Knowing & Feeling The TCC Movements

Justin was watching a very sincere T’ai Chi Chih teacher at an annual TCC conference a few years ago. He went over to her and said, “You are not turning your waist.” She was very surprised and said to him, “But I always tell my students to turn their waist.” I’m sure she had told them. But telling someone to turn his or her waist is very different from turning it on our own. She wasn’t trying to make excuses; she honestly felt that she had been turning her waist. She knew the correct verbiage for what she was doing, but for whatever reason she was not able to feel what the movement was doing inside of her.

I, too, had a similar waist turning problem that affected all my “taffy movements” and the side-to-side movements. Justin would often say to me, “Turn your waist.” I told him that I was. He said, “The movement is not a shoulder turn.” Regardless of how much I practiced turning my waist, I never seemed to get it right. Finally, he started to help me by asking me not to turn my head. A couple of weeks later he said to keep my nose to the front. Still later he added that I needed to swivel the hips. After many years of doing it incorrectly, my body felt stiff and uncomfortable with each correction. I kept trying to do what he asked. Trying is not always feeling.

My biggest problem was that I wasn’t feeling the movements. Some of you may be asking, “How could you not feel your body moving?” Like I said, I knew the verbiage but not the feeling. I didn’t understand that each correction that he made naturally led to the next. The hip swivel took much practice. He kept showing me the oval that the hips were making. I tried many movements that I thought were the hip swivel. I turned my hips by turning my shoulders (not a hip swivel); by turning my head (not a hip swivel); by turning my nose (not a hip swivel); by sitting on the piano bench and going straight across (still no hip swivel). Justin naturally kept demonstrating the hip swivel to me. I noticed that his movements were soft and gentle and mine were not. He kept talking about the oval that the hips were making, and he would show the curve with his forefinger.

One day with much determination, I tried to make the curve with my hips without moving my shoulders. Justin had already told me that the shoulders did have a little give, but they did not move very much. I held on to a chair and moved my hips, but each time I let go of the chair the shoulders went into a bigger turn. I started to notice that when I held on to the chair, as my waist turned from side-to-side, my belly button moved, but the rest of me felt very stiff. I started to say to myself all the things that Justin was saying, one after the other: don’t turn your head, keep your nose to the front, try to keep your shoulders from turning too much, feel the curve of the hip swivel to the back (“sit in the little chair”), and then to the front. I felt the energy move from knee to knee as I shifted my weight and made the curve. My knees let go and the waist followed. I felt a rush of energy.

It was all worth it. The roundness and softness came the more I practiced. Of course, I then had to admit to the students that there was more to the side-to-side movements than I had shown them. An infinite practice is always that way. It is the way we learn to love and share the Chi.