this I practiced it for three hours a day. In other words, I spent three hours a day
standing still and breathing oddly.
I have noticed over the years that some people would rather
not work on the basic exercises or on any kind of standing practice. It can be hard to deal with the monotony, or
the physical discomfort, or perhaps people feel they’re not really practicing
tai chi if they’re not practicing forms.
But what I think of is Ged in the Isolate Tower, memorising those
endless lists of names. Tai chi forms
are so complex even on the most fundamental level that if you don’t separate
things and get them clear in your mind and body, it would be impossible, I
think, to ever have a decent form. So
much of the grace and power of Chen Tai Chi can be understood from practicing these
basic exercises and breathing techniques.
And I suppose that is the jewel
I’m looking for. It may be that I am going
slightly mad in the process, and I’m eating a lot more chocolate than I should
be, but I hope that one day I’ll look back and be really glad I put in this
effort. And if I ever get offered the
chance to reincarnate in Earthsea I will definitely take God up on that. Though I might pass on the Isolate Tower.
