Taiji Class Notes #1

Hi all, this is the first of what I hope will be many profitable entries in a blog about the Saturday morning Push Hands class at the YMAA HQ in Boston. The goal is to provide the group with an idea of my goals and observations on each class as we go along to help cement the experience immediately following the class for everyone’s benefit. These notes will be posted online on the YMAA.com website and on my own Facebook page. I hope everyone in the class will feel welcome to comment on them and contribute to the dialogue. Comments can be addressed to me in class or on the Facebook entries. I don’t know what shape the YMAA.com notes will take yet but I reasonably sure that there will be room for comments there. My thanks to Tony Chee and everyone at YMAA.com for giving me this forum.

So, first some basics about the class. The Saturday Morning Push Hands class has been a fixture here at the school for as long as I have been training at YMAA it is a very well established class with lots of regular students who show a lot of dedication in making it there every week. I have been teaching it regularly for the last 10 years or so and prior to that I assisted Dr. Yang in running the class. So I have seen the class under lots of different circumstances and with many old and new students. My current goal for the class got crystalized several years ago when I decided to follow up on some material that Dr. Yang introduced one day when he was available on a Saturday and lead the class. He introduced the idea of moving from inside techniques to outside techniques. If you can picture how we set up to play the drill “centering” then you can get a feeling for inside techniques. There are lots of opportunities for attack but you are very vulnerable to counter attack. Outside techniques most closely resemble Double Pushing Hands except instead of lining up directly in front of your partner you are shifted somewhat to the side as if you were both standing on parallel tracks next to one another. This drill of shifting form the inside to the outside is a necessary skill for actually using taijiquan to fight. It had never really been introduced before in that format although it is touched upon in Double Pushing Hands and Silk Reeling Jin training. I found this drill immensely interesting and very intriguing. I thought it was a method to get the class going towards Moving Push Hands and sparring.

My goal was to have the entire group, regardless of stripe, comfortable with moving Push hands by years end 2008. I made that decision in the spring of 2007. I formally announced that goal in the beginning of 2008 to the class. Everyone seemed amenable to the task and the timetable. Now as we enter into 2009 I believe that last year’s stated goal has been reached. We spent a great deal of time integrating movement into Na and Coiling Jin and then into moving Single Pushing Hands. We still have a long way to go but the group is doing nicely and I have learned a great deal about the material.

The goal for 2009 is to integrate what we have learned in to moving Double Pushing Hands and Rollback and Press. My secondary goals are to establish a repertoire of applications for Double Pushing Hands and to move as many people as possible to their next stripe. I also want to help the more senior students to keep on track for some of the more advanced stuff in the curriculum. Finally I want to ground the entire years training in a more realistic self-defense framework since I feel YMAA training has never really been approached from that point of view. (Well, at least the Taijiquan portion, I can’t speak to the Shaolin since I only spent a few months doing that, being to lazy for Shaolin.)

So, now that I have established a base line for the Blog I can move onto today’s class.

Today we had 12 people in class, this is a fairly decent turn out, some of the regulars were in the Qin Na seminar next door. If everyone shows up then we have about 18 regular students in the group whom I’m not surprised to see come in the door. ( Anyone is welcome we’re always looking for fresh meat, er, new students.) We worked on three main topics;

1. Centering
2. Double Pushing Hands
3. Monkey Dance

1. CENTERING

I worked with Ariana B. and Mark K. today. The big thing that I noticed with Ariana was that she still hadn’t integrated both halves of her body into her attacks. In other words she uses either her right arm or her left to attack but rarely if ever uses them to attack jointly. This is a fairly common trait in new to middle level players and it is something that can be fixed in a relatively short amount of time if you keep reminding the individual of the incidents and show them the places where they are integrated so they can catch the feeling. It is also useful to relate this integration to the form so there is more reinforcement of the concept. Prime examples from the form are Fair Maiden Weaves with Shuttle and Step Back to Repulse the Monkey.

On the plus side she spent a lot more time attacking my center than in the past and her emotional control was better. Her passion in the drill fueling the event rather than controlling it. So good stuff all around. I find it very rewarding when someone that much smaller than me can find mny center and break my root. It is a good sign that the principles of taijiquan can work in any circumstance.

