The Journey Within

Turn your body, turn your body!

That’s what I’ve been hearing throughout my Tai Ji journey.

All movements should be whole. As the hand moves, the body moves, the leg moves – everything should move in perfect harmony.

In the last reality check, I haven’t found this unison yet. I found something more subtle – the turning radius of the kua.

Now, I’ve always heard how the kua should relax to allow the body sitting on it to turn. I think I’ve imagined the turning radius a bit too big. We actually only need to turn very little in the kua section, to generate a large turning on the hands. Imagine an ice-cream cone. The sharpest point of the cone actually turns very little, yet you would have licked off half the ice-cream with that little turn at the bottom of the cone!

Now, the trick is to find that point in the kua to turn, so that you actually know what you’re trying to turn! The point is quite elusive. Read – I don’t find it very often. Hope this observation will help you find yours. Look for the small, rather than the big. You don’t actually need to turn the body. Just turn that small point, and the body will follow.

This reminds me of an “observation” I’ve heard. The husband is the head of the family, but the wife is the neck. The head will always depend on the neck to turn.

You just have to find that neck.

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The figure 8 training method is to draw a figure 8 on a horizontal plane while you’re in a horse stance, using your body as the pencil, and the butt as the pencil tip (or more precisely, the bottom of the vertical axis running through your body as the pencil tip). Please let me know if you have a good picture to illustrate this. My drawing skills are somewhat limited bordering on non-existent!

Anyway, my previous encounter with this training method was just to draw this figure 8, to train the legs and to train turning the body. Recently, I was asked to revisit this method again, but this time the kua should not protrude. This criteria was not previously included. By including this criteria alone, the intensity of the training is so great that I can’t last more than 1 minute of it!

The protrusion of the kua was something recent to me. It is whenever the kua is not relaxed that there will be some protrusion, i.e. some tension at the kua. To resolve this, my current teacher suggests (among other things!) to try out this figure 8 training method.

If you have tried this before, or even if you haven’t, please let me know if you are having similar experience. Just be careful about the knees, as the training may seem like drawing circles with the knees.

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It’s been a while since i’ve last written about my private tai chi lesson. I’ve finished the Sun style form some weeks ago, and now i suppose it’s fine tuning. The usual suspects are still there – relax, relax, relax! Such a simple word and yet the permutations of body parts that can be relaxed is just too many! So i’m just going to highlight the one that I’m finding most difficult – the kua!

I guess many has written about the kua. I’ve linked it with why we have knee problems when doing tai ji. Just when I thought I was making some in roads, my push hands classes tell me otherwise. The message is always the same – the kua is not “loose” enough. Going through this with my teacher, he came up with a simple technique which I hope will help you too.

First, let’s start with a test of loose kua. Do a horse stance. Turn your upper body to one side while in that stance. Both your knees should stay where they are. If they’re following your movement, your kua is not loose.

To do this in a horse stance is difficult. So what he advised was to do it in a higher horse stance. Let the focus be on loosening the kua rather than do a “pretty” horse stance. Give the knees a rest. In fact, try to avoid bending the knees further in an attempt to loosen the kua. The knees are still kept bent though.

I find that this technique actually helps narrow the focus on relaxing the kua. It shuts out distractions from all the other body parts. Please let me know if this helps you, or if I’ve made this clear enough.

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Kua is the link between your hips and your thighs. That’s my basic understanding of it. But a good test of a relaxed kua is when you can’t find your kua! The tension between thigh and hip disappears. I’ve actually felt this in a teacher. But I can’t reproduce it myself. Only very rarely that i can reproduce it in a high stance (you don’t need a low stance for a song kua) and the rest of the legs hurt like hell! The good thing about that is you can feel the whole of the feet “grabbing” the ground (全脚抓地). Rooted, if only for a few seconds. I’m in the process of extending the time I can do this, and hopefully, I’ll be able to do it in other wider and lower stances as well. I’m still in the high stance.

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Knee pains are really common in Tai Chi. I remembered my first time (!) when I had a knee pain from doing tai ji training. It was quite frustrating especially when I asked the teacher and all the teacher said was… “yes, there must be something wrong with your stance”. The teacher might have good intentions by wanting me to find out on my own, but I wasn’t buying it. After that remark, I stopped going to his class completely.

It was not until 2 years later did I find the real reason for the pain in the knee. I must be really unlucky or did not have much fate in meeting teachers. I wonder if this is one of those things you hear about that “when the student is ready the teacher will appear”! I guess I wasn’t ready for a long time.

Anyway, just to hope that you don’t fall into this trap as well, I hope I can share a bit of my thoughts here on knee pain.

A popular correction for knee pain is that “your knee should point in the direction of your toes”. I’ve tried this for ages, and everytime I find my knee not pointing in that direction, I literally move the knee into that direction. This works for a while, but it’s difficult to see where the knee is in some postures (unless you have a mirror or an experienced person who can spot these things!). By the time your head moved round to see where your knee is, you would have moved your knee, thus invalidating your observation. Remember Schrodinger’s cat from your physics days? (I can’t claim I could, but visually, this theory is easy to remember just because there’s a cat involved.) So, what do you do in such a situation?

The answer to this is a seemingly unrelated aspect, SONG KUA! A lot of body pains can be related to this “song kua” but we’ll focus on the knee in this article. It’s not the knee which is pointing the wrong direction, it’s the kua that’s not relaxed enough resulting in a wrongly pointed knee! (This was such an epiphany for me at that time!) By relaxing your kua, your knee is automatically allowed to move wherever feels natural, and the natural position is the same direction as the toes! Correcting the knee itself is actually the wrong approach to solving the knee problem. Relaxing the kua is. But correcting the knee is easier to understand and teach. Because, how would you explain what the kua is? Maybe this post might help.

Another common thing I do during training is to “bounce” up and down to test whether I’m in the correct position, and whether the kua is relaxed enough. This, as I’ve just found today, is very bad for the knee! The knee is already under a lot of pressure, and you’re still adding more stress to it! When in the form, just move on, and don’t try dance half-way doing the form.

Let me know if these techniques help.

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Different people different hands, sounds obvious but often forgotten. We have to treat each hand differently, that is we have to treat each opponent differently. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Everyone has their own preferences and dislikes. Everyone pushes in a different rhythm.

However the best ones have no preferences (or dislikes). The best ones will just “listen” to the opponent and adapt. The best ones understand that different people has different hands.

I guess right now i’m so far from it, I just try to focus on “song kua”. I always wonder why most push hands people i’ve seen always have a very “strong” hand, i.e. muscle more than whole body movement. A lot of them also seem intent on winning! I’m always skeptical pushing with these people because, as much as I want to learn the whole body movement, I’m very likely to be drawn into a strength contest! I guess now I understand how to learn from these people. I also have to understand that different people have different hands. That’s how I will improve!

So push with as many people as you can, but remember the principles. Let them push you around but don’t forget the principles. Just understand how to adapt. You’ll learn more that way and sooner or later, you’ll be “winning” just because you have understood and learnt from them.

Remember, different people, different hands!

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