Learning To Shift Gears

Only a few times in my life did I try my hand at driving a manual shift on an automobile – not very successfully. Scary for me and very funny to those trying to teach me. Maybe that’s part of why the forward and back weight shifts were more difficult than they needed to be when I first learned T’ai Chi Chih.

Manual shifting aside, did you ever have the experience driving a car when you were a little too impatient in parking or turning around, and you put the car in reverse when it had not quite stopped completely in moving forward? Not a fun experience (and not very healthy for the transmission on the car either.)

So this little lesson makes moving smoother, and it’s easier on the body’s joint mechanics. Do not misunderstand the continuity principal of TCC to mean that we are always either shifting forward or back, or side to side, or up and down without any moment of being in “neutral.” (Neutral is NOT when we are still between movements with the palms of the hands facing downward. We are actively grounding during that time of stillness.)

I recall a good reminder of letting our body be still – in neutral gear – when Sandy McAlister used the phrase, glide and arrive. This is different from a simple forward and reverse that, if done abruptly, will disturb the smoothness and grace of our TCC movements, and would likely disrupt the form or our hand movements.

I ask my students to remember that on their motor vehicles, neutral is always in between drive and reverse. I ask them, “Why do you think that is?” Even so, it is still possible to reverse direction too quickly and jerk the vehicle.

What is nice in the TCC practice is that we don’t have to brake at the end of the forward or backward or side-to-side movement. (If we do, we are probably rushing the weight shift.) The body gracefully comes to rest in stillness for a moment with the weight fully on one foot and then gracefully begins the reverse movement. The hands just keep moving through that moment as if carried by the momentum. Patience.