Harmony Tai Chi - Class 2

 'The world is like a bow being drawn;
what is high comes down, and what is low rises.
What is lacking gets filled; what is full leaks into the emptiness.
The world threatens those who have too much and yields its real wealth to those who have nothing.
Yet human beings try to operate in exactly the opposite way.
We give power to those with power and take it away from those who don't have any.
Good luck!
The path always returns.'

Tzu, Lao. Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching (Chapter 77 )  (Kindle Locations 760-766). crispy press. Kindle Edition.

Form #2 - Grasp the Sparrows Tail - Gate of Subtle origin

We begin this class first by reviewing what we worked on in week 1 and next we move forward with the 2nd movement form.

The 2nd movement 'Grasp the Sparrows ' is comprised of four smaller movements each with its own common name, and with its own spiritual or poetic meaning attributed from the Ni family tradition. These four smaller movements were also each among the 13 original Tai Chi postures attributed to Chan San Feng, and as such they have classic correspondences with yin/yang and five element theory. The table below lays out these correspondences.

The Four Components of Grasp the Sparrows Tail

Common name	Ni Family Spiritual Meaning	Tai Ji Classics Correspondence
Brush the Sleeve	to raise the lower	pure yang, heaven, creativity
Roll back	to lower the elevated	pure yin, earth, receptivity
Press	decrease the overabundant	yang within yin, water
Push	nourish the insufficient	yin within yang, fire

 

The attentive reader may at this point have noticed how the Ni family meanings mesh nicely with the quoted chapter (#77) from the Tao Te Ching that introduces this post. This is a small example of how the Ni family form meanings provide a depth of philosophical background that can enrich ones engagement with the movement. 

Each individual posture meaning much like the individual notes in a musical composition can take on a collective significance in the context of those meanings that surround it. As this collective significance takes and sheds form, the contours of its shape unfolds in a long progression of the movement. The meanings like the notes, reveal their beauty in relation to those that came before, the silence in between, and the suggestion of those to come. Ultimately, the meanings in the long form trace a path of cultivation that folds back against itself, and each time one practices the form she does so as a new beginner, although perhaps starting at a different point along the circle.

In this particular example the Ni family meanings refer to fundamental transformations between yin and yang. For example the Ni family represents a long line of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, and the four most fundamental techniques in acupuncture include:

1.  learning to support the body in lifting energy when its yang rising capacity is diminished:
2.  learning to lower energy which is unrooted and floating upwards;
3.  sedating excessive energetic expressions such as inflammatory processes
4.  tonifying areas of weakness or deficiency.
   Of course these medical applications are just one way the metaphors could be applied.

Collectively the four components fall under the larger form meaning 'The Gate of Subtle Origin'. This can be thought of as a gate swinging back and forth between the limitless variations of yin and yang connected on their pivot point, and always part of a larger continuum.

The Gate of Subtle origin and Zhuangzi's Pivot of the Tao

The center point from which the 'Gate of Subtle Origin'  swings was described by my favorite Taoist philosopher Zhaungzi with a metaphor he termed 'the Pivot of Tao'. Here is one example:

'When “this” and “that”—right and wrong—are no longer coupled as opposites—that is called the Course as Axis, the axis of all courses.When this axis finds its place in the center, it responds to all the endless things it confronts, thwarted by none. For it has an endless supply of “rights,” and an endless supply of “wrongs.” Thus, I say, nothing compares to the Illumination of the Obvious. (1)

....Thus, the Sage uses various rights and wrongs to harmonize with others and yet remains at rest in the middle of Heaven the Potter’s Wheel.This is called  “Walking Two Roads.' (2)

I should mention here that the character 'tian' which is translated as 'Heaven' does not resemble the concept of heaven familiar in the modern world. It is often translated simply as nature instead. The 'potters wheel' is a metaphor for the spontaneous unfolding of nature's events and processes. Walking two roads is a metaphor for moving with the 'Tao'.

Walking two roads is what we try to do in Tai Chi practice. We want to keep our options open, finding a space of play between the extremes. From this space of free play we hope to see the possibilities afforded in a given situation without blinding ourselves to those possibilities with fixed prior allegiances. This is an aspect of moderation in that it involves not going to extremes, but it shouldn't be interpreted as staying passive in the middle. Rather than passivity, it is a posture of engaged responsiveness.

Notice the phrase 'the Sage uses various rights and wrongs to harmonize with others'. This is also not solipsism, or an enclosed, or self created reality purely of our own choosing. Having access to the supply of 'rights' and 'wrongs' requires a fluency of understanding responsibly connected to the physical, social, and cultural environments that produce the rolling situations we are embedded within. Perhaps most important is developing an awareness that is equally concerned with the the power of self deception as it is with self actualization, equally embracing our own uncertainties and illuminations with humility.

