Devotion & Perseverance

One time a great scholar came to a small village by a lake, and hearing someone chanting this sound in a small hut, entered. “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong,” he reproved the simple man sitting there practicing. “Let me teach you the correct pronunciation,” he offered, and the practitioner was delighted.

After a few minutes of instruction, the scholar left, walked down to the lake, and hired a boat to ferry him across. When the boat had been rowed to the center of the lake, the scholar looked back at the receding shore and noticed a man running to the lake shore from the hut he had just left. It was the simple practitioner he had corrected. Then, to his amazement, he saw the man step onto the water and run across the surface of the waves until the man at last arrived at the boat holding the scholar! “Sir, I am so stupid,” panted the man as he came running up, “I’ve already forgotten your instruction! Would you tell me again the correct pronunciation?”

Justin tells that story in his book Meditation for Healing in the chapter on Mantras. About the story Justin writes, “This would seem to indicate that devotion and perseverance are powerful enough, even if the pronunciation is not correct.”

We can see this in T’ai Chi Chih practice, that devotion and perseverance yield results even when we do not do the movements quite correctly. Teachers often have students of very little experience that comment on noticing a change in how they feel after just a few lessons.

Over the years I have gradually seen my idea of what is “right” in TCC soften. I used to feel more rigid about how the movements had to be done. Through my own exploration I have come to feel that Justin gave us a framework or skeleton of the TCC form and working within that framework we find our own form or expression of the movements.

When Justin was once asked at what level, how high, the hands should be for the movement Pulling in the Energy, he responded, “two inches here, two inches there,” with a shrug. My translation of that answer was that there was not a specific level but a general space. In experimenting with the movement, I found that if the hands were too high the movement was contracted, if too low it felt disconnected. There is a level where a feel-connection is made but it has to be found by feeling-awareness, not by a given location. Justin gave us the general space, mid-chest, but we must find the right level for ourselves by feeling. Is the movement constricted or mushy, or loaded with a sense of fullness, richness, aliveness?

Does it matter if the hand is turned this way or that? In some movements yes, in some no. Some positions of the hands greatly influence the circulation of the Chi, and in some maybe it is not so important. Or is it?

Do we bring our heart or our head to our practice? Do we feel our way through the movements or try to do them correctly? We need to have a framework, an outline of the movements but we fill them in with substance – substance born of experimenting, playing, questioning, exploring, feeling.

Do we do our practice from the heart, meaning with good intentions, with love, with caring, with softness of spirit? Yes, there is a form, there is a standard to T’ai Chi Chih. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter if we don’t do it correctly, but correctly is subjective. What is correct to one person may not be for another. We must each find our way, explore for ourselves, listen to experience, study, and through devotion and perseverance our T’ai Chi Chih practice will blossom within us. Balance is the key – heart and head working together.