Illustration by Victo Ngai
When we lived in South City, I used to pause early every morning, dog tugging at the lead, to watch our elderly Chinese neighbors do tai chi on the front sidewalk. By comparison, I felt like a wooden figure, assembled from round and oblong bits, squeaking at the hinges. It took me another five years to hunt down a class through the St. Louis T’ai Chi Ch’uan Association.
I show up in baggy clothes, my body stooped and stiff and lumpen, eager for grace. Gesture by subtle gesture, we learn the 37 postures of the Yang style “short form”—which, unbelievably, takes me nearly a year. This is not about mastering a new hobby and moving on. I go from nervously requesting a handout so I can memorize the warm-up exercise to feeling my way through, with plenty of laughter and lapses. Now I know what tai chi masters mean when they say, “We are not ‘doing’ tai chi. We are ‘playing’ tai chi.” It’s a never-ending game, played with a child’s pure focus.
I come to love the names: Carry Tiger to the Mountain, White Crane Spreads Wings, Snake Creeps Down, Repulse Monkey, Fair Lady Weaves the Shuttle, Cloud Hands… Our teacher, Michael David, drills us in basic principles of movement, urging us to stay relaxed and erect, head
floating, feet shoulder-width apart, wrists gracefully straight.
What’s hardest, at first, is slowing down: Those of us in the tadpole class, so to speak, tend to rush jerkily through each new movement, maybe because it’s easier than sinking low and holding the postures. Or maybe because we’ve rushed to get to work, rushed through work all day, and rushed through traffic to get there.
You know you are moving slowly enough, one master has said, “if the hummingbird does not fly away.” Another compares the movements to spooling silk threads from a cocoon: continuous, steady, slow enough not to break a single filament. First, I only slow down for the postures I’ve practiced long enough to feel comfortable doing. Then, as the movements get more complicated, I slow down when I’m desperately trying to remember what comes next—then forget to speed up once I’ve remembered, scaring the hummingbirds.
My next challenge is to “separate the weight.” The movements of tai chi flow like water, because the body’s weight is constantly shifting from one leg to the other, settling back then pushing forward. This requires more leg strength than you’d guess, especially when you’ve sunk low, knees bent and back straight, and you’re to hold the posture several minutes. My muscles burn and shake while David moves with sadistic slowness through the room, nudging backs straight, tapping hunched shoulders, positioning hands with a watchmaker’s precision.
Once I begin to separate the weight, the trick becomes separating the muscles, tightening only those that I need for each movement. Relax and let go, David tells us, but concentrate and focus; be mindful, but get out of your head… Damn those Asian paradoxes. I feel like I’m making no progress whatsoever (and yes, I know, it’s not about making progress). Then the first winter ice storm slicks dark roads, and after a harrowing 90-minute drive, I get out of my Mini and—I don’t even have to stretch. Without any conscious effort at all, I have somehow managed to clench only the appropriate muscles.
I celebrate by buying a pair of cotton-soled black kung fu slippers. They let you spin like Sonja Henie, but I’ve put off acquiring them—too many bad memories of exercise gear. The red polyester bloomers from high-school P.E., the hopeful Spandex from my single years, the ridiculously big exercise ball, the torture machine rusting in the
basement…
Tai chi is different. It is starting to feel—in that mother of all clichés—like a way of life. One evening, I actually feel the chi, its brilliant energy streaming through my body as I spin. I smile in rapt delight…until I realize it’s a hot flash.
No matter. Separating muscle tension is now teaching me to separate emotional tension, too. Not every situation requires a full-blown fight-or-flight response. You can use only as much energy as you need to deal with them, and let the rest of your mind and heart stay calm.
In this context, the martial-arts applications (which the guys in class are always asking about) start to make sense. I’m not planning on executing a throat strike if somebody grabs my purse. But taking positions in which I am rooted in the ground, stable, protected, and ready to deflect any blow makes me feel emotionally safe, too. Tai chi’s simple insight holds its own against a thousand Western self-help books: Strength comes from being rooted and balanced, not from tensing, pushing, and forcing. As your movements become fluid, your reactions speed up. You feel less stiff and precarious, more ready for the unexpected.
“The ability to yield gives you so much power,” David remarks. He tells us he used to be argumentative, always ready for a fight; now he’s the calm, neutral facilitator in formal arbitrations at work. This is the final separation: of the self from the needy, querulous ego. David tells us stories of the selflessness of professor Benjamin Pang Jeng Lo, the tai chi master who studied for a quarter-century under professor Cheng Man-ch’ing in Taiwan and has overseen the St. Louis T’ai Chi Ch’uan Association for 30 years. David talks about how humble and down-to-earth Lo is—right before his gentle Push Hands knocks a 250-pound football player clear across the room.
Lo flies in from California for a visit. He’s a small man with a beaming face, 84 years old, clad in jeans. “He is always there, but you can’t bring any energy to bear on him,” martial-arts expert Robert W. Smith once wrote. “A neutralizer par excellence, he sticks to you and ends by uprooting you.”
In his demonstration class, Lo emphasizes, “We don’t use force.” He mimes a punch and says, “That makes me tired.” The point is to be so rooted and in such complete equilibrium that it’s your attacker’s imbalance that does him in. “Relax. Don’t use force. Don’t collapse,” he urges. “Separate the weight.” He makes his foot a delicate paw, touching down first without weight, silently. “In China, we say that your head supports the sky, your feet support the earth, and you are in the middle.”
After class, I ask how his years of practice have changed him. “The movements are very slow,” he answers, a twinkle in his eye, “so people hot-tempered can’t do them. People here call tai chi a moving meditation. It makes you calm down.”
Tai chi is about fitting into nature, Lo says, and finding harmony with other people, and finding balance within ourselves. “Mind strong, body weak is no good. Same with athletes—body strong, mind weak is no good. If your body is balanced, you don’t fall down. If your inside is balanced, you don’t get sick.” He chuckles. “Everybody is tight. Sometimes we cannot help it, because society is that way. One guy tells me, ‘I don’t have time.’ I said, ‘Oh, you will have time when you are in the hospital.’
“Society goes fast, fast. But we can change ourselves.”