'Thus, the Radiance of Drift and Doubt is the sage’s only map. He makes no definition of what is right but instead entrusts it to the everyday function of each thing. This is what I call the Illumination of the Obvious.' (3)
 

Some might also be interested in a post I created 5 years ago that concerns the of idea of nature filling what is empty, taking away from the excessive and in general moving things towards an equilibrium. I called it the 'Tao of Entropy'.





1,2,3. Zhuangzi; Ziporyn, Brook. Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, With Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Hackett Classics) (p. 12&14&15). Hackett Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Harmony Tai Chi - Class 1

This is the first of what I hope will be series of posts intended to provide philosophical support and background to the Tai Chi movement classes I have begun offering in Topanga CA.  Class 2 is here,
and class's 3&4 are here.
As a cautionary reminder to not take any concept or posture as rigidly absolute in its correctness I lead with this excerpt from chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching:

'Naming things loses what unites them. Failing to name things loses them into what unites them. Words are limits that make experience possible. But form and formlessness are the same. Tao and the world are the same, though we call them by different names. This unity is dark and deep, but on the other hand it is deep and dark. It opens into the center of everything.'(1)

Class 1 Objectives- Basic Stances & Principles & Forms 0 & 1

In the first class the goal is to provide a foundational introduction to classic Tai Chi and Taoist principles and to introduce the Ni Family 108 step Harmony Tai Chi Form (2). These principles are introduced as I teach the most basic Tai Chi stances ( horse stance, cat stance & bow stance) and the first two Harmony Tai Chi postures ( Wu Qi - form 0, & Beginning Tai Chi- form 1). This is done so that the principles can be experienced and felt as they are introduced. Philosophical and theoretical background context informs Tai Chi practice. This background of understanding should neither stand separate from, nor dictate to, the actual felt experience. As understanding of the basic concepts progresses the student will find those concepts being expressed in the movement naturally without intentional force.

Classic Tai Chi Principles

During the demonstration of the basic horse stance I introduce some of the most fundamental classic  Tai Chi alignment principles. This website (3) is a good resource to a comprehensive collection of classic Tai Chi teachings. The primary classic alignment principles I stress which are attributed to Yang Cheng-fu (1883-1936) include:

•  Head upright to let the shen [spirit of vitality] rise to the top of the head. 
• Sink the chest and pluck up the back.  
• Sung [Relax] the waist. " 
• Differentiate between insubstantial and substantial. The first principle in T'ai Chi Ch'uan.  
• Sink the shoulders and drop the elbows.
  

I also teach some classic principles related to movement dynamics attributed to Chan San-feng (est. 1279-1386) when having students move between the yin cat stance, and relatively more yang bow stance.

• All movements are motivated by I [mind-intention], not external form.
• If there is up, there is down; when advancing, have regard for withdrawing;
  when striking left, pay attention to the right.
• If the I wants to move upward, it must simultaneously have intent downward. 
• If correct timing and position are not achieved, the body will become disordered and will not move as an integrated whole; the correction for this defect must be sought in the legs and waist.   
• The qi is rooted through the feet, directed by the waist, and expressed though the fingers.
  

In addition when teaching the horse stance I try to communicate 3 fundamental Taoist concepts:

• Complementary Support of Opposites (Yin & Yang) - Here I use the example of embodying the foundational energy of the earth in the lower body, while simultaneously connecting to a fluid, expansive, and sky oriented awareness up the spine, in the upper torso, and through the top of the head. The students are encouraged to feel how establishing a rooted foundation below does not detract from but instead helps to actualize a light and agile expression above so long as we feel lower and upper in connection and not in separation.
  
  
• WU (Emptiness - Absence) - One of my favorite explanations of the WU (Emptiness - Absence) concept is contained in chapter 21 of the Tao Te Ching here beautifully translated by Crispin Sartwell (4):

'A path through the forest is merely where the trees aren't:
a clearing or absence.
 What is it? Where is it?
These are not exactly the right questions.
It is an absence among things that is also the way you are going.
It is surrounded by trees;
if it had a nature, that would be it:
the stuff all around it that touches and shapes the emptiness within it.
But that's where you move, isn't it?
That's how and where you go.
It is a useful emptiness, an effective absence.
You've never left it, even if you think you have,
and everything you've seen, you've seen from it.
I know it because here I am.'