Mark is always fun to work with since his skills have matured so nicely over the last couple of years, Today the chief thing I noticed was that he seemed to attack with his right regardless of stance. So I mentioned this to him and he started thinking about it. (The really cool thing about being Mark’s partner or instructor is that you can comment on things to him and he generally listens to you. Pretty much what a teacher wants in his students.)

Comments and Questions

Brian M. asked about dealing with a person who is much stronger or larger than you. ( He ahd just done two full rounds with Mark.) I opened the discussion by saying the centering can be a hard drill to do against a significantly larger or stronger individual because you can’t move your feet. I stated that eventually you will lose in that scenario. Jim O. at that point disagreed with me saying that one should play defensively, wait for the other person to move and get inside their circle. In his experience he has found that large people have a bigger area where they can operate offensively but if you get in close, inside their circle they sometimes have more vulnerability. Mark K said that he tries to prevent the attacker from ever getting a solid “line” on him so they can never play to their own strengths. (Sounds a lot like Na JIn.)

2. MONKEY DANCE

I introduced this drill in order to genreate a more realistic response to an attack in the students in the class. This is part of the self-defense slant I want to put on things. The game takes this shape. The class divides into groups of three or four indiviuals. One person is put in the center and is blindfolded. The remaining individuals then procede to attack him or her, trying to break his root. They can use one or two handed pushes and can attack from any direction. Pulling on hair and hoods of sweatshirts has also worked it into the drill. I want them to get as close as possible in a safe setting to dealing with being ambushed. Currently all I want them to experience is the emotion and to see how they move in response to these attacks. My long term gaol is to see the person on the middle neutralize and start to counter attack.

Comments and Questions

The discussion that came out of this session was interesting, but rather long so I’ll just discuss the main point that came up.
Each one of us has to decide what level of assualt is their trigger point or “Go”. When do you decide that this person has broken the social contact and you have to use phsyical force to deal with the situation or conversely when you decide that oyu are in a bad place/event and it is time for you to leave.

In general the response to this drill is positive. I have some thoughts on haw to expand on it. But really getting the most out of it may require another class or some kind of day long intensive event.

3. DOUBLE PUSHING HANDS

The final topic in class today was good old Double Pushing Hands. I have returned to this drill both stationary and moving in order to accomplish several things. One, getting some people to pass it in their stripe, two, integrating it into moving push hands and three, to use it as a springboard for building a repertoire of martial applications. Oneof the things that taiji as we practice here at YMAA is that martial applications come relatively late in the training. For the very good reason that the fundamental skills in taiji that make those applications possible require a great deal of work. But right now with the group that I have I only have a couple of people who have not already passed this drill. So I feel it is safe to add these techniques into the drill. Most people I see doing the martial applications of taijiquan are very tentative, I hope by building a small stock of qin na and various other applications the students can approach the more demanding analysis and development of applications later in their training with more confidence.

So far we are just working with variations of Qin Na from Crane Spreads It’s Wings. Today I added a third Peng variant whicj, truthfully I forget the name for it and couldn’t find the name when I looked it up. But we’re getting bette and I hope this proves a viable path to follow for a few months or years.
We have opened the discussion on Cavity Press in the class at the request of some of the senior students. I am going to ease into this slowly since first I don’t have a lot of practical knowledge of it, second there is a lot of misunderstanding of Cavity Press and third it is a dangerous set of techniques. Mostly I showed the class today how to find and attack a cavity in the arm called Neiguan (P-6) which can numb the hand and may cause fainting. Well, no one passed out but most of us were able to find the spot on ourselves and the other people they worked with. I wanted them to try to find it on as many people in the class as possible. Since different people are sensitive to different extent. Also the make of the limb varies greatly from person to person so it is necessary to really get a feel for finding it in many body types instinctively.

Comments and Questions

I didn’t get a lot of feed back on Double Pushing Hands. My main critique was a fairly routine one. People allowing the Peng to collapse in the latter portions of the neutralizations. A common and annoying error.

So that was the overview of the class for 1/31/2009. Good stuff all around.

Have a great week.

Jeff Pratt
Taijiquan Instructor
YMAA Boston

Jeff Pratt began his study of Taijiquan at YMAA Boston in 1987 and has reached the rank of Instructor (3rd degree) in the YMAA system. He specializes in Pushing Hands, which is advanced two-person practice in Taijiquan. Jeff is also a disciple of Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming. He has had extensive training in the spectrum of disciplines comprising YMAA's Taijiquan program.