• Xin (Heart/Mind)  - This is the ancient Chinese cosmological concept that thinking and feeling cannot be separated. It precedes David Hume's famous dictum that 'Reason alone cannot be a motive to the will, but rather is the “slave of the passions”' by a couple thousand years.
  
  Here is a quote from George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' (5) that jives nicely with Xin- Heart/Mind concept.

'To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.'

And this from Roger Ames and David Hall (6):

'The point is that in this classical Chinese worldview broadly conceived, the mind cannot be divorced from the heart. There are no altogether rational thoughts devoid of feeling, nor any raw feelings altogether lacking in cognitive content. Having said this, the prejudice to which Daoism is resolutely resistant is the dichotomy between the cognitive and the affective that would privilege knowing as some separate cognitive activity.'

Form 0 and Form 1

Form 0 - Wu Qi –The great Void- As mentioned above Wu means absence. This form simply entails a process of letting go while standing in horse stance, and feeling the emergence of the various Tai Chi and Taoist principles as they run through the absence that accompanies release. Wu Qi is a process of cultivating and staying with a receptive capacity to respond -- which is also a responsive capacity to receive -- without coercion that which is real and in the world ( and thus in ourselves ).


Form 1 - Beginning Tai Chi - Existence before Heaven and Earth - Like the Wu Qi posture, this posture is attained in horse stance with no stepping ( just some gentle arm movements). The posture involves engaging the minds intent (I) with what is known as the three dantian (or three seas of qi, or 3 energy centers). The 3 dantian are physically located at; (1) just below the belly button (lower dantian); (2) behind the sternum (heart center - middle dantian); and (3) behind the forehead (third eye- upper dantian). This engagement of intent is not solely focused internally, but means to bring forth an unmediated connection with the environment we are each embodied within as well as between the thoughts and feelings that flow through this embodiment. This unmediated feeling and thinking (Wu Xin - heart mind) is described thoroughly as what Ames & Hall refer to as one of the Wu Forms in their highly recommended philosophical translation of the Dao De Ching (5).

 
1, Tzu, Lao. Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching (Kindle Locations 68-73). crispy press. Kindle Edition.

2. http://www.collegeoftao.org/tai-chi-qi-gong--meditation.html

3. http://www.scheele.org/lee/classics.html

4. Tzu, Lao. Waterway: a new translation of the Tao Te Ching and introducing the Wu Wei Ching (Kindle Locations 250-259). crispy press. Kindle Edition.

5. http://www.literaturepage.com/read/middlemarch-229.html

6. Ames, Roger. Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation (Kindle Locations 566-569). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Hozho - A Comprehensive Navajo Conception of Beauty

Comprehensive Beauty - Hozho

It is usually translated into English as “beauty,” though also as “health” or “balance,” “harmony,” “goodness.” It means all these things and more. It refers above all to the world when it is flourishing; it refers to the community, flourishing in the world; it refers to things we make, which flourish and play a role in the flourishing of other things; and it refers to ourselves, flourishing as makers, as people inhabiting a community that inhabits a world. It is a word for the oneness of all things when they are joined together in a wholesome state. (1)

The above quote describing the Navajo term Hozho is drawn from the final chapter of Crispin Sartwell's 'Six Names of Beauty. Gray Witherspoon, author of Language and Art in the Navajo Universe, is also quoted making this important point regarding the concept:

"It is not an abstractable quality of things or a fragment of experiences; it is the normal pattern of nature and the most desirable form of experience.” (2)

It is this connection between a 'wholesome state' of 'flourishing' and 'the normal pattern of nature' that makes  the Hozho concept ideal to explore the intersection of 'the true', 'the good', and 'the beautiful'. Sartwell refers to this intersection as an 'integration of values', and a 'cross-cultural truth' which he grounds on the recognition that we are all embedded within an integrated system, a system in which we are inter-connected with each other in inter-connected environments. I would argue that any coherent conception of a system requires some degree of integration, and like turtles, its systems all the way down ( and all the way up ).

When beauty is defined as the normal pattern of nature this suggests there is also an abnormal pattern, or a way of acting against the normal pattern, a way of acting against nature. There is also an important argument that needs to be addressed against the idea that nature itself is beauty. As Sartwell points out

we cannot quite say that every single thing in the universe is beautiful, without ‘beauty’ losing whatever meaning it had. But a beautiful thing can have unbeautiful parts, and it may be that the cosmos as a system or even as a mere concatenation is beautiful, though many parts of it are not. (3)

Another way to address this argument is to point out that a thing may be beautiful or ugly depending upon the context in which it is viewed or in light of the whole of which it is a part. I find it very interesting that in the Navajo language the meaning of a word can flip to its opposite with a change in context. With is in mind,

 beauty and ugliness could be conceived as.........a center in which opposites are overcome as opposites or emerge into harmony. (4)

This denotes a great deal of over-lap between Hozho and ancient Chinese philosophical ideas. Sartwell points out similarities with the aesthetics of Confucianism. I am thinking more directly about how this last idea meshes with the thought of  Zhuangzi:

When “this” and “that”—right and wrong—are no longer coupled as opposites—that is called the Course as Axis, the axis of all courses. When this axis finds its place in the center, it responds to all the endless things it confronts, thwarted by none. For it has an endless supply of “rights,” and an endless supply of “wrongs.” (5)

and also with the first 3 ideas I mentioned in my initial post:

1.   things that seem different have ways in which they are the same
2.    things that seem the same have ways in which they are different
3.   receptive exploration of these relations may yield a position that responds non-coercively

On the off chance that anyone might be interested in thoroughly exploring these 3 ideas from the context of Chinese philosophy I can recommend  two excellent books by Brook Ziporyn. Yes, if you think I'm getting overly philosophically wordy on the concepts wrapped up in these 3 ideas here is well over 700 pages devoted just to them 😏💭 :

1. Ironies of Oneness and Difference in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li
2. Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and its Antecedents

Sartwell, Crispin. Six Names of Beauty (p. 98-101). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

Wabi-sabi - Finding Beauty in Humility and Imperfection

I wanted to make my little experimental re-entry into blog posts authentic by writing about my current immersions informed of course through my longer-term interests and investments . At this moment I am immersed in my running practice, and finding new ways to feel connected to the beauty the of world I am a part of. Currently Crispin Sartwell has been serving as a source of inspiration in this process. This post will draw on the 5th chapter of his  'Six Names of Beauty' which explores  beauty from the complex hard to translate  Japanese concept  wabi-sabi.

Wabi-Sabi - Humility, Imperfection

This is going to need some elaboration. Here is list of some of the terms Sartwell associates with the two aspects:

 Wabi -poverty, rough, humble, bare, imperfect, asymmetric. world affirming

Wabi as an aesthetic is a connection to the world in its imperfection, a way of seeing imperfection as itself embodying beauty (1)

Sabi - loneliness, solitude, stillness, meditative depression

Sabi is a quality of stillness and solitude, a melancholy that is one of the basic human responses to and sources of beauty. (2)

Thus, wabi-sabi is an aesthetic of poverty and loneliness, imperfection and austerity, affirmation and melancholy. Wabi-sabi is the beauty of the withered, weathered, tarnished, scarred, intimate, coarse, earthly, evanescent, tentative, ephemeral. As Leonard Koren says: “the closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become.” (3)

In the chapter the tradition of the Japanese tea ceremony is discussed in the context of a radical change in the tradition spurred by the reknown sixteenth century tea master Sen no Rikyu. The ceremony which had previously been practiced by the wealthy with the finest most expensive porcelain bowls came instead to be characterized by a spare, unadorned aesthetic. It's symbol would become the the Kizaemon tea bowl. Here is Sartwell quoting Japanese philosopher Soetsu Yanagi describing the Kizaemon:

The clay has been dug from the hill at the back of the house; the glaze was made with the ash from the hearth; the potter’s wheel was irregular…. The work had been fast; the turning was rough, done with dirty hands; the throwing slipshod; the glaze had run over the foot.” But, he adds, the Kizaemon tea bowl is plain, unagitated, uncalculated, harmless, straightforward, natural, innocent, humble, modest. “More than anything else,” writes Yanagi, “this pot is healthy. Made for a purpose. Made to do work.” (4)

Paradoxically the symbol of the ordinary would be honored so as to become priceless. The symbol was elevated for its lack of self-consciousness yet this abstract fixation would render the Kizaemon as an object of self-importance. Here is how Sartwell describes the dilemma:

Connoisseurs such as Rikyu and Yanagi long most for the quieting of self- consciousness, surely also the goal (or the goallessness) of Zen. But self- consciousness is at its most intense in persons of Yanagi’s stripe: an aesthete who continually submits his experiences to a canon of taste of his own articulation, and who regards himself as a repository of his culture. The self- consciousness of the aesthete is itself a form of pain or even disease: there is no release from the interior monologue that judges all things and thus sets one apart from all things. We might say of such people that they are tortured by taste. (5)

There is an adage from economics that also describes this curious yet pervasive process known as Goodhart's law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure (6)

In a broader context I see Goodhart's law in relation to social world as a mirror to how I see the law of thermodynamics (entropy ) acting in physical world; ubiquitous, all embracing, constantly eroding that which is coherent while simultaneously serving as its source. The law can be traced to 1975, but I would suggest the larger phenomenon - losing contact with the genuine through symbolic fixation - as that which the original Taoist philosophers aimed to correct.

Lucinda Williams -

Reading the section on wabi-sabi I immediately thought of the music of Lucinda Williams and specifically her later album 'Down There Where the Spirit Meets the Bone'. Although 'Six Names of Beauty' was written prior to 'Down There Where the Spirit Meets the Bone' Sartwell does mention her earlier album considered by many to be a masterpiece 'Car Wheels on a Gravel Road' as an example of wabi-sabi in reference to zen gravel gardens. By the time of this later album Williams voice is an embodiment of the gravel she previously sang about yet a stark beauty seeps out from the cracks in the pebbles.

 Compassion from 'Down There Where the Spirit Meets the Bone' - a poem written by her father

Nina Simone  -

No one could summon the sublime, meditative, melancholy, like Nina. Vulnerable, painful, yet life affirming beauty

Black is the Color of my True Love's Hair

Thelonious Monk -

Asymmetrical Beauty - Round Midnight

 The Enduring and Complex Beauty of a Tree

Trees are also a common object of beauty for Sartwell. There is a lovely discussion of the beauty of trees undressed of their leaves against a winter sky revealing an image of the underlying complexity laid bare. Also covered is the art of the Bonsai in which the medium of the art is life itself in microcosm:

A bonsai master shapes a tree with the utmost care, and, in fact, such a tree may be cultivated by generations of masters. And so it endures, though it also changes and grows at each moment of its existence. It is a living representation or capturing of life as well as an expression of the will to work with life and never against it, always moving with the “ki,” or flow of energy of the tree but also with the ideal of the master. (7)

 The Wabi-Sabi of Endurance Running

The concept of wabi-sabi is instructive to me as an aging endurance runner. In my first post in the series I painted a picture of what I hope to access in part through my running practice, and this picture imagined a convergence of what is true, good and beautiful. In my last post I described how beauty can emerge on a run, but the wabi-sabi concept better applies to the enduring process of the practice with all of its life constraining and life affirming realities.

As we have seen ( and heard ) the beauty of wabi-sabi resides partly in its simple, non-scheming, and unforced presentation of the real. Yet there is also a sense that hints at something deeper, something more complex lying behind the unadorned exterior that contributes much of the beauty. It is not that the wabi-sabi presentation intends to deceive, but instead that our conventional perceptive capacities are limited and superficially focused. One obvious way an endurance running practice fits this description lies in the way its physiological adaptations manifest. Compared to weight lifting for example the adaptations are to a large extent hidden. There is not much in the way of visible external enhancements, yet within the cardiovascular ( increased capillary density ) and central nervous ( hippocampal neuroplasticity ) systems new pathways and connections are among the adaptive creations. Even going down to the cellular level adaptions from running include more and higher quality mithochondria providing the power for a robust capacity to respond to world.

Power as a metaphor has far-reaching implications in western culture that are built upon a conception of humanity as separate from the natural environment. We define freedom in the sense of using our will to overcome the burdens that the natural world hurls our way. This idea of overcoming and controlling the world is in opposition to the concept of world affirmation I have been speaking to. If we are embedded in the world as part of the world we make ourselves the enemy by focusing our power on controlling it. This is power as force, power as coercion, and this explains our power symbols ( money, technology, big oil, militarism, bulky muscles, etc...). In my experience, I sense freedom not through forceful overcoming, but more often when I build capacities to accept the world as it is and work within it,  with and not against it.

What would it mean to embody 'the will to work with life and never against it', in the context of affirming and accepting without artifice what is true about the world.This is not an easy question to address. It might be easy to fall into the trap of Goodhart's law hypostatizing one side of the dilemma or the other. This could entail an affirmation of the will to endure, along with an unconscious denial of the inevitable physical decline. Such a move would not be world affirming, but instead creates a world separate from oneself and in need of overcoming. I see this this type of self affirmation as ultimately world denying. Running away from worldly truth is not a viable alternative, and an attempt to create your own truth purely out of will is sure to shorten the time one can experience the joys and benefits of endurance running. On the other hand affirming and accepting what is true in the world need not lead one to disengage from vigorous activity and become a couch potato. My plan is to adjust with the changes consistent with the way Lucinda Williams changed her music over time or with the way a deciduous tree adjusts to winter maintaining awareness of the beauty that I am embedded within.




1-5,7.  Sartwell, Crispin. Six Names of Beauty (pp. 83-89). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

 6.        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law